Thinking about

I have to think about the stuff before I paint it — these days, at least.  Formerly I would set up the easel and have at it, but nowadays I typically must obsess over the thing some, fuss over it, sneak up on it, walk around it, muse, mess with, improvise a jazz riff or two over it.

So I have another painting on the “to do” list that’s been in a holding pattern since August, and I must go through the picture courtship ritual.  Decided that this time, I’d start with something simple and direct. 

Picked up the pencil.

And where I began ….

Many Versions of Me

The me-of-yore you all know so well.

My recent arrest photo when I was caught selling forgeries of a pink eraser on the international conceptual art market.

Me during my vivid Blue Period (move over, Picasso).

The “yikes!” me when I learned that our hamster had babies (nine!).

This is a pensive me when I was  39 years old.

And this is my basic everyday self, when I’m not in jail, not dealing with overly fecund rodents, and not feeling “Blue.” 

Naturally, you all want to see more of the myriad, many facets of me (I’m deep), but you’ll just have to wait for another post!!

My day at the beach of thought

I needed a day at the beach real bad.  So I went there in imagination by drawing my favorite object of nature.

This was mostly a left-hand day, too.  I wanted to be very carefree.

Looking for all the angles, I turned my shell upside down.  I think.  Actually, I’m not sure it has an upside.

Looked at the lines.

Looked at forms and shadows.

Tried one path and changed my mind.

Smudged.

And then I had to go home.  The beach of the imagination has less sand than a real beach, less of a wonderful breeze, but it still has magic.

Me of Long Ago

Before I let my hair grow very long and looked in profile toward the left, I looked like this.  This image is a photo of a xerox of a drawing that I made at an uncertain date long ago.  I don’t know where the original drawing is now, but since I inherited from my Depression Era-surviving parents a deep reluctance to throw anything away, I’m fairly confident it will turn up.

The blue is an exaggeration of a picture of a picture.   I think it’s very jazzy, very Miles Davis.  I was Kind of Blue, you see.

I have a whole box of ancient drawings.  Sometime, I need to go through them and do my walk down Memory Lane.

The Apples of my Eye

Last night it was oranges, today it was apples.  And now we can compare apples with oranges. 

I followed the same pattern as yesterday.  I drew first, then I painted.  To be more exact, I made pencil drawings, then an oil pastel drawing, then a water soluble crayon drawing, followed by the painting above.

The changes in medium dictate what you can describe and thus alter the way you think about the subject.

Each one has qualities it renders easily and qualities the medium can render only with difficulty.  And some qualities, of course, it cannot render at all — and that’s gotta really press you to think.

I don’t just think about the objects, but about each little corner of photons bunched together.  Every little “piece” of what you see can become a small composition in its own right, an object of meditation, a color or line thingy to yearn for.  A speck of color, a change from dark to light, a edge that diffuses into its surroundings ….  The world is wonderfully colored and composed.

In even a little clump of apples together.

Learning to fiddle fast

What I did with the creamer, I thought to do with my flowers on a larger sheet of paper.  These drawings are made on Strathmore 400 series 18 x 24  sheets.  It’s difficult to work as fast on the larger sheet — though I haven’t given up.  Without switching to other media, staying with my sharp and steady Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, I want to gain a greater ease and freedom with the larger scale drawing — approaching the subject in the same manner, with a point-and-shoot, see-it, draw-it swiftness only doing it bigger. 

This size sheet is too small for me to do this particular still life at actual size.  If I got a vase of flowers that fit into the 18 x 24 format, that might speed things up further.  (Let’s see, do I have any admirers who could send me flowers?)

(Um, no.)

Anyway, the first attempt is rather pointedly out of scale — a problem that would be fixed by switching to something smaller that I can fit into the sheet without downsizing (and we thought only corporations downsized).  In the second drawing, I was more self-consciously determined to deal with the proportions before scribbling into separate passages.  Nevertheless, mistakes or no, it matters not.  The point of this whole foray into drawing is that I shall have no fear, feel no scrupples, and draw until I drop.

I had a third drawing that I began last night under different illumination, and I would display it here — except — I dropped.

La Crème de la Creamers

As advised by her union, Doll has taken another day off.  In her absence I turned my attention to my creamy colored creamer.

The great artist Edgar Degas once said, “il faut refaire la même chose dix fois cent fois”  (you must redo the same thing ten times, a hundred times), but hopefully Doll won’t be gone that long.

I don’t know whether or not another French expression applies here.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The more things change,  the more they stay the same.)

Or whether my creamer metamorphoses or stays the same.

I gave it the most loving attention that could be fixed upon a little creamer.

I even drew what it feels like, drawing without looking at it, drawing with the sense of touch.

I drew it many times, and still it has secrets to share.

Let’s have a nice round of applause for the star of the show, the Creamer!

Drawings Comparisons

The woman is from an exercise in a drawing book, Bert Dodson’s Keys to Drawing. 

The second is a draw-anything-that’s-right-in-front-of-you in five minutes kind of drawing exercise (I took the suggestion in this instance from Dodson’s book as well, where he calls it colorfully the “five minute burn.”)

Lastly is another rose from my scheme of drawing my still life one corner at a time. (This is the same rose as I’ve drawn and posted before — it’s becoming a subject of enduring fascination.)

So, what do my pictures add up to?  I’m beginning to wonder if my mind is telling a story.  The sultry young woman, the couch, the rose — could she be looking for a story to inhabit?  If there’s a story, I’ll probably never know.  I just draw the pictures.

Besides light today I studied gravity a little

If you want to observe gravity, creating a still life of drapery is a good way to do it.  What is holding the cloth up?  (It’s tensile strength?)  What is pulling it down?  Gravity! (I know the answer to that one!)

The tug-o-war between the cloth and the pull of the earth is what you study.  Look for a long time.  Gravity is a wonderful thing.

Messages in a bottle

My companion, my mom,  had to write in her diary and I drew bottles while she did.  It can be disconcerting what to write.  Why should I write that?  What does it matter?  But, it’s the truth I said.  What does it matter what I had for dinner?  Because it’s the texture of your life, I said.  (I guess I can be really annoying, but remember I majored in English.)

While she wrote, I drew bottle tops.  Why bottle tops?  What do they matter?  They’re just there.  But, let me tell you, those bottles were (are) so incredibly beautiful, and I never noticed until I started drawing them just because they’re there.  It is reality we’re observing.  It is light curving toward us, bending, reflecting, distorting, refracting, scattering, hiding — doing all the things light does to objects in the universe.

Why draw ordinary things?  Because they are true, because they are there.  (And so are we.)

How I wish I could have brought you the beauties in our bottles, but it eluded me.  I guess you’ll have to draw your own bottles.  Meanwhile, this is all of the beauty I could catch.