The Fulness of Summer

My idea of the summer landscape is like a theatre in which the trees are actors.  They strike the most amazing poses.  Their slightest gesture makes your heart catch.  Before they even speak their lines — their ancient lines spoken over and over  for millenia — never tiring of meaning — always rising up like bass notes sounded over centuries — I say! — before all that the tension frazzles the nerves with delight of anticipation, I find myself longing to be an actor among them.  Their drama concerns me.  I feel I should take the stage with them.  I want to wander among them and see each one in its marked place, before the curtain opens, and the action begins.

To wander the stage before the play begins, before the lights come up, when all the actors are still shadows and the musicians inhale to play the first notes.  I want to watch it from all directions.  How I want to discuss techniques with the director.  How I wish I could be more than just an artist with a pen and a few crayons.

Sleeping and Dreaming

This drawing of a sleeping child is a study for a painting.  I have made so many drawings of this face and her hand and this pose!  I have tried so many times to dream her dreams.  Drawing is partly a way of entering into other worlds.  Like a novelist creates characters and actions for them to be living, an artist has to create the whole pictorial world of the painting.  But unlike the novelist’s, the artist’s world is one scene only that forever plays again and again before the spectator’s gaze.

There are actions in paintings, but they are frozen and stilled.  I love the stillness of art.  I love the stillness of a scene that never changes, of a child who forever dreams, of a summer day that is eternal and always wonderful and bright.

[Top of the post:  Study of a Sleeping, Dreaming Child, by Aletha Kuschan]

Mirrors into Thought

I’m busy painting koi these days, doing my own version of Monet’s Nympheas idea, living as it were in imaginary pools of water, becoming it sometimes seems a fish myself, so immersed I am in a world of blue.  So, it’s intriguing to reencounter a work like this drawing of flowers and to find so many similarities in it to the fishes and the pool. 

Though the colors are entirely different and the associations are quite opposite, this picture bears a mirror likeness to the koi ponds.  This similarity is made all the more mysterious by their oppositions.  One takes place outdoors, the other inside the house.  One is natural, the other is civilized and artificial.  One is vertical, the other horizontal.  But inside both pictures are formal means of ordering the visual idea.  Both images have a “swirl” of sorts as its schematic center.  The implicit visual movement of the flowers in their design, both the flowers in the vase and the ones arranged on the design of the cloth, echo the swimming motions of the fish in their pond. 

I’ve noticed this kind of visual metaphor before in my paintings.  I have no idea what it means.  Beneath the subject matter lies a process of ordering and arranging that is as much the subject of the painting as are the objects depicted.  Somehow in the precise ways I order things, my personality lies hidden. 

It might seem that a person’s way of ordering ideas would be the last thing about themselves that they would “hide,” and yet I only discover these facts of self-hood for myself by this very indirect means.  And without even realizing I was doing so, naturally I reveal something of myself to others also by these tacit devices.

We project ourselves outwards upon the world in myriad ways.  Just that sense one has of knowing people, of taking the measure of them, even of people that we just meet when we make those crucial “first impression” judgements — all these effects are signs of the self that is foisted out.  Even a shy self is thrust onto the stage of life despite one’s efforts to seek shelter. 

We are all actors on the stage as William Shakespeare once keenly observed.  For the artist the picture is but another kind of garment one wears to demonstrate and manifest the self to the world.

A picture is a strange mirror because it distorts as much as it reveals, pressing ideas outward into the world in a thousand disguises.  Yet behind all forms of concealment, one person peeks through.  Paint.  Do paint, and I guarantee you’ll gain self-knowledge though you may not always recognize the face you see in painting’s strange mirror.
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[Top of the post:  Drawing of Flowers in a Vase, by Aletha Kuschan, Caran d'ache on Canson paper]

Fuzzy details

The upclose of first marks on a canvas can be kind of exciting.  When everything is possible still…

[Top of the post:  detail of a Koi picture (see Anne Sophie Mutter and her Opposite) 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]

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]