Reflection and Epiphany

Evolutionary change would work from older to younger, from depths out of a cave and into the light.  Five times, still — do nothing.  Stay home. 

Warm light, be still, do nothing anchored in the middle of a great lake as old as time itself — timelessly still like an eye that can see what is real, can choose what is true from what is false.  Rich in wisdom.  Kind in age.  I felt that the earth is good as it is.  That no change could make this crystaline moment any more perfect and full and ripe and good.

In the fall of my youth, a ripe aged autumn.  I chose. Change your voice, I chose. 

Not as before, but as of old.

 As old as old.
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Making Difficult Pictures

One problem that artists have at the beginning arises from a misapprehension.  When seeing a painting in a museum, people often think that that’s it.  They see a complete, whole and finished thing and mistakenly suppose that the artist just painted it.  Such a task, anyone would acknowledge to be difficult, but to create ex nihilo — which is often what people mistakenly suppose artists do — would be really, very hard – perhaps impossible.  In fact most complex pictures have lots of studies that lie behind them.  Studies can take many forms, but usually they exist.  Typically they are not on display.  They reside in the background.  They lie stored in a drawer in the artist’s studio.

What defines a study?  One might say that it’s any work of art that takes a separate aspect of an idea and pursues it in isolation.  When you study old masters’ techniques, you find many such drawings that rehearse ideas that are later used in completed paintings. 

So, it’s “okay” to take an idea apart and pursue it in bits.  The drawing at the top of the post is that kind of drawing.  I was interested in the drapery and drew it in isolation.  To create this drapery I had first made a photograph — but even the photograph is part of the pursuit of an idea.  I’m still not certain where it’s going.  Or if it’s going anywhere.

The figure has no head or face and hardly any arms.  These details don’t matter at this juncture, and I left them out.  The details here are to drawing what scales are to music.  This is a drawing of riffs and phrases.  Such things have their own charms.

[Top of the post:  Drapery Study, by Aletha Kuschan, colored pencil on Nideggen paper]

Riosriosrios drew Durer’s Owl!

I asked Riosriosrios to draw Durer’s Owl and here it is!  Isn’t this fantastic!  You ask Riosriosrios to draw something, and you get a drawing!  Drawing on demand.  I like that idea!

You may recall that last month I had asked Riosriosrios to draw Durer’s Rhinoceros.  (I’m kind of a Durer fan.)  The rhino was fabulous too!

[Top of the post:  Durer's Owl, drawn by Riosriosrios of wordpress]

Tropical Mood

Sometimes you paint something in much the same way you’d go for a walk.  You just decide that it would be pleasing to  be occupied with visiting an imaginary place, and in the case of art, one visits by painting.  That’s how this picture came into being.  I think I must have painted it in winter.  I was definitely in the studio and not anywhere near Hawaii.  The river, meanwhile, could be purple in nature by some rare convergence of weather and odd lighting, but chiefly this one is purple because I felt like making it that color.  Also, it’s rather a gravity defying river in its gesture. 

Sometimes you cannot explain why things have to be as they are, but the composition of this picture obeys a chromatic and compositional logic that are necessary to it.  The things that make it what it is increase it’s tropicality, and I wanted it to be very tropical.  Perhaps it became more tropical than nature herself ever is.

[Top of the post:  Tropical Ridge, by Aletha Kuschan, acrylic on canvas]

Koi Mountain

These fish are vying to reach the center.  Something’s going on there.  Others of them swim around this activity, not participants exactly, yet aware in waves of concentric bustle.

Oddly enough, this used to be a painting of a mountain.  Now it’s fish.  The mountain just wasn’t working out.  An artistic real estate transaction needed to take place.  The mountain moved out.  Fish moved in.

[Top of the post:  A Study of Koi Swimming, by Aletha Kuschan, acrylic on canvas]

Night Squares

This sketch for a painting is more about night (and squares) than about fish.  (It’s a sketch for a painting.)  But, lo and behold, the fish snuck in.  I count five, maybe six along the bottom.  This is hardly more than a scribble, but I love this.  If somebody calls me on the phone and takes up a whole bunch of my time … friends … this is what’s taking place on my side of the conversation.

[Top of the page:  Study for a painting, by Aletha Kuschan, ballpoint pen]

Computerized

Ever since discovering, by golly, that our computer had photo collage software on it (who knew?), I’ve played around with images by combining things on the computer and then altering them via the computer’s many interesting graphic features.  This “fishwave” is one result.  A photo of a heavy drapery is blended with some pictures of koi swimming and all that has been run through the washer on the permanent press cycle until it looked as you see it above.  Sometimes I paint from images like this that I’ve created on computer.  After they become paintings, they can be photographed and rerun through the same computerized process again to be transformed into something else.   Metamorphosis.

Then, too, there’s the computer between the ears with which we can attempt daring things.

Wishing you flowers

I’m doing something today that I don’t often do — I’m chilling out!  And wishing you flowers on this lovely Sunday afternoon.

My Compotier

When I found a blue compotier at a second hand store I felt as though perhaps I might bump into Bonnard in the next aisle.  It’s not often that buying glassware feels like fate, but then most people buy a compotier to use rather than to paint.

While I am doing koi pictures, I post other things and this image is another where I discover that the subject matter has elements in common with the fish I paint now.  The cloth on this table is one that I’ve loved ever since I first saw it, and it reappears time and again in my pictures.  Perhaps it is not odd then that its big roses spiral in waves of floral pattern like my koi in the water.  My koi are roses swimming in water.  And my roses are koi dancing across a table cloth.

Sometimes it seems that one repaints the same picture over and over in many disguises.

[Top of the post:  Floral Still life, by Aletha Kuschan, oil on paper]

Abstraction

What people call abstraction is not really abstraction.  People think that it’s a genre in art and its opposite is “representation” (a term that had to be invented once abstraction became a trend).  Abstraction is merely a giving over to perception.  A pure visual data that comes into our eyes via the optic nerve exists for us only as an notion of possibility.  No one really knows what uncoded vision might be.  By the time we are able to speak, we have already also learned to see, and things are things.  Once you can give a thing a name, you’ve made it possible to ignore much of what it looks like.  Artists, however, are people who make the trip back into perception.  Yet even an artist cannot see things deprived of their thingness.  Our brains shape the world prior to our awareness in ways we can barely imagine. 

Children imitate speech before learning their language.  They get the rhythm and sound out with something that almost passes for English, or French, or Chinese, or whatever — only it lacks a clear vocabulary!  I think to some extent children express bits of pre-vision also even as they are learning to see — or learning to see while defining more and more of the world in words.  I gave my daughter a paint brush at a very early age, and she did more than “just scribble.”

I found a logic and rigor in her first paintings.  And they are not devoid of “representation.”  When she could talk she used to tell me what was inside her pictures, and there were always things.  A child’s “abstraction” is only apparent to outsiders.  A world of things lies hidden inside the marks. 

A true abstraction has nothing to do with whether objects are recognizable in a realistic way.  Ingres’s paintings and drawings are full of the most beautiful abstractions.  Before they are things, his lines are pure lines.  Their lyricism and sinuousity stands apart from a mere rendering.  All the greatest works of art have a visual logic that resides deep inside the image, really at its core.  Thus to endow a picture of something with a vivid abstraction is merely to bring back into it the immediacy of living perception.

[Top of the post:  A picture of something by the author's kid at age three]