making a statement

An artist's statement is essentially a sales tool, an essay written to provide viewers an insight or two into the artist's life and work. But it can also be a mechanism for artistic self-reflection, as encouraged by Ariane Goodwin in her guide Writing the Artist Statement: Revealing the Spirit of Your Work. Business coach Molly Gordon offers a link to an excerpt that includes a series of exercises designed to help the artist articulate his or her creative vision.

My friend Phyllis (www.phyllislasche.com/) came home with me to Torrey from the Oil & Cold Wax workshop in Telluride, and among other things, we went through some exercises from Goodwin and elsewhere and compared notes. Doing so reinforced my conclusion from the workshop that my primary challenge these days is in the area of meaning rather than in the areas of materials or methods, because my answers tended to be literal and process-oriented (makes sense -- that is what I do well) rather than meaning-oriented.  It's not that I don't put meaning into my work, but rather that I can't/don't articulate it.  And it is not as important that I articulate it in an artist statement as it is that I articulate it to myself, so that I can start to work consciously from a deeper space within me.

This parallels the challenge that I have, to interpret a mood or emotion in paint. I process what I paint through my literal, verbal mind, and I have a hard time letting that go and making a direct link from feeling to canvas. I'm not sure the latter is necessary, but I sense that it is something that I should explore. I am curious about it, for one thing.

The image above is a very unfinished piece from the workshop, but it shows some initial attempts at unthinking spontaneity. The exposed surfaces were created without verbally processing what I was doing. I plan to do more of the same.

old friends

The past six months have been a time of travel (Spain, Bluff, Arizona), gardening, meditation, Buddhist study, and cello.  It has not been a time of painting, though I have not particularly avoided the studio.  Rather, other things have come first, and it has felt fine.

But a four-day workshop in oil and cold wax with Rebecca Crowell here in Telluride, CO, has brought me back to active painting and to this blog. These have been full days, immersed in the painting process and soaking up the companionship of fellow artists. It is a workshop similar to that which I attended last year in Wisconsin (see posts from August 2011), with much the same objective content, but with the different dynamics of a different group of participants, and a different impact on me because I am in a different place. As the workshop winds down, I want to summarize a few of the thoughts it has brought to mind, if for no other reason than to reinforce and clarify them for use as I return home.

I have pages of notes that I can already see fall into roughly three categories: lists of supplies, websites, and other resources; techniques of paint application and removal; and conceptual/theoretical concerns.  Put more succinctly: materials, methods, and meaning.

Materials and methods were very valuable to learn about or review during the workshop, but I come away from the week with a pretty clear conclusion that it is the third category that is my current challenge.  I know in general what meaning I want my work to contain: My muse is always the Colorado Plateau. This has been clear since I began painting, and I had a breakthrough moment in Wisconsin last summer when I could finally articulate it and its relationship to abstraction and cold wax.  But I need to go further; I need to parse out from that broad concept the details to put into my work.  Talking with Rebecca and with my friend Phyllis, who also came to the workshop, I think I see a way to approach this task. As the weeks and months ahead unfold, I will use this space to record the adventure.

composition and pattern

Two days in Bluff provided a wealth of visual input. The first day was cloudy and blustery, and while the rest of the group bundled up and went hiking, I drove up a broad canyon and spent a lovely time creating a pencil sketch of  a big butte from the warmth of my car. One of the joys of drawing is the directness with which one's visual perception is rendered onto paper. The butte was a feast for the eyes (see left), there was no sign of human civilization within sight, and the tranquility of the scene was occasionally enhanced by a soaring hawk or a group of deer heading for the creek in front of me. I was fully engaged with the task at hand, and at peace with myself and the world.  While the result is nothing to treasure, it was the process rather than the product that I sought.

The second day was warmer and much sunnier, and this time I accompanied the others on a morning hike to one of the many Anasazi ruins to be found in the area. Late in the afternoon, three of us took a walk along the San Juan river to view a panel of pictographs and petroglyphs left behind by long-vanished inhabitants. The quality of light was exquisite, and I satisfied my artistic impulses with many photographs of patterns and textures in the cliffs and on the ground. The images will provide visual inspiration, as well as remind me of the beauty of the day and the place, when I am back in the studio. The image at the right is one of my favorites.


Bluff has always been a special place to me,  There is something about its particular combination of river, buttes, and sky that speaks to my soul. I feel at home, and at the same time am filled with a longing to create, to render what I see and feel. I have painted there before, and will no doubt do so again.

thinking small

My (relatively) large surfaces have begun to reward my persistence with the development of character and visual interest.  This past week I have been able to deny the urge to move quickly and make large haphazard gestures, and instead to slow down and consider small things.  I have divided and subdivided, blurred lines and marks, blended and separated, scratched and impressed. It seems to be a process of alternately focusing in and pulling away, and it almost develops a rhythm of its own.  It is both challenging and satisfying, and although it requires patience, it is also absorbing.


Part of what is making this shift possible is an accompanying desire to draw.  This revival of an itch that I haven't felt in a couple of years was neither deliberately sought nor cultivated, and I have yet to pick up my sketchbook. But the impulse is real and is helping my focus to sharpen and my marks to become more deliberate.  Sketching, or drawing, requires an interaction with the object that is being drawn, while the abstract work that I have been doing requires an interaction with the surface that is developing, without an external referential object.  But every drawing that is created feeds the repertoire of marks and images that eventually becomes a language for abstract composition.  It also helps create a habit of focusing, something that I have been trying to develop amid all the abstraction.


