About ten years ago, maybe longer, I stapled a piece of canvas paper to some cardboard and began drawing my blue compotier in quick strokes of paint. And what happened after that? The phone rang? I dunno. Whatever it was, I quit working and never resumed the painting. And it has stayed in this haphazard condition ever since. Of course it was only a study from the beginning. The canvas paper is torn and oddly shaped. But I love this unfinished picture.
It’s the kind of thing you do strictly for yourself, the way that humming in the shower is distinctly different from a recital. I made a record of forms and linear contours in whatever order they struck my notice. I was unconcerned about the identification of the object, about whether anyone can tell what it is. I observed instead its visual properties, and they held my gaze perfectly well in all their abstract purity.
The beauty of a sketch offers dangerous temptations. It can make one timid about going forward. The sketchiness can be so beguiling that one becomes reluctant to make that necessary journey toward finishing an idea. In my youth the buzzword was “over-worked.” It was the great terror. God forbid one overworks a picture. New bugaboos have replaced that idea now. Of course, there does exist a genuine fault involved in finishing something in unmeaningful ways. Yet we must bite the painterly bullet and go forward with ideas, willing to make mistakes of judgment in the interest of learning real visual lessons.
An artist definitely needs to learn how to go beyond the beauty of impulse, ephemera and accident. Certainly. But equally truly, one must have one’s moment of daliance with these delights. Or else one forsakes the encounter with pure form. It cannot be got any other way. Sometimes it comes just so fleetingly.
Artists learn to accept the stops and starts of discovery in order to get the knowledge that comes hidden in the different places — in the mind’s different corners of impulse and deliberation.
Aletha Kuschan's Weblog 