The task I set for myself was to draw flowers, some being focused on line, others on masses. In the case of linear drawings such as the one above, some of the edges can be fused by drawing layers of crayon over other layers. The upper layers of crayon actually push the pigment below around a little bit, smearing it and softening the contour.
White Rose, neopastel on Canson pastel paper
In another drawing, I used neopastel crayons which are naturally soft and smearable, mixable like paint. Line is a feature, but the lines tend to be thicker unless you do something to the edge of the pastel since the sticks themselves are thick, and even as the tips fracture into facets from use, the lines still tend to be wide, though some options for creating spidery lines are possible as well. No spidery lines are found in this drawing, however — only the weave of the paper which stiples some of the passages of color in places where I didn’t rub the pigment into the paper.
Pink Rose, neocolor crayons
I went back and forth between line and masses. The crayons produce lines unless you break them and use the sides of the crayons. I wasn’t interested in breaking them so I sought ways to use their graphic features, like using hatching of parallel lines to create passages of color and using line to emphasize the tensile character of the flower’s stem, and also to let line separate the petals of the flower from each other.
Red Rose, neocolor crayon
When the character of the line is left plain, the jumble of lines going in different directions can make a drawing seem to have movement in it. This would not be a natural movement, in this case, but just a kind of arbitrary optical movement created by the technique. The flower is not swaying in a breeze; rather the whole image is buzzing from little lines whose short motions are like frequencies.
Pink and Blue, Rose and Leaves, neocolor
When you press the crayons firmly into the paper, they will create smooth passages if the paper (as here) is smooth. So this drawing of the rose became a drawing of distinct shapes. I colored inside the lines — I did indeed.
Sometimes I deliberately set out to draw a subject in different ways to think about the differences between line and mass, line and tone, differences in media, and explore what the medium seems inclined to do with ease and what features are coaxed out of a medium only with patience. The ideas available to explore are more than one’s thoughts of the moment can compass. There’s so much available to try or to do, and I know that half the kinds of things I might do don’t even occur to me as being possibilities. And always another drawing opens new prospects so when the drawing session ends, it’s with a bit of wistfulness.
After posting a blog every day for over 250 days — 258 to be exact — I have decided to dial the posts back to twice a week. Posting everyday was good for launching a new blog, but across time becomes a bit daunting also. I’ll be posting on Wednesdays and Sundays going forward.
I hope that everyone is having a lovely Easter Day and enjoying the much desired arrival of spring in its fulness.
I work on a large easel painting between tasks. Sometimes in idle moments I make drawings for it. I have drawn and redrawn this same stylized rose. Drawing and redrawing it becomes a meditation. I am beginning to learn the process of drawing it as one might memorize a piece of music. There’s a reference photo I use. The flower in the photo is less than an inch in size. The drawing is many, many times magnified. The flower in the painting won’t be realistic, but it won’t be stylized in the manner of the drawing either. And nothing requires me to use either these drawings or the photograph as the source for the flower. More ideas of the flower might arise from any source. So, the drawing doesn’t serve the purpose of refining the idea. It’s just a way of thinking about the painting when I am away from the easel. Or it’s even just a way of thinking about flowers — or a particular flower of a certain shape.
Materials shape how you think about something. I like the crisp lines of the first drawing, but I was wondering about the possible ways that you can soften the linear element when you’re using a linear medium. Crayons make lines. You can break them and draw using the crayon sides. But for the drawing above I let scribbling confuse the edges to produce a softer version. There are innumerable ways that one might use the drawing tool to make the edges less defined. These were idle drawings so to pursue the question perhaps I’ll make more idle drawings in some as yet undiscovered hour.
Drawing can be a form of meditation. What that means when the drawing is meditation could encompass many things. If you compare drawing with other forms of meditation, let’s say you’re considering attention to the breath as meditation, then drawing as meditation might focus upon watching the lines unfold without trying to make the drawing do anything in particular. You can draw in a purely watchful way in a descriptive mode as readily as in an abstract mode. Both ways of drawing can follow a “no gaining idea” when you are just drawing as a way of noticing the present moment.
Or, let’s compare it to an auditory meditation as when one listens to sounds — particularly to the beginning and the diminution of a meditation bell. You can watch the drawing as a visual corelative. It’s like the bell’s opposite since you start with the diminished image — beginning with just a single mark — and as the drawing progresses you have the fullness of the image, the production of all its colors and lines and tones, for as far as you’ve decided to take it.
