penmanship

mindfulness drawing, ballpoint pen, notebook 6×5 inches

The Youtube algorithm brought me a tutorial on cursive, not sure why, but there it was and the penmanship in the intro screen was marvelous. I made a note to play that video later, during which time I wrote along with the presenter. I don’t know what she says in the video because I didn’t actually listen. I had music playing on another channel, so I just watched and wrote in unison — which is rather tricky since you can’t look at her writing and your own at the same time. If I were keen on getting the letter shapes just like hers, I’d have to stop the video periodically. Note to self.

I was doing the video more for fun than instruction. However, one viewing has greatly improved my handwriting. The key is slowing down. In her introduction she makes lots of scribbles and tests out different pens. Exactly the same sort of scribbling is great for drawing and for testing pens that you intend to use for drawing.

Flashback, a few days earlier, I had made some scribble drawings such as the one above to finish off the ink in a pen that was running out. Turns out the pen had much more ink than I knew and like the Energizer Bunny, just kept going and going. I was drawing without looking — actually I was drawing while reading something. It was a lark. Restful, aimless making of lines while looking elsewhere. The drawing at the top turned out to hold some interest. I even dropped a photo of it into the computer so I could add digital color and more lines.

digital alterations to ballpoint pen mindfulness, scribble drawing

Everything reminds me of Monet lately. I look into these ballpoint pen clouds and see bits of Giverny. When I did the penmanship exercises a few days later, I didn’t make the connection between the warm-up scribble session at the video’s beginning and my “mindfulness” drawings (there were others!). But later still I was working on a first version of a painting I saw in a dream. The “dream” painting consists of mostly dark blues and greens in brushstrokes formed as loopy scribbles. The penmanship video and my mindfulness exercise flowed together without my awareness. And both contributed to the painting just as silently and stealthily.

Dream painting, version one, acrylic on canvas, 24×30 inches by Aletha Kuschan

My mind went out for a walk and brought back curiosities, and I was the last to know. It’s odd how things connect together without one’s conscious notice. The left hemisphere doesn’t know what the right hemisphere is doing. The penmanship video not only improved my cursive, it contributed something to the gestures in the painting. The scribbles in the painting represent in curling, coiling brushstrokes the edges of thousands of leaves of foliage in the dark green painting of my dream.

handwriting sample, neater and much nicer than my usual

Practicality has been kinder to me than to the artist of Hawthorne’s story. Maybe it’s because my stealth cognition hides many of the real causes of my ideas from me, preferring to manage those sorts of things itself. Practicality thus cooperates with art, and things just flow together. If you’d like to let your subconscious play tricks on you, too, or if you just want to improve your writing, here’s the link.

living room

Flower Wall (Birds and Flowers), acrylic 48 inches square, in a lovely setting

I place my paintings in beautiful settings through the magic of photographic editing, getting them ready for their natural migration into other settings far beyond the studio. Paintings are ideas — they are ideas about how the world looks. And ideas have their own migrations. Like the migrations of birds or butterflies, ideas like to fly. They move when they are ready.

Until that apt moment, it’s fun to imagine the future places where the pictures will live — once they are released into the wild — into the wide world. Their internet travels are just one fluttering of wings.

Perhaps we learned to think of art as inhabiting museums. Museums are wonderful. But most art lives somewhere else. The great art of the past lives on museum walls, but much of the wonderful art of our time lives in homes. The museum idea of art does not accord with the experiences of life. When you want a living art of the present, you have to look beyond the museums. Perhaps at some future time, the genuine art of our era will find its place in public collections, but for the present it needs to find its home with inspired collectors.

Thanks to the internet, I am aware of the wonderful art of many living artists. In some cases, I know their art directly — having seen it in person. In other cases, I know it only from reproductions. It’s this beautiful art of the living moment that I want — not trends and clinical pretentions. Remind me of the life I am living. Bring that life into the rooms I inhabit. That’s what I want from art.

simply living, seeing

drawing of a jar filled with rocks

Certain kinds of beauty come when the artist is a raw beginner.  Sometimes I’ve pulled out old drawings and appreciate anew the memories they evoke.  I wish I had drawn more.  Would that I had drawn tirelessly.  Lack of confidence trips up too many young artists.  But the drawings I made when I knew comparatively nothing have a raw, innocent candor.  And now I find I seek the beginner’s mind.

