Past and Present Tenses

I used to make small paintings in emulation of artists I admired such as this painting of a sprig of holly in a crystal mug meant for a study of the early still lifes of Van Gogh.  The lozenge pattern of the mug, which one can find analogies for in certain Van Gogh drawings, was as significant as the “green-black” of the holly leaves (a color that Van Gogh loved) or the expressionistic pointiness of the leaf’s shape.  The scale, the smallness, the spontaneity of going outdoors and collecting a sprig and painting it all of a sudden were other things that I took from this master who I wanted to understand.

Yet there’s not just emulation of a famous artist:  the holly tree grew outside our house, you could see it from the living room window.  The mug was a fixture in the kitchen cabinet, container for many a cup of hot cocoa on a winter evening.  These were ordinary items from my life at that time and signified more about my life than I ever guessed then or than I can even guess now.

Whether memory lane provides a quiet stroll through the past or a fast-paced on-ramp into the future is sometimes difficult to gauge.  This painting that I made years ago seems to chide me now for the less-than-spontaneous patterns of my current art-making.  If I go back to that, I sense that I am not really going backwards but forwards….

These flowers aren’t shy

These flowers, unlike the ones I mentioned in my previous post, are not shy.  Moreover they comprise another “junk painting” that I’m doing.  And junk paintings are definitely not shy.  This picture appears over top a canvas that I painted and rapidly learned to hate.  The subject of the underpainting was totally different. But the materials were swell –  oil primed linen on sturdy stretchers.  So I turned the thing sideways and discovered that it became the perfect format for the development of a junk painting based upon a beloved junk drawing:  a marriage made in heaven, surely.

I love my junk drawing.  So far the junk painting looks different from its source, stiffer though bolder; and perhaps it will strike out its own path, yet it’s near enough to the junk drawing to have me feeling giddy and light-hearted about wielding the paint brush.  You really have to set your sights on delight sometimes.  Seriousness is important, but we cannot live in that place all the time.

Meanwhile the source for both the junk painting-in-progress and the junk drawing holds some sway over the process.

They each carry memories of this drawing.  And this drawing in turn was based upon another painting of the same subject.  I am incorrigibly addicted to redoing the same motifs …

Mornings of the Honey Jar

The morning — I try to find it with my crayon.  It hides inside the objects. Light glances through all the spaces.  Air from the window winds in quietly.  My tea, its steam, finds the currents.  Could I chase the tea’s steam — all the forms would be revealed.  In the darks of the cloth, like the night sky lightening, and morning in the reflection lands.  In a focused beam on the forwardmost surface of a dark blue bottle a nano-image of the sky outside the window beams hard like a diamond.

Captured in the facet, light, all tight and intensely found.

I watch the colors move round.  Dial of an earth clock set in colors.

there are bright colors in the World

I like color.  Color is the thing that made me want to be an artist.  Just looking at colors cheers me.  Putting the still life objects on the table, choosing one color to be next to another — this arranging the colors before even beginning to paint.  The colors sitting on the palette.  The light that flows over all the objects.  Reflections, shadows.

And the in-between spaces of the still life really delight me.  Do people know how wonderful the world looks in that couple of inches between the marmelade jar and the Chinese rice bowl?  Or in that passage where the folds in the cloth float behind and near the chrysanthemum vase?

I paint to look at things.  And if my paintings say things, it is “look at this!” and “look at that!”  The world is so amazing to look at.  We ought to be looking at it all the time.

I have an admirer!

Georgia, who is eleven, found my artwork at this blog and selected me as an artist to study for a school project — an event about which I feel wonderful pride.  One reason I began writing my blog was that I hoped to reach the “young artist of the future,” whoever that might be, and to offer encouragement to anyone who comes along who loves the visual world and wishes to explore it.  (My other reason is of course to reach wealthy collectors who will buy up all my stuff.)  Anyway, Georgia copied my drawing at the post “Doll’s Day Off.”  My version is below.

I think it’s marvelous the way Georgia has translated my colored pencil drawing into watercolor.  “Translation” is a very old practice, one that may have some support from the ancient art of rhetoric where it was lauded as a particular way to copy while at the same time transforming a thing.  The way she uses the watercolor medium is very bold, placing colors of paint with firm confidence.  I also admire the way she has rendered the leaves of the plant with delicacy, achieving an admirable sense of atmosphere and space.

So, there you have it.  I’ve got an admirer!  And I’m as pleased as can be!

my tea cup lives a life of complexity

Actually my still life was inspired by the paintings of another artist.  I set up my still life to emulate qualities in the other artist’s work.  My subject is different in scale, in medium, in manner and in subject but the arrangement is partly there.

I always say that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” and I intend to be very sincere.

Art Quote du Jour

“Je n’ai, pour ma part, jamais évité l’influence des autres, j’aurais considéré cela comme une lâcheté et un manque de sincérité vis-à-vis de moi-même.”

“For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.”            – Henri Matisse

Art Imitating Life

I bought three apples at the Giant Food store (well, actually I bought five apples, but I ate two of them).  These apples have already appeared in this blog in pictures (they were competing with the clementines, you might recall).   After comparing apples and oranges, these apples are ready to go head to head with new competitors.  They want to be famous.  Here they are in their room with the picture of their idols on the wall.

They stand before Cezanne’s famous apples of Provence.  I don’t know.  It’s hard making the real apples that nature makes and Giant sells stand up strongly against the rich pigmentary apples of imagination that Cezanne conjured when he looked at the contents of his produce basket of rural France during the 19th century.  Oh, how his old Provencal apples have such grandeur, such gravitas!  Real light reflects off mine and gravity pulls them down yet they don’t quite stack up!

When doing a “picture within a picture” of this sort, calling on the Masters, one ought to be ambitious and vie with the Big Guys.  So, I did.  I tried to do that.  I got Cezanne’s picture there (in the form of an advertisement for an exhibit at the Baltimore Museum) and I looked back and forth between it and my apples from Giant Food. 

Okay, so it’s back to the drawing board for me.  It’s hard to capture the full dignity and splendor of apples from life.  Cezanne was so clever.  But I tried!  And I’ll try some more.

Here’s the same three guys by themselves.

Oh, my darling Clementine!

Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling, Clementine!

In the wake of my couple hours at the museum, I return to my still life plans with renewed enthusiasm.  I’m not sure why, but I always accept the gift of pleasure when it comes and try not to ask too many questions.  Something about copying the other guy’s still life objects (in this case figs belonging to Frans Snyders) jazzed up my experience of the colors, shapes and lines of my own set up.  I made these drawings last night — wanted to do something while that good feeling was still mentally vivid.  And I decided to approach my still life in the same way I had done at the museum:  I made some fast pencil drawings first.

Drawing the bright orange Clementines with pencil turns into a nice meditation upon tonal strength.  Without the umph of orange dazzling chroma, you have to find other means for deciding how to be emphatic.  I learned a new appreciation for nuances of dark and the wonder of figuring out where and how much gets you some magic (I’m still figuring).

I don’t really need to make the pencil drawings to do the color version, but making them helps nonetheless.  Having made the pencil version, I already know something about my subject.  We’ve already shaken hands and gotten beyond the formalities and are well on our way to the beginnings of a wonderful friendship.

(Just for the record, I didn’t actually sing the song while I was working, but it does make a clever post title.)

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.