Still life of Bottles and Lemons on a Table, neopastel on Strathmore paper
The darkness and strong contrasts of this drawing came as a surprise when I found it during my housekeeping. I am not sure what was going on with the motif. Perhaps I was drawing at night under the yellow light of the table lamp? That seems the most likely explanation. The drawing is so different from others that I’ve been finding and seems to point in a different direction. That difference makes me wonder if this drawing might be a good one to turn into painting. These drawings I made represent the objects at close to life size — sometimes a bit smaller — but only optically so. The things feel like they are actual size. I feel like that makes it natural to put them into painting. They already have the sense of things that could be grasped.
There’s no question of making any of it real. The set up is long gone. The drawing has a feeling of illustration and exaggeration in it. It tends a bit toward fauvisme. So those are the qualities that it would carry into painting if I make it into a painting, which I might do. I am finding so many drawings that I want to paint that choosing which to do first will be challenging. The objects in the pictures are becoming as beguiling to me as the real objects were. I am feeling a great pictorial longing, being very eager to put down lines, shapes and colors using some aromatic oil paint.
The picture is an odd fish among my drawings, but I like it.
Oranges in a Blue Dish on a Red Cloth, neopastel on Strathmore paper
One of the drawings that I recently reworked is this one above of oranges sitting in a white and blue dish. I thoroughly like it now, so much so that I’d like to do a painted version of it as soon as I get the chance. It’s the perfect size for a small painting, and in paint I think I can have even more fun playing around with the warm colors of the red cloth and the cool contrast of the blue and white plate. This drawing was okay as a study when I found it, and I liked its unfinish. When I began adding to it, I did so aware that I might spoil what I liked about it. I’m glad that I ignored that feeling. Because not only is the drawing more full, it now offers better suggestions of how it might transform to a painting.
The colors in this drawing are ones I associate with Matisse, and there’s a particular motif that I have been wanting to explore for a long time. This little orange and rose-colored picture takes me a bit closer to this long-sought idea.
Seeing this drawing sitting on the table when I finished working on it was such a boost. I feel like someone who has stumbled into treasure. I feel like a kid at school. (I liked school a lot.) The old drawings are finding new life.
Going through stacks of drawings, I find lots of drawings that were unfinished. They may have been studies. I stopped the drawing when I did for some reason now lost to memory. Some of the drawings have not been worth keeping, others offer ideas. I look at them and think of ways that I might continue working on them. The drawing above is one such drawing, and I have already made additions to it. I confess that I liked the drawing better before I made the changes, but then too I did not think the earlier version was right or even worth keeping. Reworking it and finding that it’s still not right is just more indication to continue experimenting with it.
As anyone can clearly see, it is just a little still life of a cup on a yellow surface. There is no reason not to continue fiddling with it to see how that yellow surface might be made more interesting, or how the cup might become more substantial or a better reflector of light — or any other quality as comes to mind. The great virtue of the old drawings is that they offer such great expansive opportunity for just playing around with images. There’s nothing to lose and possibly something to gain. Since I paint still life, playing around with the studies is a path to learning new skills.
It’s never been my habit to work without reference to a set up or a photo or something that I could see — other than the drawing itself. But now with these found drawings I am learning how to draw from imagination. They are the perfect vehicle for learning this skill that’s new-to-me. Sometimes artists are afraid to take a drawing forward, afraid of spoiling it. But this drawing would have ended up in the rubbish at the curb if it were not so useful right now for learning to do some new ideas. It’s not that it was a bad drawing. It just wasn’t a good one, not good enough to hold onto when one is streamlining one’s life. But this drawing was excellent for playing around, particularly because it has so much white in it, and any fan of Pierre Bonnard knows how important white was in the artist’s pictures.
I am getting new lessons in light and imagination, all the consequence of some simple housekeeping.
Sunflowers, False Sunflowers? watercolor on hotpress paper
The nature of reality seems like something we should think about. In the area of religion, philosophy or theoretical physics it’s easy to see how one would get things wrong. The probability of error seems like it would be nearly one-hundred percent which might make the contemplation of reality seem most impractical. And yet, while we surely get much wrong about the comprehensive view, we probably do get some of the local aspects right. We ought at least to give deep consideration to what we inwardly believe — since we do already believe it. The belief, in that respect, would be already established fact — by which I mean fact of a personal nature, a characteristic habit of thought, perhaps even a bias. If you already think certain ideas and those ideas are influencing your actions, you might as well have as clear a picture as possible of what those ideas are.
