marks and meaning

The pen-and-pencil exercise of abstracting the alphabet into marks has led to further thought about marks and their meaning. A mark can be a simple as a short stroke of a pencil, but marks are also combinations of these small units that take on more and more meaning the further they are developed. Marks become symbols, and symbols may be letters that form words that hold meaning, or symbols may be nonverbal shapes with meanings that may be universal or may be culture-specific.  Even marks that convey no such meaning affect the space in which they are made: The first mark on a blank surface immediately affects that surface and how it is perceived and how later marks are made in relation to it.  The energy of a mark, its direction, its placement, its color, its thickness, length, movement -- these all affect the viewer at either a conscious or a subconscious level.

What does a viewer see in the marks of an abstract painting?  If a mark represents (deliberately or not) a cultural symbol, it will convey a certain message.  If it looks like a letter from the viewer's language, other associations will be made.  If it is neither of these, the viewer might react to its visual effect on the overall painting, for example, the extent to which it activates the surface.  Or the mark might evoke an emotional reaction due to its own characteristics.  The sharpness of a zigzag might connote anger, while a wavy line might represent calm.  A classic mark-making exercise is to put down with no forethought one's reaction to "emotion" words such as anger, calm, fury, joy, sad, happy, and so forth.  This is one way to develop a type of "language" of one's own.  Yet how any given viewer will interpret that personal language will depend on his or her own background, culture, education, emotional makeup.

Marks that do not create actual words present information on a nonverbal level, yet many people seem to react by trying to translate them into words, to name them.  Of course, many people react to abstract art by trying to see representations in it.  The more interesting question, to me, is how all this affects the marks that I put down.  If my paintings are to be nonrepresentational, my marks cannot describe an object. But the point of my rather pedantic approach here reflects my realization that not only do I have a choice about what marks to put down, my choice will affect how others see my paintings. Then the question becomes, what do I want to convey?  Which leads back to the question addressed in a recent post:  What is my intention?  Yikes.

I could just paint for myself and not care how others interpret it.  But I want my art to communicate to others, which means that I must consider both my intention and how my marks convey it.

The image above is a 6" x 12" panel that had been lost to too many layers of paint.  It was one of the first pieces that I picked up on Saturday and dared to mark.

scribbles

My "art deco" alphabet from Friday pulls me in whenever I look at it.  The gestures and movements are very natural to me, and in a sense it represents a language of mine.  Looking around my studio, I saw the 12" x 12" panel-in-progress at left, with the large additive gestures already in place (I had applied them with an oil stick some time back).  But as Meg and I spent our last hour together in the studio, I realized that I was still uncomfortable both with making marks by scratching out (in contrast to adding on top), and with being more free-form in mark-making (which I like to call scribbling or doodling).  I always have tended to get too repetitive or take the scribbling too far, ending with a result that I didn't like.

Bolstered by Meg's presence, and already familiar with her expertise in mark-making, I wanted to work on this before she left.  For her part, Meg had laid down enough cold wax layers on a couple of panels to want to try some scratching out, and was happy to demonstrate.  As I watched her, she described her action as controlling the pressure and speed of her tool, but otherwise being free in her marks.

The concept of combining control of the tool with freedom of movement clicked for me.  I think perhaps in the past I've either controlled everything or let everything go.  I worked for a while exploring the dynamics of balancing the two, and was excited to see what happened.  The smaller scratches on the panel above were my first attempt, and I went on to several other panels that have been languishing on the walls.  There is more work to do here, but I feel as though I've had a breakthrough.  Huzzah!

alphabets

My sister-in-law, Meg, has been visiting from her home on the northern California coast.  Coming from redwood forests and restless ocean, the open horizon and sandstone stasis of our southern Utah country provide a stimulating contrast in environment.  Meg is in a transitional period artwise, after a career of working primarily in glass (see some of her work at Gualala Arts).  The two of us have wanted to try working together for a long time, and this seemed a perfect moment to do so, in the pause between the retreat of winter and the constant activity of summer.

This is our third and final day together in the studio, and we both feel as though we been in an intensive workshop, with the accompanying exhilaration and exhaustion.  In addition to just sharing each other’s artistic energy, we each had some purposes: I wanted to benefit from Meg’s work in drawing, and Meg wanted to open up her boundaries by exploring some cold wax and color work with me.  We spent the afternoons on the latter, of which more later.

In the mornings we have focused on producing mini-sketches and designs based on the English alphabet.  My first alphabet, shown at right, was simply an exercise in remembering mark-making with pencil and paper, using the lower-case alphabet as a source (interestingly, Meg chose to work with upper-case letters...hmm).  My second alphabet, shown above, carried with it the assignment to have each "letter" touch all four sides of its space.  I love the way that each set of five letters became a row.  I also am interested to see how instinctively art-deco-ish this second series turned out to be.  I wonder what the next alphabet will look like?  I have done this type of exercise before, in classes and workshops, but it has always fallen off the radar here at home, where I focus too much on the production of finished paintings and not enough on nurturing my own artistic growth.  It has been rewarding to spend this time with pencil on paper. 

