Simple Mountain

Fantabulous Koi

Mountains are ideas as well as being places. Even people who have never spent time in the mountains respond to the idea of mountain. The idea pared down to its most spare form, as a pyramidal form, or as a word in one’s language, has some pull. I can think of ideas that mountains can mean — shelter, permanence, grandeur, sublimity. However, what I want is to discover various emotions.

Colors can evoke emotion, too. Apart from associations with particular things, colors have their own evocations. Putting together the idea of mountain and certain color harmonies — I’m not sure where I’m going with these things — I just made a little drawing. I’m thinking a bit about beginnings, ways of drawing at the beginning, the broad forms from which more complex pictures are derived.

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Pieces of Color

Fantabulous Koi

You can always do something familiar in a slightly different way and in so doing expand your skills a little or change your perspective. When making these little shifts, they can seem inconsequential in the moment — and they might indeed be caprices. (Nothing wrong with that.) But sometimes they lead as first steps in new directions, with an influence that will reveal itself only in retrospect. So you give your whims their due, and see what happens down the road.

I’ve used collage a lot across time and used it in different ways, making large ones, small ones and medium sized ones. Usually I make collages as tools to sort out questions I have about a particular painting that’s in the works. Those collages are studies, as surely as many of my drawings are studies. They’re studies in a different medium.

I was curious lately about whether one could…

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What does the Mountain teach?

Fantabulous Koi

This is how the Self speaks.

How does the Mountain speak? It speaks with gravity, with the difficulty of an uphill passage. It speaks with rocks that can make you lose your balance, or with pebbles that slide under your shoe then tumble away producing a slip from which you easily recover, but which costs you time and energy. The mountain speaks with changing weather, with heights each having its own character. It has shadow side and sunny side, a windy or calm side. Sometimes the mountain addresses you merely by its inexpressible beauty.

As you climb both beauty and gravity together take your breath away.

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One face, one fact

Fantabulous Koi

How does one choose? What invisible decisions does your brain make? Or your mind? Or your soul? The decisions that occur before awareness? Before you even know you’re making a choice, it’s made.

“Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none,” writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Self-Reliance.”

The face stood out to me. As I walked toward a Buddhist frieze exhibited at the Freer Gallery in Washington DC, one face in particular caught my notice. The whole sculptural relief is a badly worn surface from whatever prior life it had before its inclusion in a museum. The faces had nubby surfaces, chipped here and there, or eroded by wind and water. Museum lighting adds another random element, casting parts willy nilly into shadow or prominence.

Time is the last factor. We were pressed. The frieze was the last thing…

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Moving!

I’ll be writing at a new blog Trace Elements.

Sail on over there and join me. ====> https://fantabulouskoi.wordpress.com/

The whole painting at present

Not sure when it will be finished or what it will look like. The painting doesn’t really have a logical conclusion. I have discovered that I could just keep changing elements of the scene from now until forever.

Not exactly a welcome insight. Of course, “forever” has a pragmatic correlative. The painting is probably near to its final aspect. And I have enjoyed the doing thus far and continue enjoying the changes — and the studies and versions in other media. They have been great fun.

These stages are what happen when you climb pictorial mountains.

My Cheat Sheet

Sometimes I have a little drawing off to the side while I’m painting. It’s there so that I can talk to myself, as it were. I rehearse in thought — and with actual tools — aspects of the painting that I’m going to be changing. It’s like a visual “to do” list. Sometimes I have written notes too.

I go back and forth between these alternative versions and the actual painting. The purpose is not to spare me from making mistakes. The painting is fluid. It changes. I accept that readily enough. The cheat sheet is more a matter of discharging thoughts. I have these ideas about maybe this, maybe that, and the ideas are more quickly traced through more direct tools — these being my notions of immediacy — everyone is different.

As a river has little tributaries that pour into its current, these alternative tasks are just what they are. They are part of the enjoyment of the moment.

portion of the painting roughly corresponding to the cheat sheet, detail of a landscape in progress

Abundant bright air

Drawings are vicarious experiences of nature. There’s the nature out there. Also there’s the nature in here. Nature from the inside is sometimes a landscape. And one of the landscapes that I particularly enjoy is the one that is spacious.

This one is doubly spacious because the water mirrors the sky so you get some sky twice. And actual sky and water are pretty similar anyway.

Oh, and then there’s the blue. Blue is the best.

The Favorite Place

The favorite place is nice in real life, but it’s really marvelous in art — more particularly in the process of portrayal. As the picture of the favorite place unfolds and emerges, the sensation is different than being there walking and enjoying the open air. Imaginatively it’s keener than in life. Or, rather, the life experience that I find so arresting comes about from watching bits of pigment attach to paper. The smears, dabs, scratchings, the contours, hatchings and whatnot are all so lovely.

The materials are beautiful. The colors are beautiful. The experience is so immediate and so close at hand.

Above is a detail of a drawing. The whole drawing measures about 8 x 10 inches. I’m drawing with the marvelous Neocolor1 crayons. What wonderful tools these crayons are!

Sentinel Tree

I started this painting ages ago. Reworked it in fairly recent times. And it’s been rephotographed.

It’s brightly colored. I love the crepe myrtles, marvelous trees. I cannot get enough of drawing and painting them.

Seems an apt choice for today. Happy summer solstice, everyone.