New path ways in the Blogging Life

I have neglected my little blog lately while I rethink my path forward.  It’s not been so much a case of “writer’s block” for I have been writing copiously in my little notebooks in that arena of my life that is strictly low tech.  But I have lacked ideas for blogging.

And I guess it shows!

And I cannot present my paintings here for a season — though there’s plenty of paintings in the archives, of course.  For reasons that I cannot quite explain, the paintings I’m doing right now need to be secret.  Koi can be shy.  And these koi need quiet at the pond, invisibility, freedom.  So I have planned to write less about painting and more about …

well, more about something or other — just as soon as I figure it out.  Meanwhile, drawing a creamer is always good for keeping yourself busy while you’re figuring.

Regular readers know that I am my stuff.  That’s me up there!  Me as a creamer… yeah, it’s kind of weird.

Eyes Open

To open your eyes each morning and find light pouring into your head, tapping the optic nerve and stimulating sight, isn’t it amazing?  As soon as I get up, I routinely go to the window, peer through the blinds,  and look outside.  There’s always something interesting on the other side.

Something about the impulse to draw is as basic as this.  You open your eyes and find a world outside.  And all that remains is to grab something that writes and begin making lines.  Maybe the first artists did something like this.  How magical it must have seemed to them.  How magical it truly is.

May we always have that sense of the magic of reality, how miraculous it is to gaze upon a world.

window of the notebook

I have a notebook that I’m filling up with pen drawings.  Usually I crop drawings to eliminate the extraneous edges, but when you’re dealing with a notebook, to crop the picture is to ignore the notebook itself, and that I think eliminates a significant part of the charm.  An artist’s drawing notebook, like other books, participates in a mystique of opening and closing.  You enter another world, as it may be, in opening a book.  Closing it, you leave.  A book is rather like a door that way.

I like the area of space in the unused page, the way that previous drawings bleed through and appear like ghosts.  They blur the edges of separation between the pictorial things and remind the observer that everything exhibited is ultimately just lines of ink on a sheet of paper.

I have several vases in the notebook now.   Each drawing is a little world.  And the notebook, therefore, is what?  Door to a miniature alternate flower universe.

Dipsy Doodling

When I’m at a loss for something to do, or distracted from the work at hand, or sometimes when I’m on the phone, I draw little dipsy doodle drawings of whatever happens to be within my line of sight.  Is interesting how much freedom is there to be had when you just breathe in the local air.  Though it is wonderful to travel, yet there are also adventures to enjoy at home.  And sometimes I look around and find that even certain regions of my studio contain picturesque material, airy linear heights and craggy inky depths to plumb.

Some of the doodle drawings relate to “serious” works.  I might have a still life going and take my drawing from this standing source.  But the differences between the fast pen drawing and a “serious” painting are like the difference between business travel and a vacation.

One might wonder why an artist needs a vacation from painting!  Well, let’s face it.  Everyone needs a vacation from everything sometimes.  And little doodles take you to another mental place.

But the really nice thing about little dipsy doodle drawings is that they take you — briefly — to another mental sphere, bright and light and spare, and the expense costs no more than a sunbeam …

Quick thinking

One is forever learning to think quickly for no matter how many times one may have acted spontaneously in the past, each new spontaneous action is singular.  Always some brake that must be met.  Always some objection to get around.  The barriers are spontaneous, too, and only agile quick-witted thinking out-smarts that part of the brain that waits for you with the utmost caution.

The koi are quick witted, too.  Quick and sleek swimmers are they, as agile as desire unstopped by will.  Their direction is all their seeking.  Of one seamless swift intention they move.

If the crayon can be made to move with fish-like certainty, that would be a koi drawing indeed.

Guppies

Have to make the small drawings sometimes.  Gotta to have some little fish to stock the pond.  This one above is a page from a large notebook, and the drawing is made using water color pencils.  And the colorful frame comes from the bedspread.

Nothing quite so relaxing as drawing the little fish who grow up to be the big fish.

Juggling fishes

I was at the koi pond this week, visiting fishes that I have sorely neglected.  What have I been doing lately anyway?  Feels like a whirlwind.  Well, the end of one year moving into the beginning of a new one can feel that way.  I know I was drawing still life and doodling some landscape ideas and this week I returned finally to my fishes (who pretended not to recognize me).  Is rather like juggling roses and shrubs and koi.  Quite a circus act, that would be.

Well, after a suitable interval of distain the fishes stopped being coy.  Then it was just koi I juggled.  And they tumble into a bunch in the detail above, bustling and crowding one another.

I have a bunch of ideas for new ponds.  One pretends that art works will follow each other in some kind of logical sequence.  But it never quite works that way.  The impulse to do this or that happens higgledy-piggledy.  The real work of picture making is a melange.  It just is.

The koi need to understand.  But they did persuade me to come back soon.

A year of small moments

Glancing back over 2011 and asking myself what were its best gains for me in terms of my art, I think it came toward the year’s end when I decided that I would do pochades.  For many years I set my sights on big things, partly because I wanted to find out if I could do them.  That journey led into some wonderful places that I plan to continue visiting, as for instance the koi ponds.  But when I turned my attention to making pochades, it was with a realization that I had perhaps forgotten how to make small paintings.  And I needed to come back to this once familiar ground and relearn its lessons.

And that’s the lesson I’m eager to carry forward into 2012, this year full of wonderfully round numbers!  Indeed, I want to combine the old habit of visiting the koi pond of thought to see what new ideas it brings and to do its opposite also in the making of small quick pictures.  I want big expansive pools of big healthy frisky koi.  And I want little sketches of colored land and sky small enough to hold in your hand, something that I can do in a couple brief sittings.

I love the beginning of the year because it provides a natural moment for reviewing the past and for making new plans.  And I love to plan!  I love the empty page full of possibility and light!

May the blank pages of possibility on your 2012 calendar fill with good things and happy spirit’s adventure!

hairdos and things to do

The problem in art, after you solve all the other problems, is what to do.  The old saw about “being dressed up with nowhere to go” is true, and it’s the bane of art.  People talk about the technical things, but thank your lucky stars for all the technical stuff — for when the technical stuff is all used up then you have to decide quite simply “what to do.”  At that moment, perhaps it’s a good time to turn to the drawing challenges that people have graciously suggested.

I add one of my own:  draw your hair.  It’s a good “tempus fugit” subject.  Said differently, draw your hair while you still can — while you still have hair, while you can still hold a mirror, while you still have a sense of humor ….

And if I’m too late with my advice, and you don’t have any hair, get a doll with big hair …

a drawing is a memory of something

One wonder of drawing in notebooks is the experience you get opening the notebook after a chunk of time has passed and having a day of your past life come rushing back into being.  If there were one reason that stands above all others why artists should indulge the practice of drawing in notebooks, I’d say it was this.  Indeed, the notebook is like a diary except that rather than relying on words it deals in images.

Both diary and drawing have their unique capacity for distilling time.  I don’t praise one above the other.  All I do is exhort people to keep them, one or the other, a record of words or pictures — at least for a season.

It’s like canning peaches.  This is my canning:  only I canned a whole pond and included some ducks too.