Art of Brooding

Being an artist seems to require a certain amount of imaginative time.  Translate that as meaning: lazy time.  Synonyms: day dreaming, fuzzing out, wool gathering.

Sometimes one even broods.  Brooding consists of “what to do, what to do.”

As for me, I have been overly busy.  I’m definitely ready for laziness of a high order.  Coffee, empty air in front of my ideas, not a thought in my head, kinda time.  Then it shall be so much easier to work.

The modern era conspires against the artist.  But we must fight back and resist.  I cannot burn down the MVA, but I can postpone all of tomorrow’s bureaucratic intrusions into my life and decide to be instead.

(Wish me luck.)

Meanwhile, the lady caught brooding above was wonderfully delineated by Henri Matisse.

PS – My “Cheat Sheet”

Searching for the answer to the riddle Kitsune offered, I doodled a bunch of trials that make nice hieroglyphics.  Looks like the Rosetta stone for space alien languages!

[Top of the post:  Cheat Sheet for solving a riddle, by Aletha Kuschan]

Good news, Kitsune

I solved the riddle! (Whew.)  The solution occurred while I was drinking coffee this morning at a McDonald’s restaurant after having fiddled with numerous trials and erroneous attempts.  I guess insight played a role in my solving it since I had “found” the solution without realizing it the night before and had rejected it — by which I mean that I had discovered the correct shape (thinking of this as a drawing exercise) but had the scale wrong (a common problem in drawing)  Thus a slight attitude adjustment was needed to capture the solution, requiring several hours of sleep as well as relaxing distractions plus a fresh morning perspective.  (No doubt the coffee was helpful, too.)

The work of solving the riddle presented many intriguing corollary questions.  While solving it feels nifty, I wonder who created the puzzle and what questions lead someone to an invention like this.  Discovering a puzzle requires a higher and brighter curiosity, I think, than solving a puzzle that is already well received.  While artists complain of the difficulties they face in the market place, imagine the plight of a riddle inventor!  Certainly one must have very pure motives to spend one’s days in devising riddles and puzzles knowing that one’s reception is so marginal. 

Other ideas passed through my mind as I toiled away at the puzzle.  I was aware of having seen its solution once, but recollection did not come very handily to my aid.  Even knowing that the lines had to meet somewhere outside the figure did not help much psychologically.  I still felt compelled to try various ways of connecting the edges of the box.  Finally, I realized that an element of trust was required.  Could Kitsune have tricked me?  Was there a solution?  And another kind of trust was needed, too.  I have counseled various persons about confidence in regard to their drawing.  Drawing in art, making “mistakes,” can be discouraging and I have told people many times that you must go through the problem and not give up on it.  It is the passage through self-criticizing thoughts that leads ultimately to the promised land of art.  Here I was with a knotty problem — a drawing problem, I decided to think of it in those terms — and I could have given up, but I decided to follow my own advice and press on.

I am still not convinced that it is not more math than art, though I chose to use art as much as I could to solve it.  But unlike most the art I do, I did not know what the thing I was drawing looked like.  The reasoning here was exactly opposite what I typically do.  Usually I look at something and from a massive wall of perceptions, I am choosing certain ones and ignoring the rest.  Here I had very limited means, four lines, and with them I had to discover something I could not see, trying to bring it into visibility by following a set of instructions.

As I was leaving McDonald’s backing my car out of a parking space, perhaps it was then I had what felt like a real “insight” moment.  As often happens in art, drawing something or looking at other artists’ drawings will change the way we view the world.  It struck me as more than a little ironic the number of arrows that seemed to be everywhere around me after I had found the figure that solves the riddle.  A big arrow painted on the asphalt pointed the direction out of the parking lot and as soon as I noticed that big arrow, why it seemed that the world was littered with arrows!  They might have been like hints (unless of course there’s more than one solution!).

[Top of the post:  photograph of a McDonald's restaurant napkin upon which I solved a riddle posed by a reader, Kitsune, on the post Alice Drew a Maze, photo by Aletha Kuschan]

Sorry, of Late

Sorry I haven’t posted any art today.  Of late, I’ve tried to post something everyday.  However, today the frogs have taken up all my time.  They’re quite unruly. 

[Top of the post:  the frogs at home]

Stream of Consciousness

And this is the stream of consciousness!

Little Pond of Dreams

This might be the pond where I threw my keys, from which I caught three fishes.

Pixel With Colors

Pixel swims into so many of my pictures.  Here he is all colored with crayon.  He usually lives and swims in this painting.  “Il faut refaire la meme chose, dix fois, cents fois ….” Degas said.  I took it very much to heart.  I’ve lost count how many times I’ve drawn Pixel.  (“You must redraw the same thing, ten times, a hundred times….”)

[Top of the post:  Pixel with Colors, by Aletha Kuschan, pencil and crayon]

This is not Alice

This is just an ordinary cat, attracted here perhaps because of all the fish.  The fish had better watch out!

[Top of the post:  Drawing of a Cat, by Aletha Kuschan, pencil]

Dream of Three Fish

I had a dream of three fish once.  I had driven a long way on the highway to a large building with a tall wall with no windows.  It was beside a pond.  And I got out of my car and unaccountably threw my keys into the pond!

Realizing I wouldn’t be able to drive my car further, I rushed to the water’s edge to fish out my keys.  I threw in a line and pulled out three bright fish that looked at me with their eyes.

[Top of the post: Drawing of Three Fish, by Aletha Kuschan, ballpoint pen]

Leaping Fish

This fish is all line and light, blue and white with a grid to keep him from leaping off the page and out of sight.  He looks at you.  The world is mostly water, you know.
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[Top of the post:  Pen drawing of a Fish, by Aletha Kuschan, ballpoint pen]