Such drawings don’t need to be anything. They are just records of a period of time that you spent looking at something and putting down visual equivalents of certain perceptual notions. Making many such drawings becomes an extended meditation and you only discover where each one leads by taking up the task and following its course.
Little Creamer with Yellow Vase, drawing using neocolors
Little drawings like this one go straight to the heart of what I love about art. A thought process that’s so direct, one where you just gaze at things and make images of them, following your perception, makes me happy. What sort of art it is, I don’t know, but I like it. Drawing the shapes of objects, the colors that surround them, the features of their surfaces, the spaces between things, all these elements offer endless chances to be fascinated. This little drawing, for some reason, particularly pleases me. It feels cheerful. You can lose yourself in drawing, becoming united to whatever it is that you’re seeing. That said, only now I notice that the edge of the yellow vase is missing from behind the handle of the creamer. Where’d it go?
I am fairly certain I was looking at the things when I made the drawing. Still life objects are not known for wandering around on the table. And yet, the curved edge of the vase should appear in the area inside the pitcher’s handle. It’s not there. One’s mind plays the most curious tricks.
Yesterday evening after a busy day away from the house, I was eager to spend some time painting. I turn my attention to small paintings of late, because it’s so easy to start something and make solid progress in a fairly short time span. The little yellow cup and some grapes were the subjects for last night’s session. About midway through, I decided that I wasn’t crazy about the dull dark olive green of the background color and was thinking about changing the cloth in the setup to something more lively. Instead I decided to just add slight, related color variations into it, taking some cues from the cloth color, but changing it and exaggerating it according to the moment’s whim. Going forward with this little painting (one additional session), I plan to do more intuitive and imaginative alterations. Why study Bonnard all these years if you’re afraid to depart from literal interpretation of the setup?
I may not even use a setup. If I do I must reassemble it, arranging the items in a way that’s “good enough for jazz,” since I took the setup down after working. I didn’t have room to leave it up. There are already several little setups around the room. This would have been one too many. Anyway, I knew then that I wanted to take my cues from the painting itself in the next session and go forward more from memory and imagination. There may be some scraping of paint involved. It’s time to play around with the surface some. Why not?
I am already thinking about what the next setup should be. I have a pearly white, Chinese teapot that I haven’t painted in decades. It would be fun to look at it again. I am thinking about the white teapot on a violet-colored cloth with a lemon. The first setup happens in the mind. It’s fun to paint. It’s fun to think ahead too.
Blue Compotier with Fruit: Blue & Pink, oil on canvas panel
Last night I had the most wonderful painting session. Earlier I had watched some videos by Kelli Folsom, whose art I knew from Instagram. Her way of painting is a bit different from mine, but certain elements of the way she paints looked so fun and reminded me of how I approached painting when I first started painting because it’s very much an Impressionist vibe, and the Impressionist painters were my first loves. I particularly love the way she loads a brush and uses paint very expressively and freely. Just a little tweaking and her approach suits my color sensibilities. In fact with a little tweaking, that approach draws me closer to the Impressionists and to Bonnard (who I love). So, I chose the beloved blue compotier and did “my” version of Kelli’s approach. Where she tones the ground, I left the canvas white. For loose lay-in of drawing I used local colors instead of using the uniform brown she favors. What I chiefly took from her approach — besides her encouraging enthusiasm — was spontaneity and looseness. I was totally up for “pushing paint around.”
Blue Compotier with Fruit: Blue and Pink, detail with juicy paint
The contrast between thick and thin paint is one of the qualities that I like in the body of the compotier, where you see the fruit through the glass. It’s a look that I want to explore more in upcoming paintings. Boy, it’s wonderful to be painting again. You appreciate something more when you’ve been a way a little while. During my household reorganization I have been away from the easel for longer than I like. And it was great to happen upon Kelli’s videos just at a time when I appreciate an emotional boost. She has a wonderful, freeing and affirming attitude toward painting.
As a warm up to the little painting above, I first painted the blue compotier on a slightly larger canvas, one that I found during my household inventory. It was an unfinished painted sketch of the compotier cropped, on the far side of the canvas — depicting half the compotier. On the other side was a seashell, just indicated but not completely blocked in. And it looked like the seashell was only partly visible too. Not sure what I was going for by portraying the objects in parts, but it’s a nice canvas so I decided to continue with the compotier part and turn what was the seashell into curtain (since there is an actual curtain next to the compotier as it sits on the still life table at present). At the bottom edge, just a bit of a creamer appears — so it stays in that theme of partial portrayal of things. Well, perhaps Bonnard smiles….
