Drawing some yesterday, planning future flower paintings — to take up the loose threads of paintings I began but never finished — and get new ideas for possible future works. I love making pen drawings as a way of dreaming about things. It helps me get acquainted with the objects. The smallness of scale makes me feel as though I enter another dimension through the pen lines. It’s a way of mentally moving among the objects.
Some objects need special consideration. The blue compotier will be empty and its interior spaces will need to carry a lot of weight alone.
I will draw it over and over. Each drawing helps me see it differently.
I was also inventing a still life in the notebook, adding things as I thought about them. It’s just an idea for something where yellow is the predominant color (as my written notes attest).
Then there was a little sketch for another idea that’s already on the back burner simmering. I day dream about this picture that I’ve written about before.
Aletha Kuschan's Weblog 
I’ve begun using my blog more and more as a storage place. Concerning the last drawing, the one where I’ve provided a link to the picture to which it relates. At that post I just added a drawing that has a new idea for the window treatment. I’m trying to put these ideas all in one place. And blogging is really useful that way. The blog becomes like a filing cabinet, and into the folders I add new material as I get it.
I am really inspired by how you stick to your drawing discipline. Obviously you like drawing, but it has to also spill over n a positive way into all your other modes of expression. For me my blog is also a storage form mainly, a vidial diary. Keeping all my paintings physically is out of the question, i have no merket for selling them and they just stand taround reminding me of that. So i keep painting over them. At least they live on in some form on my blog!
Maybe it is a discipline. I didn’t necessarily think of that. I love drawing. When I first decided I wanted to be an artist, I didn’t think my drawing was any good. I suppose it mostly wasn’t back then. So I was right! But I wish in retrospect that I had persisted more tenaciously anyway even at the beginning. I waited such a long time before I would let myself be enthralled with drawing and just love it. I would have found success sooner — and by success I mean a sense of exhilaration.
I post these drawings — because, why not? But they are very private as to their making. I am not thinking about anything, not about what anyone might think, not about rules, I think of nothing except the things, thinking about putting lines around them — sometimes across and through them, connecting them to the other objects in the scene in whatever way seems right at the moment. Drawing feels for me like unfettered action. You see, you think, you draw.
The drawings of the compotier above are hardly much larger than postage stamps but I love miniature things like this. They are visual musings.
I would think twice about painting over things. The physical presence is unique. Photography never catches the whole thing. There’s something wonderful about the first marks on a white surface. And the tangible connection with the idea of the painting, being able to hold it in your hand.
I posted a painting a few posts ago, one that I made decades ago, said it was a favorite, probably couldn’t sell it if I wanted to (and I don’t in any case want to) — you might recall — blue and white vase with some clover against an abstract looking mass of dark that’s actually a shadow cast by a step — anyway I can look at that now, and hold that painting and it’s like being transported back in time. Such a wonderful sensation. Art is part time machine.
Great to hear that you get so much joy from this Aletha. Your comment and your feeling about your old drawings remind me of the poem “The Planet on the Table” by Wallace Stevens. I quoted it in one of my earlier posts.
What a wonderful poem! I post it below for others who find your comment and our conversation. All your quotes from poetry make me want to read more! I used to read literature back in the day …
The Planet on the Table
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.
It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
Wallace Stevens