The current desire to draw began in the days when I was not visiting the studio, and I did sketch a bit around the house.  Then it was reinforced by reading Chasing Matisse, a delightful book recounting the journeys of an older artist (a group in which I count myself) from Little Rock, AR, who took a year to live in Europe with his wife, retracing the movements of Matisse throughout his life, visiting the places where he worked and the homes in which he lived.  In addition to providing details about Matisse, the book considers artistic questions regarding both how to see and how to create, and also ponders the sanity of selling one's stateside home and moving to Europe. The book is quite well written, and its themes resonate with me.  The author draws constantly as he moves around (some sketches are scattered throughout the book), and that whetted my appetite for drawing as well as provided insight into how to integrate sketching into my daily life.  (No, I haven't done so yet, but I will be taking my sketchbook along with me when we head down to Bluff on a midwinter getaway the day after tomorrow.)

rediscovering the joy

Today provided one of those "in the groove" studio sessions that make all the days of slogging worthwhile.  On days like today, things work.  Instinct, tempered by experience, takes over.  Curiosity replaces habit, experimentation overcomes fear, the possibility of what may come mitigates judgment of what is.


It has been a pleasure, over the past week, to have the energy to be present in the studio even for short periods of time.  Rather than fret about being unproductive (a mindset that I need to get rid of anyway), I was just grateful to be there.  I am focusing on seven larger pieces that I am going to finish before I work on anything else. Today I got entranced by clouding over three of them with whitish mixtures, then using rags and scrapers to reveal lower layers.  Contrasts emerged: of dark and light, of vertical and horizontal, of straight and curved, of mechanical and organic.  On all three panels, these are intermediate layers, and creating them served the significant purpose of getting past being stuck, of getting past layers that had become too precious to "mess up" but too premature to consider as final iterations.


The image above is one of the three.  All are from the "aerial" series that I began last fall (see posts from last September), and have been hanging untouched since October.  The length of time elapsed somehow has allowed me to break from the representational versions into pure abstraction, to keep the compositional aspects that I like but push forward toward something else. I won't know what that is until I get there, but I like the way it is developing.

reassessment

A couple of months of ill health have pulled me away from the studio and indeed from even thinking much about artistic matters.  Feeling better, I am again approaching my cold-wax work, but I find myself distanced from it, not in the sense that my works-in-progress appear unfamiliar or disappointing, but rather that I find myself asking Big Questions, such as, what is it that I want to do here?  Why am I painting?


I have painted some this week, but it has been intuitive and without direction while I tested my stamina.  I do love the process and can spend hours with it, but what is my end product?  I started out -- and have stated it quite publicly -- wanting to convey to other people my responses to the land and geography in which I live.  But, at least at the moment, I am tired of trying.  I'm sick of painting cliffs, abstractly or otherwise.  (Yet sandstone formations still resonate with me.)


Perhaps this negative reaction to my stated artistic purpose is because much of last year I spent exploring a more internal world through music and meditation.  My attempts to explore it also in the studio have been feeble at best, and not satisfying.


Big questions.  If I don't think about art when I am sick, am I really an artist?  Wouldn't I always be thinking about it if I were?  Wouldn't I spend my spare time reading art books or sketching instead of doing crossword puzzles?  Is music more my milieu than painting?  What is it that I am pushing away here?  I don't mind painting for myself rather than for the public (as has been suggested to me), but that doesn't answer the question, it just changes it to, what do I want to say to myself?


There is so much to think through, and it is a sign of my improving health that the thoughts are beginning to accumulate faster than I can deal with them.  Hence this post, and probably the next few, to try to begin to sort through them.

I don't think that the answer is to go back to representational painting.  In some ways that is an easy out: Although representational painting unquestionably has its challenges, I find it to have a certain superficiality that doesn't speak to me and a process that is in a sense too easy, too mechanical.  (I'm sure I offend thousands of representational painters here, but I don't mean to; I am speaking purely subjectively.)  Besides, I love working in cold wax, which pulls toward the abstract by its very nature.


I've had the thought that I want to paint from small things, but on large surfaces.  I am inspired by the detail of a piece of sandstone, of a leaf, of a riverbed.  I've done this in cold wax on small panels, but I want to go bigger, and I'm not sure how.  This, at least, is a positive thought and one that provides forward motion.  What a relief to consider it!  But it does not address the BQ's, and although I may pursue it, the larger issues remain.  Also, what about the larger sense of the country, the space of the sky, the stability of the land, that I love so much?  Can I convey that through details?


Too many questions, too long a post.  To be continued....

dance

 I watched a PBS program on Bill T Jones and his choreography and modern dance troupe last night, and once again felt that visceral connection to the dance process and form.  I feel it in my bones and muscles.  I was pulled right back into the years when I danced, vivid memories of the feel of the pieces I choreographed both in my body and in my mind.  I was fearless when I danced, I had no self-consciousness or nerves.  I have never felt so completely one with an art form since.

I know I can never fully get back into dance.   Age and location are two huge barriers; even if I could get back into enough physical shape, I would have to turn my life upside down to live where I could be in the dance world.  So this morning I turned the question “how can I dance again?” into “how can I incorporate dance into the two forms of art that I am practicing – cello and painting?”.  Good question.