Flowers of the New

We spent lots of our holiday drawing, my ten-year-old (soon to be eleven-year-old) art assistant and I, but the cloud cover always seems to thicken whenever anyone reaches for a camera so I’ll have to keep you in suspense a while longer regarding our results. 

Meanwhile, I rearranged the studio today — always a heady experience as I realize that I’ve misplaced half the items I own and find myself becoming reacquainted with them in the shift and bustle.  Greetings! There you are!  Where’ve you been?  Whatever possessed me to put you there? But reunited now ….

In preparation for new still lifes I have been planning, I shifted stuff around once more, finding old things, no doubt losing new items by disturbing their places.  But I have accomplished my goal: I have two flower still lifes set up for work.

I have been dreaming about these pictures, imagining them in my head, contemplating the meanings of flowers.  Finally I can stop dreaming now and begin working.

Any Picture Will Do

Here’s another detail of the drawing I posted earlier.  I could have started another still life.  In fact, I’m hoping to do this still life again from another angle before I take the objects down.  But for now, I’ve considered it just as interesting to go forward with this drawing as though I were started a new version of it. 

What is the difference between doing a new version, or making many small alterations to the existing image?  In many ways all my pictures are the same idea played out into different forms.  By that logic, I figured I could continue working on the same image and be doing something “different.”

I was reading something lately that persuaded me I should relax and go more deeply into the picture that’s already on the easel.  Already, I begin seeing the still life in a different way.  There is so much more to observe than I noticed up to this point.  And even if the drawing were to change little even just the difference in quality of my observation seems marvellous to me.

I find that looking at the still life, I encounter so much beauty in these things.   Subtle relationships of color, quiet spaces of empty air in the interstices among objects, a strange and  quiet and perplexing beauty in the cloth behind the flowers that present a picture within a picture.  The “real” verses the depicted flowers offers a continuing challenge.

And of course, it is all artifice.

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Like a Bug

I have been revisiting my large drawing of flowers, posted previously here.  I have been trying to get further inside the details of the thing.  I am trying to see into the structures of the individual flowers and into the empty air that surrounds them.  Both flowers and the air are one and the same for the artist since both equally represent the surface of the picture.  Both flower and empty air matter to a bug, too.  One is the destination and the other one’s medium of travel. 

So, I have become like a bug.  I travel vicariously through the flowers of my picture, looking for nectar.
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I went green once before

The green cloth of the current still life drawing is one I’ve used before.  In this picture I shoved the flowers off to one side.  The objects in this still life all seem to have enough solidity to make them really citizens of the still life.  And each one has a little bit of turf carved out.  I don’t envision that bowl ever infringing the territory of the vase.
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Alternatives

When I walk around the easel and look at the still life from the other side, it looks like this.  I think this is such a pretty view.  Sometimes it’s hard not to jump at doing this view right now.  But I have to finish the other one first.

And, you never know.  The fish might start to beckon again.

Fish?  Flowers?  Fish?  Flowers?  It’s tough!
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Not enough hours in a day

Today’s been kind of busy!  I don’t have time to comment at my own post.  But it’s been a fabulous day here.  Hope you’ve had a fabulous day, too, wherever you are.  Sometimes there’s not enough hours in the day — in a wonderful sense.

Just like a kid.  I’m going to have trouble sleeping tonight because I just want to keep playing.  Been drawing my flowers, as you can see!  They’re beginning to get there.

Can’t wait for the sun to come up tomorrow!
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Dialing for Still life

I write to you from afar — I guess that doesn’t really quite make sense on the internet does it?.  Suffice it to say I’m not at my usual post, I write a dispatch “from the field,” and moreover I’m doing it with dial-up.

This picture above was something I found wedged inside one of my drawing notebooks.  I’d forgotten all about it.  But here it is.  It’s a little still life “painted” using artist’s crayons on linen.  I’ve both seen and read about some of Edouard Manet’s pastels that he did on canvas and decided to make this picture on cloth just to be doing the same thing Manet did.  It goes along with my theory of walking a while inside the old masters’ shoes. 

