the versions so far, together

It’s fun to assemble them.  One gets ideas from the group also.  I look at four different ways I drew the same thing.

A recurring dream … one that I have while awake.

But there’s more to this dream ….

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repetitions for a mythological garden

Let it never be said that I lack a work ethic.  I have made several versions of the foliage imagery.  I enjoy going over it again and again.  It’s incredibly scribbly.  Many little bits of leaf, many pieces of light and shadow — and yet also many ways of thinking about the organization of the large forms.

I did this drawing using Stabilo CarbOthello pastel pencil.  Then put a bit of watercolor over that.

I have lost count how many variations this is.  I love this motif, but it’s just a part.  I need to figure out how it will relate to the other sections of the idea.  I haven’t even made the first compositional drawing yet.

It’s just one part of an idea.  Each time I draw, each time I write, I get a few more bits of the idea. It’s like lucid dreaming.

sight reading a page inside the book

Scribbling out the idea … it’s like sight reading in music.  I’m not sure how the music sounds yet.  I haven’t actually heard it.  I’m reading the parts, getting figures in my head.  First I have to find out what is there.  Later I will look for interpretation.  First comes practice.  At some future juncture my hands will go straight to the notes.  You must assimilate the music.  It has to go from the page to the interior of your head.  You have to hear it a while, get a feeling for the whole, discover its anticipations, its revelations.

There’s a beginning, a middle and an end.  I don’t even know what the beginning is.  I compose the visual music at the same time that I learn it.

 

kismet

I was at the U S Arboretum a few years ago when they were giving away old books.  Most of them treated obscure topics.  I found one book that I thought I could use for making sketches.  It sat in the back of my car for a long time.  When I cleaned my car, it migrated indoors.  It sat in one spot, then another.  After I started reading Marie Kondo’s book “the life-changing magic of tidying up” I figured it was destined for the trash pile. Something stayed my hand.  This morning it “struck joy,” to use Kondo’s phrase.  And I’m drawing one of the third or forth foliage studies I’ve made so far for a project that crept into my head last night.

This book feels kind of perfect for what I’m doing.  I have felt so excited that I wanted to write about it and I haven’t even finished the first drawing yet.  But it is so perfect.  We are definitely striking joy this morning.

The book is so perfect that even the panels in it, the lines drawn on every page are as though designed to help me figure my foliage studies out.  The text is minimal and offers simply some random extra texture on a related theme: flowering plants.

The Big Tidy Campaign of 2017 is on-going.  It will be a while before I complete my household transformations.  I continue with my regular work during interludes — and while my muscles rest from the exertions of much moving stuff about ….

foliage abstractions

I got an idea for another imaginary garden, dream garden, mythological garden — a motif that has drifted in and out of my head over the years.  So I have begun just scribbling aspects of it.  Drawing and redrawing it in sketches is a way of also redrawing it in my thoughts. I’m not sure the element of foliage even comes through the drawing, but the large abstract movements do.  They need to be developed too — perhaps more than the descriptive element of foliage.