Friday, February 8, 2008

How does one begin?


I have been thinking about teaching lately -- thinking about what should be taught. One finds plenty of books in the stores. They typically show a series of steps, a series of ideas represented in different stages of a picture. The books are okay, as far as they go, in giving someone who has never thought about drawing a way of starting. However, they have the great disadvantage of starting one in the path of convention, of teaching people to see a subject in terms of predetermined ideas. In sharp contrast to that, a real picture deals with ideas in some kind of hidden order of attention and meaning. Your eye goes to this place or that for sometimes mysterious reasons.
In real life, pictures can also sometimes stop abruptly. One has lost the idea, or become temporarily derailed. It is not a matter of not knowing how to draw, but of not knowing what to draw. Sometimes the unfinish of the image is more evocative than adding to it would be. Sometimes a painting has to ripen slowly, or to age like a wine. You set it aside and let it stand as an object of meditation. It's like a dream that has been interrupted.
An image can go through stages that have nothing to do with convention. There is no proper way to draw a thing because there is no proper way to think about it or experience it. The life in the image has to be lived in the mind of the artist first if it is ever to live in the mind and heart of the spectator.

Intuition


I've learned over the years to trust my artistic instincts, and I find that sometimes I'm "composing" things when I least expect it -- as when I rearrange pictures in the studio as part of an effort to "clean up" or to organize work or because I'm looking for something. I often find that the pictures I place next to each other, however casually and with no evident purpose, often times reveals formal relationships between images that I had failed to notice.
In the picture above I put some canvases that I meant to work on out where I could see them. The still life of flowers was already leaning against the wall. It was with a little double-take that I noticed that the features of the landscape are very similar to the forms of the cloth in the still life and to its out of focus design. The comparison is perhaps more interesting for the fact that the landscape is based on a drawing of Van Gogh's which I decided to make into a painting.
Sometimes it seems as if I am just painting one picture, it appears in many forms, but it's the same picture underneath the various manifestations.
Well, something like that probably is happening. The "picture" I'm painting is the structure of my own thoughts.
Delacroix said so wisely that the artist paints the self. It is not narcissism to do so, but necessity.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Especially when it's your kid



It's always wonderful discovering a new instance of bold drawing. It's especially wonderful when the example comes from my kid. The drawing illustrated here arose from a process that I've observed before in my daughter: she sees a subject that is "too hard," "too complicated." In her simplication of the "hard" subject, she discovers a beautiful and elegant economy of means.
It's a wonderful lesson. Learn to think like a child. See the world anew.

Asparagus and Carrots


Here's a novel way to measure your ingredients!