After having made trial of it myself, I’m afraid I cannot report back as to why Manet chose to do pastel on cloth as though it were a painting.  In my own picture, perhaps the chief effect is that the colors stand out against the warm brown-grey of the linen, which one must admit is kind of nice.  But overall I suppose there’s no advantage in doing pastel on cloth (rather than on paper) that is immediately obvious.  It’s one of those things to do, I guess, “just because.”

So “just because” — here  it is.  Nothing ventured nothing gained.  The objects are ones that held a special warm place in my heart.  The aluminum cup is one my mother used to measure sugar.  Its battered interior catches all kinds of silvery glimmers of light.  The other principle object is a bottle of mercurachrome, once used in quainter times to treat small cuts.

You can make a still life of the most unpreposessing things.

My early still after Manet

When I was a youth, I made this still life of things around the house.  (The pink sloping surface on the right represents a typewriter covered with cloth.)  I was trying to do something Manet-like.  The particular painting I had in mind is Manet’s Still life with Melons and Peaches at the National Gallery.

As you can see, I didn’t quite finish my painting.  Lost my nerve, I suppose.  Or ran out of ideas.  Probably a little of both.  Still, I find that I like the painting as is.  It has all sorts of visible pentimenti — even in that respect it’s Manet-like.

[Top of the post:  Author's early attempt at still life in a style of Manet, by Aletha Kuschan, 28 x 28 inches, oil on canvas]

Attention’s Gaze

I thought I’d give some advice.  This is free advice.  In a world where so many things are advertised as free, while so few things actually are free, I figure I offer people a genuine bargain.  Anyway, I am going to tell you how to begin a painting — for whomever is interested.  However, we shall not so much as lift a brush right now.  This will be mental painting during which time we look at a photo of a Monet still life and imagine various ways that we might paint something similar.  Are you game?

First, let me say, I took this image from the internet and am not familiar with the actual painting.  Looking at it here, it looks cropped on at least three sides.  Still, it’s quite lovely so let’s take it as it is.

I would urge you, artist, to begin by noticing the largest elements.  In first marks on a canvas one does well to heed the largish elements of the motif and place them first.  The reason is fairly obvious: that way, as you make changes you are less likely to have to move around those same largest things because they’ll already be firmly situated where you want them as opposed to their being where you don’t want them.   More significantly, the raison d’etre of the whole picture (in a great painting) is locked into the large elements from the outset.  And such is the case with this Monet painting.

Even allowing for the cropping I spoke of, this fragment of the painting shows its structure as being so solid that I think we could make fairly good educated guesses from this core as to how much the painting extends beyond what we currently see.  Certainly within this core, you can really sense the factor that gravity plays.  All the flowers are balanced with respect to the vase so that we know the vase will not topple, though notably the arrangement is very natural and asymmetrical.

One clump of flowers sits just above the vase and others radiate from this clump at irregular intervals.  The vase itself has been realized very simply as a smallish cylinder, its rim partly hidden by the lower most leaves of the bouquet.  One could indicate the edges of the cylinder with just a couple strokes in the beginning.  One side of the cylinder is lit and is lighter than the background.  The other side is in shadow and the edge of the background just adjacent to it is slightly lighter than the background overall.

Above this cylinder, I would — if it were me — scrub in a little green in droopy passages to represent (in the most amorphous way) the lovely green leaves that crown the vase – from which the flowers emerge.  I would, if I were beginning, keep things simple.  I would make the green very generic and the white of the vase just a little warmed by a little yellow.  The background is mostly grey, which you could get with black and white if you like — though a combination of yellow ochre and ultramarine blue, or of orange and blue, or some other combination of opposites or near opposites that have been diluted with lots of white is probably better, freer and optically more complex and pleasing.

