It is hard to see her face

The definition of art is a somewhat amorphous thing.  Recently I chided someone for identifying “art” with whatever will challenge me, make me feel uncomfortable, touch me, transform me.  I suggested that some things will have these qualities and yet will decidedly not be art.  Driving in rush hour, doing taxes, taking a standardized test, getting a root canal — all are challenging.  I guarantee the root canal will make you uncomfortable.  Perhaps a dentist will argue that root canals are art.  But, for goodness sake, let’s let the dentist make the argument.  Artists don’t have to do it for them.

What is art?  In the era when drawing doesn’t count, art has morphed into namelessness.  Everyone is an artist now.  Art is whatever you want it to be.  And still life beckons.

Let me suggest that art’s definition be reserved for the hard stuff.  Let an old master’s skill be an ingredient.  Better that we be striving toward it than grinning and slapping our own backs in self-congratulation. 

Life still beckons.  I say art is a mystery, and I will pursue it.  Better to ever pursue and never reach than to cheapen the journey with goo-gaws and touristy nick-nacks.  Can I persuade you to share in the longing?

Okay, I don’t usually rant.  But the ubiquitously recited litany that art will challenge me, make me feel uncomfortable, touch me, transform me — it’s so “me, me,me”!  When did we lose our bearings?  When did we leave nature aside?  When did we lose our capacity to see inside the veil?

I copied Ingres (who knew what art is) and left the face blank.  I think she makes a nice metaphor for Art.  Art is she whose face is hard to see, the mystery that beckons, the life that needs transcription, a line suspended in air, a thought held in a breath, a definition that defies.

Chiaroscuro shell

Today was a loose ends kind of day.  Did a little of this, little of that, but had few chances to do a sustained bit of anything.  Except I made this drawing.  Pencil is such a moody, smudgy medium.  Shiny too.  Have to love the way that graphite gives off light as well as absorbs it.

The shell, too, reflected my thoughts back to me as well as absorbed some of them.  The beauty of drawing is the way it lets your mind drift off to lazy, limitless, meditative places.

What remains behind

What counts is what remains behind.  Sometimes artists — especially when they are new — are over-scrupulous in comparing what they make with its model.  Even Matisse acknowledged that art is a truth that’s parallel to nature.  You make your drawing as faithfully as you can.  You really let yourself be in touch with the reality that you think and see and feel.

Afterwards, and of course there is afterwards, you have the drawing itself.  It’s its own little world.  You should not care too much whether it is the exact replica of Nature as you saw her.  What is it in itself?  In itself is all that the spectator will afterwards know.  In itself is really what counts.  You were making a drawing.  You are not placing a landscape of dirt and trees and bugs and animals on the floor for your spectator to inspect.  You are giving them an image — a visual idea on a sheet of paper.  All that they can inspect are its lines and shapes and colors and forms.

Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I love Nature.  But Nature and Art are not the same thing.  They are sisters, perhaps.  But each is her own person.

I did the drawing above one day.  I don’t now know where I was or what I looked at.

Landscaping

Sometimes I take my trusty Caran d’ache water soluable crayons out on the road, and I confront Nature face to face.  (She has such a pretty face.)  I have a few places that have become favorite haunts, and I revisit them and produce different versions of the same motif.  The wonderful thing about drawing is its spontaneity.  The world’s oldest medium is highly portable.  To draw all you really need is a stick and a page. 

Well, my sticks are elegant modern inventions, and while they’re not super expensive, they are pricey enough to brag about, and certainly worth rooting around in the grass to find the ones that one has accidentally dropped.

Silk Colors

Color conveys mood.  One question I begin my koi paintings with is what color blue will predominate?  For this particular painting my studies help me decide whether one fish (now in a leading role) will be a soft pale orange or a richly saturated orange.  The color of the fish is especially important since orange and blue are optically opposite.  If the fish is richly colored he will stand out in a maximal way, and if he is a quietly pale orange he will make a much less forceful impact. 

