I have a list of things to work on and I was supposed to be working my list. But then I got an idea about this motif, and it seemed like something that I should do instead.
Sometimes I seem to be dreaming while awake.
This is a beginning of something or other. Not sure where it’s going — only that it’s light.
Some of the landscapes I’ve been painting are just scenes without any special significance. And this landscape began that way. However, as I keep tinkering with it, the scene begins to suggest something to me. I don’t know what it is. A memory? Some hidden meaning?
While I was tinkering, I made a drawing.
The little yellow tree used to take up more space, as in the drawing. But I decided to make it smaller. And somehow that works better. But I don’t know why. Not in terms of naturalism, but just as meaning. Or so it seems.
I read through the forms using a ball point pen in the previous post, and here I’ve rehearsed the forms in color using Caran d’Ache Neopastels (oil pastel). The drawing measures 18 x 11 inches. Didn’t color everything. It’s just a dress rehearsal, still thinking out loud.
Building up the “pond with lilies” in acrylic paint. It measures 20 x 24 inches. After beginning it with drawing, I have kept to the scribbly sensibility.
It all began here:
Not really a drawing — I had so much fun making the scribble drawings for the painting that I decided to continue the process on the painting itself. It will all get covered up. It is, nonetheless, an energetic way to begin. I used acrylic medium to thin down the paint, to capture more of the character of the “ball point pen lines”. The canvas is 20 x 24 inches.
Van Gogh was such a wonderful writer as well as being a great artist. If you rummage through his letters even at random, you always find something remarkable. So it is that I find this passage today:
The poor soil of Drenthe is the same, only the black earth is even blacker — like soot — not a lilac black like the furrows, and melancholically overgrown with eternally rotting heather and peat. I see that everywhere — the chance effects on that infinite background: in the peat bogs the sod huts, in the fertile areas, really primitive hulks of farmhouses and sheepfolds with low, very low walls, and huge mossy roofs. Oaks around them. When one travels for hours and hours through the region, one feels as if there’s actually nothing but that infinite earth, that mould of wheat or heather, that infinite sky. Horses, people seem as small as fleas then. One feels nothing any more, however big it may be in itself, one only knows that there is land and sky.
[source: http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let402/letter.html%5D
For Van Gogh on that day it was his being in an enormous prospect outdoors, among infinite seeming fields. For me it is the confined corner of my studio where I find another sort of infinity — for everywhere I look I see some small thing that opens large with details and beauty. And everywhere I look the things seem imbued with ideas. Nature has filled the room with thoughts and the things are poems.
When you need flowers, remember that you can find reproductions of my pictures on Fine Art America. (Got to plug my own site — this is an advertisement!)
I have put many of the flower pictures there, some koi, some landscapes. And there’ll be more coming.
So if you need something red, please think of me. And when you need flowers. And koi. And so on. Think of me!
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/bright-carnations-aletha-kuschan.html
Think about creating a walkway in a garden,
a path made with pebbles. Instead of dumping the bag of rocks into the path and pushing them around with a rake, you move them around pebble by pebble. Well, clearly I cannot do that — am not that crazy. But the changes to the picture seem like shifting pebbles around in a path.
I posted this before, and I have worked on it a little more. This is the larger version of the motif. It’s on blue paper. The other smaller one is on brown paper. I wonder if the changes are even visible to the spectator. More increments are necessary, I think, before the changes really take hold. I’m not ready to let this go, and yet the differences between where it is now and where it needs to be are slight.
I had posted details of the other drawing. Here are a few of the same passages from this drawing.
It corresponds to this detail from the other version (below).
And the central portion of the large picture:
And the slightly smaller one (below):
The one helps me think about the other.
One quality I love about pastel (both oil pastel and dry pastel) is the ease with which you can drag color over top of existing layers. The slight change in the surface, like rearranging pebbles in a garden path, makes the thing more tactile — and (somehow) seems (to me) to make it more real.
A garden scene of floating world with trees above and clouds below is not different from a herd of koi seen rushing through the water, the planes of water shifting as the koi move through. One is like the other. I often think that I am continually painting the same picture over and over, whether it is koi or landscape or flowers or something else.
Why is a koi not just like a cloud?
The definition of art is a somewhat amorphous thing. Recently I chided someone for identifying “art” with whatever will challenge me, make me feel uncomfortable, touch me, transform me. I suggested that some things will have these qualities and yet will decidedly not be art. Driving in rush hour, doing taxes, taking a standardized test, getting a root canal — all are challenging. I guarantee the root canal will make you uncomfortable. Perhaps a dentist will argue that root canals are art. But, for goodness sake, let’s let the dentist make the argument. Artists don’t have to do it for them.
What is art? In the era when drawing doesn’t count, art has morphed into namelessness. Everyone is an artist now. Art is whatever you want it to be. And still life beckons.
Let me suggest that art’s definition be reserved for the hard stuff. Let an old master’s skill be an ingredient. Better that we be striving toward it than grinning and slapping our own backs in self-congratulation.
Life still beckons. I say art is a mystery, and I will pursue it. Better to ever pursue and never reach than to cheapen the journey with goo-gaws and touristy nick-nacks. Can I persuade you to share in the longing?
Okay, I don’t usually rant. But the ubiquitously recited litany that art will challenge me, make me feel uncomfortable, touch me, transform me — it’s so “me, me,me”! When did we lose our bearings? When did we leave nature aside? When did we lose our capacity to see inside the veil?
I copied Ingres (who knew what art is) and left the face blank. I think she makes a nice metaphor for Art. Art is she whose face is hard to see, the mystery that beckons, the life that needs transcription, a line suspended in air, a thought held in a breath, a definition that defies.
Today was a loose ends kind of day. Did a little of this, little of that, but had few chances to do a sustained bit of anything. Except I made this drawing. Pencil is such a moody, smudgy medium. Shiny too. Have to love the way that graphite gives off light as well as absorbs it.
The shell, too, reflected my thoughts back to me as well as absorbed some of them. The beauty of drawing is the way it lets your mind drift off to lazy, limitless, meditative places.
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