Reinterpreting

I’ve been playing around with a certain idea for a long time without making a painting of it.  It’s based on a dog we had — now deceased for several years — he was — how should I put this? — athletic.  So I had this idea of Spottie Leaping Through the Forest.  His name was Spot.  (For Star Trek fans he was named after Commander Data’s cat.)  And he leaps through the forest because he’s hunting.  Our dog loved to chase squirrels, and a couple of unfortunate squirrels got caught too.  Spottie was fast.

It was to be my version of Henri Rousseau.  However, it still hasn’t quite made it into paint. 

Nevertheless, I’ve made a bunch of sketches and even made a computerized collage from photos collected from the internet.  Evidently I printed out a postage stamp-sized version of the computer collage and pasted it into a notebook below a pen and ink sketch.  Funny the idle things you do, that you forget about, and then later rediscover one day while cleaning. 

In the miniature version above a whitish layer of something photographic seems to create a water’s surface as though some of the image is above the water and some things are underwater.  I never noticed this before today.  I don’t remember noticing this quality in the computer collage when it was printed full size.  So, sometimes the endless fiddling around that one does while playing with images creates new possibilities. 

It’s a slight thing, but I like the idea that I could portray the surface of the water and things underneath it.

Silk Colors

Color conveys mood.  One question I begin my koi paintings with is what color blue will predominate?  For this particular painting my studies help me decide whether one fish (now in a leading role) will be a soft pale orange or a richly saturated orange.  The color of the fish is especially important since orange and blue are optically opposite.  If the fish is richly colored he will stand out in a maximal way, and if he is a quietly pale orange he will make a much less forceful impact. 

I’m thinking this little fish deserves a big personality, but I’m trying to make certain the whole painting will balance.  This study tries the quieter color.  It’s also the first time I’ve dealt with the dark fish who dives downwards.

Being Studious

Today was drawing day.  I made three studies for the koi paintings.  The freedom of drawing is exhilerating.  Beginning an idea from the blank page always delights me, but I am supposed to be finishing paintings.  Well, this way I get to eat my cake and have it too.  I am “working on” the painting — indirectly.  I am trying out ideas, rehearsing my lines, all of which gives me necessary practice for the painting.  But I still get to begin from blank.

The version above is a compositional sketch for the whole painting.  In the next couple posts I make studies of the group around the dark fish.

Coming up to the surface

My painting of the koi (originally posted on July 14) is coming along.  It’s not finished yet, but the fish are beginning to swim to the top.  I please myself in the discovery that many of my pictures seem to contain metaphors about painting.  (I love the art of painting, and hope that I am and always will be her champion.)

Just as the last layers of paint are the ones that really make the image exist, so the coming of the fish to the surface is like the idea arising into sight. Ideas in art come to us from depths, like images from dreams.  But in the act of painting we bring them toward the light and make them visible.

Fish Caught

Sometimes a fish jumps out and flies above the surface of thought,  a flash of light on wet scales.  He looks at you and dives back underneath the water, sinking into that dark obscurity of beauty and darkness into a liquid night.

What some might call just a drawing of a fish, why does it seem to me like a form of travel?  This sharp intensity of attention that lets you draw the fish, it takes you somewhere — to some strange place in thought.  There is this place to which you travel that lies somewhere between yourself and the page.

[Top of the post:  Study of a Fish by Aletha Kuschan, watercolor]

music from a little shell

I have been listening to music I hear coming from inside a small shell.  It seems to sing me advice concerning the painting of my koi fish.  Its music comes from a great distance, whispering from far inside its small architecture, and it winds round chamber upon chamber to reach the outer air of the world.  Yet the delight it produces is commensurate with something much louder and grander.  It’s really quite an amazing little shell.

[Top of the post: drawing of a lonely shell, by Aletha Kuschan, ballpoint pen]

Half Fish Myself

All my preoccupation with the koi is making me half fish myself.  This is not a dream from which one wishes to awake.  Here is a dream one wants to dream.

Koi on the Move

I’d like to go to the beach for real.  Or I’d like to dive into a pond somewhere with my friends the koi.  Can’t do either of these things right now.  Well, actually I can’t try door number two ever — unless I’m willing to get arrested by the National Park Service.  But I am up to my eyeballs in water.  And I’m not referring to my afternoon at the pool. 

I’ve been working on koi paintings.  Will be making drawings of koi, too, because painting takes too long and I need instant gratification.  I remember how much I enjoyed making the drawing above, which is fairly large, made on two sheets measuring 60 x 88 inches overall.  I have an idea for a new koi drawing so I’m beside myself with eagerness to get started.  At some future time, I’ll post them.  But for now I present these little teasers!

Work of this sort has its own frustrations, of course.  “Painting” with crayons means having to scribble or rub colors into shapes.  The upside is that it’s very energetic and provides good exercise for the forearms.  Whatever frustrations to instant gratification exist, however, are more than made up by the delight in making lines.  Lots of ‘em — over very large sheets of paper.  It’s great to be an adult and still have so much rationalization for long episodes of play.

[Top of the post:  Last year's Koi drawing, by Aletha Kuschan, crayon 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]

Anne Sophie Mutter and her Opposite

There’s an episode of Seinfeld called “The Understudy” where one of Jerry’s many girl friends gets her big break in a Broadway musical only to flub her opening number.  The very whiny girl friend turns to the audience and pleads with them to let her start over.  Violinist Anne Sophie Mutter would be the opposite of that.  I had a chance to watch Mutter perform once at the Kennedy Center in Washington thanks to the generosity of a friend (artists are way too poor to afford tickets to Mutter’s recitals).  Anne Sophie Mutter’s performance was so perfect, it’s hard to believe she’s human.  She is angelic or something. Oddly enough, she gets a certain amount of flak for her virtuosity.  Her performance is so perfect that people imagine her music lacks emotion.  The music is full of emotion!  It’s just that we’ve almost come to equate emotion with imperfection!

I have a violin and started “fiddling around” with it some years ago, and when I’m very well warmed up I can play some jazz by ear that’s not too shabby.  (It helps if all the planets are perfectly aligned.)  I doubt I could ever have been a performer even if, like Mutter, I had begun at age four.  In that area of life where I have the most freedom and fluency, I make mistakes all the time.  Big ones!

Maybe artists are just clumsy people.  One artist here at wordpress has the picture of a Julian easel toppling over in a stream as a kind of logo.  And I’ll bet that WR Jones has some stories he could tell you.  I have painted things en plein air, thought my picture magnificient, stood back for the better view, and watched the whole thing go SMACK face down in the dirt by an ill-timed gust of wind.  I cannot count the unfortunate bugs I’ve picked out of other en plein air productions.  And I’m always dropping stuff, brushes and whatnot.  Or losing things (the precise photo, drawing, whatever, that I need for the project at hand).

What I absolutely love about painting, the reason why I know it was meant for me, is that painting is a performance that takes place in utter secrecy and the only notes that count are the ones visible on the top layer.  You can make a tangled mess of the bottom, you can change your mind a thousand times, you can miss your cue, falter on the first note, sing out of key, forget the words — as long as you recover in that thin top layer — you win!

[Top of the post:  First layers (learning the riff) of the latest project, by Aletha Kuschan, oil on canvas]