Compotier half with White Curtain and Creamer, oil on canvas panel
This is found canvas. I really let myself enjoy some pushing of paint and loaded brushstrokes. This one I painted in natural light so I quit when the light faded. I may or may not return to it. It was a wonderful canvas to work on to get into a painterly frame of mind.
I have a big canvas on the easel that I nibble away on, an unfinished painting that I have decided to tackle and complete, and these small paintings with loaded brushwork are excellent practice for the big painting too since I’ve decided to let the large painting also venture into that territory that is really about paint. Paint as paint — beautiful juicy brushwork of paint. That’s where I want to go.
For weeks much of my time has been devoted to organizing stuff. Here’s a life lesson: don’t procrastinate about organization. Disorder catches up with you. Entropy. The universe. But, whatever.
Anyway, I still have tons to do to get my act together, but I have reached a point where I can resume painting. There’s a big flower painting on the easel. Even though I am shifting (in general) to small paintings for most of the time. I have works in progress that need resolution and the current large canvas is one of those. I have begun working on it, and some of the work goes flower-by-flower.
I work on the picture incrementally. So though I have to interrupt the session to do other things, I can very easily come back to the painting and pick up where I left off. Doesn’t that sound nice?
One of the flowers in that bouquet hangs apart and hovers over an empty rice bowl. It’s as though the two objects are in conversation somehow. The folds in the cloth seem to have an eerie aliveness too.
I love it when something anthropomorphic happens in a still life. It’s one of the possible effects that I love about the art of painting. Certain qualities of seeing make me want to paint pictures, and these sensibilities are ones that I hope resonate with the spectator too.
Happiness. Derive happiness from yourself, from a good day’s work, from the clearing that it makes in the fog that surrounds us.
Henri Matisse
Exactly what he said: “Bonheur. Tirer du bonheur de soi-même, d’une belle journée de travail, de l’éclaircie qu’elle a pu apporter dans le brouillard qui nous entoure.”
Ofttimes, for me, happiness comes through drawing a compotier. As you can see for yourself, I got the idea from Matisse. Is drawing a compotier the secret to happiness? You can only find out for yourself …
Compotier with three lemons, neopastel, study for a painting
The secret of happiness in life could also consist in reading — or in drawing someone reading — or in having a lovely table covered with all sorts of interesting objects — or in viewing a scene, any scene, arrayed in beautiful colors.
There are many paths to discovering the life in Life. Find yours.
The quality of French art that drew me to it, when I first fell in love with painting, is delicacy. French artists painted delicate subjects and sought out the particular optical qualities of lovely, transient, fragile things like flowers. What I ascribe to French art was more precisely characteristic of the Impressionists and certain artists who came before and after them, but once upon a time Impressionism was all the French art that I knew. I over generalized certain attributes. But that’s okay since it only made me more aware of the attributes, and later I found them in other artists and other traditions. I wanted to learn the sensibility myself — not sure by what name I called it. It was something I found in Manet’s painting.
detail of Manet’s Flowers in a Crystal Vase, (Roses, Oeillets, Pensees), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
I imitated Manet in a direct, unselfconscious way when I was a youth. I set up my still life and tried painting the subject in a way that corresponded to how I thought he did it. It’s a bit similar to how Manet himself imitated the Spanish artists he admired. Those early lessons formed the foundation of my painting practice. I have wandered off in different directions across time, but a certain magnetic core has always remained. I find myself wanting to come back home artistically and to rediscover some of the amazing sensitivity of the Impressionists’ vision.
Many art critics have misinterpreted the Impressionists’ art. The latter-day misinterpretations are usually sociological and involve projections of significance onto the things the Impressionists portrayed, making theirs an art of the bourgeoisie with critics deriding the paintings’ subjects and everything that critics dislike about middle class people, pretty girls and cats. When critics venture down that path, it’s amazing all stuff they don’t notice — both in the painting and in the world. In the painting, they miss seeing the background, which takes up a lot more canvas than you’d guess. Manet makes the background of the NGA flowers into a spatially non-specific silvery grey. An atmosphere surrounds the flowers, but we don’t really know where the flowers are in the room or in the world. It isolates the flowers and focuses attention upon them. But the silvery space has a vibrance of its own. It seems to have light in it. It’s like a net of light surrounding the flowers, revealing them. Critics point out that Manet was dying when he painted the last small flower paintings of his career, dying of syphilis. Knowing this fact does make the subject more poignant. However, if Manet had enjoyed perfect health, the painting would be no less lovely and equally as true in its beauty. Manet’s painting is a dialog between a man who sees things keenly and a vase of flowers. We don’t really need a backstory to interpret the picture for us for we all have our own experiences of days and flowers.