I’m thinking this little fish deserves a big personality, but I’m trying to make certain the whole painting will balance.  This study tries the quieter color.  It’s also the first time I’ve dealt with the dark fish who dives downwards.

Being Studious

Today was drawing day.  I made three studies for the koi paintings.  The freedom of drawing is exhilerating.  Beginning an idea from the blank page always delights me, but I am supposed to be finishing paintings.  Well, this way I get to eat my cake and have it too.  I am “working on” the painting — indirectly.  I am trying out ideas, rehearsing my lines, all of which gives me necessary practice for the painting.  But I still get to begin from blank.

The version above is a compositional sketch for the whole painting.  In the next couple posts I make studies of the group around the dark fish.

The Other Koi Pond

The other koi pond is coming along too.  I have two ponds of fish in my studio now.  Each pond has its own personality.  These fish are more idiosyncratic.  They are each going in different directions.  Big fish and little fish pass each other, each on their separate fishy errands. 

The little yellow fish strikes me as especially resolute.  She swishes somewhere very emphatically.  She is a bright, optimistic little swimmer.

The painting is 30 x 40 inches, oil on canvas.

Beautiful Dreamer

Her face has pale violet and a light, apple-green like you find on a smooth Granny Smith.  Her hair and eyebrows are the warm brown of early autumn leaves.  Cobalt blue outlines around her nose and cheek and mouth are like the first brisk mornings of late September.  And her head and hand are drawn in dark lines like the stark shadows of shortening days.

A summer dream that dreams of autumn — of school and playground adventures.  The coming of Halloween with its fabulous costume parade and sacks of candy.  Studies and books, school supplies and standing in line, and raising your hand eagerly, hoping to catch the teacher’s eye.

The same motif that was a pencil drawing in the previous post, I drew with crayons here.  These are oil pastel crayons, and the colors are “out of the box.”  I mixed some passages, but I also let the exaggerated color happen that goes with using the crayons unmixed and as you find them — I just let that happen.  Cools and warms create the dimension.  And zigzag lines jazz things up.  I also made no effort to “finish” anything.  Those out of the box colors, well, they lead to out of the box ideas.  None of the colors are quite real, yet they are evocative of real things.

I don’t know quite how to explain it, but I like a drawing that follows your attention wherever it goes and for as long as it goes.  And when the thoughts stop in mid-stream, the drawing just stops in its stream too.  And the empty spaces seem to say something.

This drawing, like so many of my studies, was like being in a dream.  And then something wakes you up. 

And you stop dreaming.  You are awake!  Time for school!

[Top of the post:  Child Sleeping (study for a painting), by Aletha Kuschan]

Sleeping and Dreaming

This drawing of a sleeping child is a study for a painting.  I have made so many drawings of this face and her hand and this pose!  I have tried so many times to dream her dreams.  Drawing is partly a way of entering into other worlds.  Like a novelist creates characters and actions for them to be living, an artist has to create the whole pictorial world of the painting.  But unlike the novelist’s, the artist’s world is one scene only that forever plays again and again before the spectator’s gaze.

There are actions in paintings, but they are frozen and stilled.  I love the stillness of art.  I love the stillness of a scene that never changes, of a child who forever dreams, of a summer day that is eternal and always wonderful and bright.

[Top of the post:  Study of a Sleeping, Dreaming Child, by Aletha Kuschan]

My little trees in a row

On a bright spring day of this century, I drew this row of young trees.  They are clothed in pink veils of flower-before-the-leaf.  And much of the silvery bark (that will soon disappear in leaves) is still visible and bright.  Their own branches and the variegated greens of more distant trees mingle on the page.  You can sense the space between near and far, yet everything is depicted in spare lines and haphardly rubbed tones.  It’s all very abstract.  Yet it’s all very “there.”

Whenever I draw something like this, it’s like taking the whole morning home with me and having it forever as a keepsake.  Spring morning-to-go!

[Top of the post:  Row of Trees in Spring, by Aletha Kuschan]