I began drawing some years ago using my left hand (I’m right-handed).  I wanted to get the awkwardness back, wanted it to slow me down and trip me up, and make me think harder about where my hand’s lines would go.  I have loved the wavy line that is the consequence.  The two kinds of drawings, right and left, seem to have slightly different personalities.  It’s like finding your alter ego.  There you are long lost twin! Anything to recapture that sense of the beginning.

Gazing at life itself, let go of preconceived ideas about what drawing should be or how it should look.  Sometimes be an explorer of the uncharted territory. The uncharted world can include something as mundane as a jar of rocks. Rocks are ancient. You’re never older than a rock.

You are living your life for the first time.  It’s all new.  Even when you’re old, you’ve never been old before. When you are old, the world is still new. No matter your age life is still life. Life is there to behold and even available to capture with a bold, adventurous, possibly a carefree line.

Climbing

drawing for the painting Butterfly Emblem

Ever have one of those days when you find yourself in a wonderful mood and you don’t know why? I am feeling that way right now. The weather is fine outdoors. The sun shines and renders all the autumn colors magnificent. You can glance in any direction in Mother Nature’s world and see beauty.

The soup pot’s on the stove. I was chopping carrots earlier today and marveling at how amazing the rich orange color of a carrot is. Need to build some painting around the carrot color. (Add that mentally to the “to do” list.)

Some days my heart climbs. It does so of its own volition. I am as it seems an observer of my own happiness. It’s a great frame of mind to encounter. It’s as though the sun is shining “in here” as well as “out there.” I am glad. And I’m glad that I’m glad.

Hope you find good emotional weather — wherever you are.

What makes something beautiful?

detail of an abstract drawing

To find beauty, I think we begin by recognizing it. Beauty is something that is pre-existent. It exists both “out there” and “in here.” Nature creates beauty. We discern it. I would liken it to sonar or radar. You scan your surroundings (basically the landscape of your life), and there’s a “ping” that certain perceptions evoke. Something attracts. (Some things repel too.) That initial sense you have of finding something lovely, that was there even before you were conditioned to life in a society, that is nature’s product. You first experienced it as a child.

How does one go about finding beautiful forms? Someday soon I’m going to schedule a day during which I do nothing but search for beauty from morning to night. I’ll be like that famous old Greek who shouted “eureka.” (If you see a lady wandering around a city poking her head into shrubbery or staring into the sky, flushing out birds and exclaiming “Eureka!” — I guess you’ll know that’s me.

In the meantime I can be crazy for beauty on a small scale. I drew the green shape above that sits next to a patch of sky blue — violet colored line, green uneven coloring with neocolor crayon, and afterwards I was struck by the beauty of the gesture. (Other people don’t have to think it’s beautiful.) What I am wondering though for myself, and perhaps you have a version of this you can relate to, is: what makes a gesture beautiful?

Another World

Paper Horse Still Life with Fruit and Flowers

Art is an interpretation of things.  Whenever we draw from life we confront one particular idea of reality — that highly acute, clear world (thanks to optometry) with sharp edges and infinity of focus.  Our eyes light upon different things and the mind blends them into one continuous idea of what’s “out there.” 

In the arts of drawing and painting, by contrast, the world exists in two dimensions, and it has a finite size.  Maybe it’s just 11 1/4 x 8/7/16 inches like Raphael’s Saint George and the Dragon at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.  Maybe it’s 1.50 x 1.97 meters like a Monet’s Nympheas at the Musee Marmottan

Butterfly Emblem

However big or small it is, a picture represents a little world in itself — very much in finite and usually rectangular terms.  So the artist always needs to be aware of the differences between the world as he sees it before his eyes, versus the world as it exists in pictorial imagination.  Then too there’s the difference between the artist’s intention and the picture itself, which sometimes takes on a life of its own.

And the artist needs to be alive to the qualities of the medium used to make the picture as well.  Not all media are equal to all tasks.  Letting the picture travel to those ideas that the medium itself suggests (by virtue of its unique qualities) is one way that artists learn to invent ideas.  Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention.  Sometimes the medium limits what is possible and thereby creates the forms the picture will take.

Mountain Collage

And one needn’t resist this — Because the character of the medium is part of the visible reality that is so beautiful.