Big Blue Water

I had a big piece of canvas draped over an empty stretcher for a long time.  Well, finally got the staple gun loaded and got to work.  The canvas was stretched, the idea was laying there ready to begin, and I’ve begun work on the last large koi painting of the season.  I know that I’ll want to do others, maybe next year or a few years hence, but for now I’m in finishing mode.  All the koi are coming up to the surface — so to speak — getting their last layers of paint.  The pond will be stocked.  The fish can just swim.  And afterwards I’ll begin a new series on some other topic.

The last koi picture has perhaps some added allure for me.  Call it the finale.  Accordingly, for me, this canvas feels most like a dip in the water.  The innate beauty of the color blue captivates me now while I work.  This picture is one in which the water and its fluidity will provide the central theme.  Added to the indulgent pleasure of the motif, I’m using acrylic paint this time so that the work goes much faster.  Usually I love oil for the exact opposite reason — its slowness, its nuance — but I’m dolloping large puddles of color, pushing loaded brushes at this canvas, letting the shapes happen fast, thinking and reacting in one gesture.  It’s really a lot like swimming — which seems just about right. 

The painting is still new, lots of work ahead.  It sits at the end of a long gallery of fellow fish.  It’s my delight to see in the morning.  It reminds me why I first began painting.  This big pond will, I hope, make the spectator feel as free a fish!  Oh, may we truly know the delight of life on our blue planet.

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]