All the world’s great religions urge us to seek beyond the commonplace — or sometimes paradoxically they urge us — all in the same breath — to find reality inside the commonplace. It sounds to me like good advice. We are inside this reality though all too often one can take his aliveness for granted. How many times do we sort of forget that we are alive? Experience can seem dull. I have a headache. I am worried about something. I am annoyed at someone. Maybe it’s worse than these comparative trivialities. Perhaps I face a grave crisis and am feeling the crisis keenly (often in the stomach, one feels such fears). These experiences are all dulling facts, but in their midst, I am still moving through miracles with each step I take. I feel like I should wake up to that realization. I feel it for myself, and it seems in general like a good thing to do. Give us this day our daily bread. I want to be nourished by life. I want to be, as Henry James said in his preface to Portrait of a Lady, someone on whom nothing is lost. I want to be gratefully aware of my surroundings. If God is hidden inside the surroundings, I want to find that out.
Personally, I think it’s good to inquire about the nature of things. I think it would be more valuable to be mistaken than to never inquire. The act of wondering has purpose. Some philosophers (theologians, gurus, what-have-you) think that God expresses self-awareness through the universe. Carl Jung was one such thinker. It’s a lovely idea. I don’t know how we would know whether or not it’s true, but it’s lovely to contemplate. I think of God seeing the world through human eyes and multifaceted dragonfly eyes too — forms of sight that are radically different — as stunning and mind-boggling. A squirrel peered at me a little while ago from a branch near my window. He looked at me and I looked at him. I wonder what he saw looking at me. And I wonder what God would see looking through both our minds as squirrel and I gaze at each other.
It is wonderful to imagine the aliveness of everything. It would be amazing to hold such awareness in one’s heart while drawing. To be describing the aliveness of a moment. It’s a lovely aspiration, don’t you think? Plato’s Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. I would not go so far as that. For who knows when the sleeper may awaken? I just assert that the contemplation of reality is good, and even to get the drawing wrong is better than to never attempt. And whatever we learn gets shaped by direct experience so we’re wise to look deeply into our own lives and not be swayed too much by the conditioning of trend and culture — not when life is right here — right at our fingertips, not when the aroma of flowers is available to one’s nose, and when the photons are dancing right in front of our eyes.
Based on the date I must have been either in my last year of high school or my first year of college. Based on the subject, I’m guessing it was college and the drawings are probably part of an assignment. It’s funny seeing the drawing now because I still draw flowers in essentially the same way. I could have drawn these flowers last week. All the petals have an edge. I looked for the contour edges and drew them. The repetition might have been part of the assignment — impossible to know. But I still do that too. I almost always draw everything several times, whenever I can. It’s what my piano teacher wanted me to do at the instrument — oops. At least I followed his instructions on the drawing page. In art sometimes you learn about your personality through such discoveries. In art you make your habits of thought visible.
Seeing the painting is like being transported back in time. I remember sitting outside this house doing the watercolor during a trip when I wandered around the town where my parents lived and drew scenes that caught my interest. I feel as though I could go back to their home and find them there again, returning home just in time for lunch. My father would have the television playing noisily in the background. The air is warm. Family members have perhaps dropped by. I might find my aunt sitting there with my parents telling the local news. The house I drew had a great elegance. You see houses like this sometimes in small towns, ones whose aesthetic sensibilities seem to transcend their setting — though the entire town was quite lovely. This particular home stood out as a particular jewel in a beautiful setting.
I painted it in full summer or else we’d find a luxuriance of flowers. In early spring the whole town has azaleas blooming in every yard. Or that’s how it was back then. I haven’t visited the town in a long time. In rich memory, I see a town of the past, knowing nothing of its present tense.
I have never learned perspective. It’s too much like math. I had no training of significance. I drew this house from pure love. I put the lines where they seemed to belong and followed with color. Love can take you a long distance in art whenever you let yourself truly feel it. Note to self: seek to imbue your art more with love.