Some of the leaves are dark, some are light.  For the dark, I would thinly scrub in some veridian or phthalo green from the tube.  And the lighter leaves can be made lighter with an addition of pale yellow and white.  At the outset, the point is to mark the contrast — leaving the nuances for later.  Similarly, I would put the flowers in early, trying to position them with precision — though not a precision that is obtained by hesitation and worry.  I would approach it like target shooting.  Aim, fire.  If you think the flower is “this big,” make it “this big.”  If you think it goes “here,” put it “here.”  Don’t take all day.  Stick ‘em in there like you were arranging flowers in a real vase.  If they don’t look right, move them before the painting gets complex.  Use a thin amount of paint at first, draw lines, be spare and free about it.  Get them as close to their relative positions as you can discern and then move on.  (It is just a painting, after all.  First of many.)

The curve of the round table is very gentle, and it takes up very little of the composition as we see it here.  You could draw this contour in with a red line – or a grey line.  This contour intersects the vase at just below the half way mark so that’s a helpful landmark.  I would ”measure” these things optically, however, in our target-shooting spirit.  The point of drawing things directly is that you teach yourself to sense proportion and shape in a natural way — you begin to internalize a gesture that matches what your eyes see.  Whenever you let hesitation and fear of mistakes scare you into grabbing tools or using all kinds of hand gestures and whatnot to get the proportion, you might as well be sending yourself an engraved invitation to be timid.  Put the things where they seem to belong.  The worst you do is get relationships “wrong,” though later this “wrongness” may turn out to be interesting.  It will at least reveal to you what you thought you saw, which admittedly has some meaning of its own.

Indeed, the advantage of copying something is that the source remains stable.  If art conservators do their job well, Monet’s painting is not going to change.  Thus the differences in how you perceive the painting can always be measured against the stable image.  For that reason, it’s good to recopy a painting that you copied “incorrectly” in the past.  You begin to learn the painting, just as a musician learns a piece of music.  It’s a good exercise and through a succession of variant copies, you can watch yourself making progress.  Later at some calm junction of your life, when you have gained experience and are ready to forgive yourself for making mistakes, you can also look quietly and objectively at the distortions or errors that you introduced into the image, and sometimes it happens that you discover a distortion that you actually rather like.  At that moment, congratulations!  you have found a new source of invention!  Matisse built a whole career on expressive distortion, raising it to a high level of enterprise.

From first gestures like these, you build up more and more information about the image you are copying.  You begin by putting in the first biggest “things” and the biggest relationships between things.  Please note that the empty spaces of a picture are as much a part of the image as the stuff is.  Yes, there are flowers.  And there are spaces between the flowers.  One paints the whole thing.  A wise artist will realize that the spaces are not insignificant.  Quite the contrary, as in real life, the spaces determine that the “things” will be where they are and will be what they are.  Where would we be without all our lovely molecules, I ask you?  Where would the flowers be without the air that surrounds them, without the shapes that press upon their locations?  The painting is “everything,” and you must be aware of this “everything,” even if only subliminally.

You deal with the big things first:  the big shapes, the main colors (let your green be green and your yellow, yellow, and add in the nuances after).  Later you look at each of the many parts, and you treat each of the parts as though they were the whole (for in a sense of course, they are). 

Now, you might ask (I hope you’re asking), which parts are parts in an image where everything matters?  When the spaces between the things are as much factors as the things themselves, how does one demark the difference between part and whole?  Oh, this is where painting becomes very philosophical and personal.  What is a part, you ask?  A part is anything that you perceive as being a part.  Even in making a copy, you are doing something very personal.  For you will notice different things, in a different order than Monet noticed even in copying his painting. 

This order of attention, this order of operations, this “I notice this” and “now I notice that” is your individual mind at work.  It’s a lovely process.  Don’t mess with it, just indulge it.  Try yourself, test yourself to see how much you can notice.  Try to notice more and more.  Record what you notice, as you notice it.  This journey into perception is “the beginning of knowledge,” for the painter.  Take it.  It’s a fabulous trip.  Believe me!

Once you start paying attention to the visual world in this manner, you will see things differently around you.  What you first see in a copy of a Monet still life, will reap observational benefits of intensified awareness all around you.  The world is a beautiful, subtle, technicolor place.  We just have to learn to see.

There’s much more to say, but this is a blog.  So, that’s all for now, folks!

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]