detail of the vase footing, grey ground, white highlights, blue-grey shadows, blue reflections, dark grey strengthening — strategic marks in Manet’s painting
When I looked at Manet’s painting, at the beginning, I wanted — and looking at them now, I want to know what he did — how he created the illusion. He has become so much a master of illusion in the NGA painting that he creates the glass vase out of air, as though forming it from a cloud. A few Zen-like marks placed strategically make a vase appear. It is solid. It holds the water for the flowers. Yet it’s hardly more than a few whispers. There’s little attempt to describe. The approach is poetic and evocative. There is no sociology. There is being. He touched a moment in time, stilled it and transferred it into paint where it hangs like a veil of light onto the canvas surface. The fragile flowers are, as of this writing, one hundred forty-one years old. That’s a long time for flowers to stay fresh.
Carnations and Roses in a Pickle Jar, detail, pastel on sanded paper, framed under museum glass
Though I became Manet’s student and remained his student (even after wandering visually away to study other artists’ works) I have my own personality. It’s like learning penmanship in school. You might have learned the Palmer method. Soon after learning a method, even while learning, our own personalities take possession. Handwriting is distinctive, personal. The same becomes true of drawing habits. What you notice, what you draw first, is intensely specific. No one else is inside your head but you. My flowers looked different from Manet’s flowers, too, because they are different. That day I drew them was unique. The lighting of the room, the things I chose to be the background, and the marks that became my calligraphy arose from particular bits of dark and light that formed the pattern on that jar at that moment.
Flowers in a Pickle Jar, pastel on sanded paper, framed under museum glass, 12.5×16.5 (image)
People can only see flowers in my picture. There’s no sociology to add since no one knows anything about me, which is good. So there are only flowers, a glass jar, an ochre surface, a violet background. My picture is ordinary. If I got some of Manet’s sensitivity, some element of the delicacy (as I hope I have) it hangs there in the things and their representation. Flowers are ordinary — though we certainly cherish them now! — now that spring is returned, and winter makes its exit. Light is ordinary, and so is glass. The magic, as it turns out, lies in awareness. In a way, even awareness is potentially ordinary since anyone can tap into it whenever he decides to do so. The miracle is there all the time. We only need eyes to see (or ears to hear — in the case of audible miracles).
close up of Manet’s way of painting the flowers in the National Gallery of Art picture.
If you’re an artist and want to learn more about painting flowers, letting Manet take you through the bouquet can provide a wealth of ideas for what to look for and how to place the paint to get the effect. But Manet’s flowers are not there for artists. They are fingers pointing at the moon teaching a relationship to have with life and with actual flowers. Gazing deeply into Manet’s imagery then venturing into the garden is going to change how you look at actual flowers. They offer you invitation to look at flowers a long time — to lengthen your gaze — to visit the flowers with your eyes as a bee visits to gather nectar. You can take a longer look at anything around you. We can get a deeper connection to our own lives. Wherever you are, you are surrounded by a miraculous reality that you can savor. Life has this delicacy that Manet observed and captured in his art. And while we are not all artists like Manet, we are all alive and the experience of these miracles is available to everyone.
I have a largish painting on the easel that I started way back when. And I pulled it out of the rack with the intention of finishing it at long last. I don’t know why it takes me such lengthy timespans to complete certain paintings when others move swiftly from beginning to completion. Learning to let go of the last remnants of procrastination has assumed top place on my list of things I want to change about work. I am determined to master this skill, that of finishing the image in a steady way. I want my practice of painting to move steadily, flowing like a stream.
In any case, I had determined to finish this particular painting even though I no longer knew where any of the supporting materials for it were located. Yet as chance would have it, I found a cache of drawings relating to the painting just a week or so ago as part of my gargantuan household reorganization, proving that there’s reward in doing inventory. The painting above is one of the most recent finds related to the painting in question. Fish Vase and Frog Teapot is a small study I did of two objects that appear in the big still life. Along with this painting, the bunch of drawings I found provide many useful aids. Then a photograph that I took of the set-up before it was dismantled reappeared as though by magic. And everything I need has arrived.
When events like this happen, it feels just as though life wants to help you out. The things come to me just as the proper time. I had planned to continue the painting anyway, from imagination if needed, but then these other materials showed up. Now I have many options with imagination still included in the mix. It’s a wonderful bit of luck.
Fantabulous Koi 