I am in the process of reorganizing my household and studio. It’s long overdue. I am giving the trash collectors a run for their money now and getting frequent workouts as I haul contractor bags of miscellany out to the curb. While much of my labor involves going through junk, I am also revisiting old paintings and drawings and trying to put things into order. Some old studies have turned up that feel like beginnings. They seem like pictures that I should continue and finish. It’s strange, but it’s almost as though I had painted them for this season when I have better resources for taking them forward. Perhaps I painted them for my future self in complete obliviousness that I was doing so. The painting above is one that I don’t remember making. Some portions of the panel are still untouched. I don’t know what the set up was, other than that it was flowers. I wasn’t even totally sure which side was up, except for the little brown flower at the upper left which seems clearly to indicate the top since the flower doesn’t make any sense when the panel is turned in any other direction. So, this painting accords well with various experiments I made in abstraction last autumn. Perhaps some of that experience will come to its aid now.
I have always loved Pierre Bonnard’s painting from the earliest I ever saw examples of it, and yet I have never quite allowed myself the freedom to paint in the sort of chaos that characterizes many of his paintings. This panel is already chaotic so it offers a chance to explore an adding on of blobs of colors for their own sakes. I guess if I work on it, it can be what some artists call an intuitive painting. I have no set up as reference, no photograph, no anything. There is nothing to lose by adding colors willy nilly as the mood arises, and there’s possibility of gain. The panel is sturdy. The paint surface has stayed very nice from however long the picture has been stored. It has reemerged in a felicitous way — though I need to make some more progress in my household cleanup before I’ll have time to resume painting in a full way. Here’s how keeping a blog can be useful in jogging one’s memory. I have this entry to remind me that I thought that continuing work on this painting would be a good thing.
Marigolds in the Garden enclosed by Stones, watercolor on coldpress paper
Joy has an expansive effect, just as fear has a contracting and paralyzing effect. You operate most to your own benefit to be receptive to joy around you. Even if you do not presently feel joy, you can open yourself to its appearance. You can look for it. And when you feel a sense of joy, you can use joy to expand your perception of things that surround you. There is always more beauty present than we know. It’s particularly wise of artists to look for and seek this excess of beauty. Learning by whatever measure to depict some of the beauty that reality provides so abundantly is a good artistic discipline. It gives training in both awareness and freedom.
Along with seeking beauty, I believe there’s a kind of intuition you have inside that can assist knowing how to characterize the subject you see. You notice visual impressions in a certain sequence that is personal. Your eye falls on first this element and then another. Sometimes simply to follow this natural progression can open the motif to your understanding. This kind of innate learning works particularly well when you allow yourself to make mistakes and as readily allow yourself to correct them once they are noticed. Even the definition of what constitutes a mistake is personal. You are looking at a scene and making sense of it according to your own perception. You are the one experiencing it, and there is no one inside your head but you. Using your own judgement based upon your experiences inclusive of this moment, you notice this or that line or color and decide to place it into the unfolding pictorial scene.
When I sat outdoors and painted these marigolds decades ago on a lovely, warm summer day, I was aware of Winslow Homer’s watercolors which I tried to imitate. He enclosed shapes in certain ways. He used color with controlled directness (so it has seemed to me). In imitating him, it’s important to note that I was using my idea of what Homer did: a certain approach to forms, a certain priority in placing veils of watercolor. What he actually did is not available for me to know. In any sort of imitation, we are still relying on our own notions. It was my idea of Homer that I accessed. I’m not sure I understood it that way at the time, but that’s of no consequence. We can only imitate what we notice. There is much about Homer that failed to register. I’ll say that the marigolds themselves came in to compensate for aspects of Homer’s technique that were beyond my ken.
My father had planted the hardy flowers and arranged the stone border around them. Sitting on the ground to paint them under the sun, the warmth of the air caused the paper to dry quickly, which was nice. It was easy to paint over passages with glazes in the warm sunlight. I tried to get the sense of the leaves casting shadows and the light diffusing over the round rock forms. I let the bluish tinge of the plant’s leaves be exaggerated and to connect with cool parts of the shadows on the rocks. There’s a profusion of things going on in any patch of earth, and I let myself get tangled in the complexity of the imagery like an ant navigating the garden jungle. Biting off more than I could chew has been a bugaboo for me across time. I still do it, and sometimes it comes back to bite me. But certainly from time to time, one does well to let complexity reign and to be unafraid to enter the massive incident that perception displays to your sight. It worked well in this watercolor, I think. I bit off a lot, but it turned out to be just the right amount because I stayed with it and just painted in a natural way expecting the best and enjoying the experience.
Painting is good meditation. When you put yourself thoroughly inside the moment and resolve to stay put there and to record what you experience, you become somewhat invisible, and the motif takes over. Your ideas can flow into the imagery much better when you refrain from introducing artificial obstacles. Then artist and motif are together in an expression like music. This experience is a true form of joy. No doubt it is entirely possible no matter what the weather, but we certainly are keenly aware of heightened perceptions when Nature’s joy is most strongly expressed as on a beautiful and perfect day.
Sometimes a painting is primarily about color. And sometimes it is only about color. I started out with drawing when I painted this still life, but over time the color took over. These colors are not necessarily harmonious. They’re partly so. But they’re also quirky and arbitrary. I’d love to know how to make them operate more decoratively. For that I would have to know why I made various passages the way I did. And I don’t have that information.
Sometimes a picture just takes on a life of its own. To say so is a bit of a cliché. But clichés do have their element of truth. So often when I paint I feel like I know exactly what I intend, at least on the scale of particular choices. These colors in their particularity, in contrast to that sense of knowing what I want, these colors just arrived. Differences between a warm and cool green, or one more tinged with yellow-orange and another with blues, one warm like certain plants in sunlight and the other like a pale mint green in icy iridescent light, the differences don’t connect with appearance. They are more like moods, arbitrary moods that just mean whatever it is they mean. The painting looks good on the wall. Hanging in a room it can be simply decorative. I don’t know how to make it more decorative, but the degree of decoration present seems to be enough. The objects are identifiable even if they aren’t real. The character of the light doesn’t matter and instead the things can just be things, and the colors can be colors.
The edge of the table moving across the canvas is all that holds it together, though the flowers are, I suppose, anchored by the upper edge. I am trying to learn something from Pierre Bonnard. Somehow this painting moves toward that vision, and yet some aspect of it disturbs me and unsettles me. I don’t allow myself the same freedom that my hero enjoyed.
That’s not being fair to myself, perhaps. I need to learn to let myself possess this freedom that I admire so much in Bonnard.
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Flowers in a Vase Pink and Orange, oil on canvas, in a bright setting.
I found a room to illustrate how the painting looks on the wall. I think I found the right sort of room: the painting looks like it’s in its natural habitat.
Flowers on a Table with a Floral Cloth, oil on paper (large)
Painting artificial flowers means that you can re-portray the same exact flowers in the same arrangement multiple times. And that’s what I did. The same flowers appeared in a set up in my home studio, years ago, when I had a cat. I had to take the still life apart after each painting session and reposition the objects back into relationships as closely as I could manage whenever I resumed working. Patterns in the cloth, positions of objects, shifted a bit from session to session, but I managed to average out the differences. At least, that’s what I suppose I did. I really just kept painting. The large canvas was okay to leave in the cat zone. It was painted using acrylic paints, so it dried almost instantly. The flowers were the most consistent element because I hid them in a closet. Had I left the set up where the cat could find it, she would surely have knocked everything on the floor after careful inspection because that’s what cats do.
The version of the painting above was painted elsewhere, and it’s an oil painting on paper. In retrospect, I wish I’d put it on canvas. But at the time I treated it as almost just an exercise. I have no idea why I did that. But the painting has survived in good condition, nonetheless. It’s more complicated to frame than it would be otherwise. By the time I painted it, the cat was gone, and the studio where I worked was outside my home.
There are at least two other related works. One falls between the two mentioned and a fourth was painted last, the final one — unless I do “large bouquet of flowers against a black background” again, which I might. It’s entirely possible. It seems to be a recurring dream. Various incidental details change. In each version the ancillary objects are different, and the cloths change. By version four the flowers were different too, but it’s amazing how much of the flower arrangement was preserved even moving the bouquet from one location to another. When you repetitively paint the same things in more or less the same relationships, I think you’ve ventured deep into motif territory. Now, for an analyst to tell me what it all means.
Fantabulous Koi 