So, in addition to three days of wonderful company and companionship, creativity and exploration outside our comfort zones, I am also left with a resolve to take some time, if not each day, then at least once a week, to do something in the studio other cold wax work.  Meg and I have accepted a homework assignment -- to take one of the other’s letters and work up a larger next iteration, due back to each other in a week -- in an attempt to enhance the transition for each of us once we are back home.

marks and symbols

I have for some time been trying to develop a graphic language of my own that I  -- and, I hope, others -- will recognize as mine.  This has been a sporadic effort, and I have given relatively little quality attention to it, partly because when I do address the issue, I am quickly frustrated.

Recently, thinking about the desire that my work reflect my Colorado Plateau surroundings, I wondered if petroglyph and pictograph art might provide the key to a language of my own.  I pulled out our books on the topic, and enthusiastically began marking paintings with Anasazi designs. Many of these are abstract symbols of the natural world -- sun, moon, earth -- that I thought might blend well with my work.  The example at left, from Jim Beard's website Anasazis.com, gives the flavor of such designs.  After a few experiments, however, I decided that they don't work.  Or, rather, the designs do, but I am not comfortable with superficially pulling meaningful marks from a culture that is not my own.  Even though I intend no harm, and even try to honor the designs, it seems almost offensive to me, to simply lift  whole images into my work.  Also, it feels as I imagine it would feel to copy Chinese characters onto my paintings:  I don't understand fully their meaning, and they are not my voice.

So, my quest continues.  Georgia O'Keeffe famously quoted Arthur Wesley Dow's admonition to "fill space in a beautiful way" as she painted, and it is also one of my maxims.  This requires, however, a spiritual and/or philosophical integrity that goes beyond just the aesthetics of the painting, and I learned something about myself in my brief winter experiment with Native American symbolism.  Back to the hard bench: I have to develop my own marks, not borrow someone else's, no matter how powerful and beautiful they may be.

time and travel

I am writing this post from Cuenca, Spain, on the last day of a two-week vacation exploring the southeastern provinces of the country (Valencia and Murcia).  Cuenca, a World Heritage Site, is a beautiful town, with a university in the modern city at the foot of the historic walled town, which occupies a high promontory at the junction of two rivers.  It is also a town very conscious of the visual arts, in large part due to a group of mostly Spanish artists who gathered here in the 1960's and whose work is present in various museums and foundations in the city.

I visited the Museo de Arte Abstracto, and discovered some new favorite painters and paintings. One of these is Fernando Zóbel, whose "Jardín Seco" appears above. Zóbel's work resonated with me, because I find in it many of the tensions that I like to address in my own work.  For example, several of his paintings are organic, almost gestural, flights of paint (indeed reminiscent of birds), yet the same canvas will present a ruler-straight thin line of color at some spot, or a quite mechanical grid of thin black lines that peek thorough from the canvas.  This push-pull of organic and mechanical is one of the tensions that I love.

I sense that there may have been a bit of a shift in my thinking about my own work, that the model inside my head has gained nuances.  I won't really know until I get home and get back to work.  The subtleties of Zóbel's work are inspiring, and the beauty of the art in the Museo de Arte Abstracto renews my faith in my own vision.  I return home more firmly than ever an abstract painter.

Intention

Two of my friends and mentors have recently spoken about intention, one in the context of cello, the other in the context of painting.  That two such messages found me, so close together, gave me food for thought.

The idea of intention in music is to decide what you want to say before you play a piece.  The concept felt foreign to me, and it goes against my natural tendency.  I've always thought my role as the player was to render what the composer called for.  This may come from my choral past: as part of an ensemble, one does not try to leave an individual mark; rather, the purpose is to blend.  And blending is also part of my nature, for any number of reasons, and the idea that *I* should decide what to express when playing a piece of music reverses my role. Rather than the musician/player serving the music/composer,  the music is the vehicle for the self-expression of the player.  This calls for more assertiveness than I am used to.

In her blog post of February 20th, Rebecca Crowell discussed Form and Content and the dynamics and interaction of the two in art.  Ideally, the two are in balance. In reality, one may frequently lead the way over the other.  The challenge is then to create the balance within the given piece (see Rebecca's wonderful essay to explore this further).

Content involves intention, and part of the dynamics of creating a painting is to use Form (the materials) to express the intention. Once again, my thoughts ground to a halt at this concept.  Not that I didn't understand it, I just couldn't identify my intention.  I have defined my general intention in painting: As in music, it is to create beauty.  But to have a specific intention for a specific painting -- especially in abstract work, which doesn't rely on the scenery or object in front of one's eyes -- that gives me pause.  I guess I have been Form-driven, playing with dynamics of color, value, composition, to create spatial beauty.  Maybe that is a kind of intention, but I think that there is more to it than that.  Even in an abstract piece, there needs to be Content.  The dilemma for me is the same at the easel as at the cello: how do I decide what my intention is?  Once I have done that, I think that Form will conform (no pun intended) to it in a fairly straightforward way.

Clearly there is more to think about and say in this regard.

time passing

I was somewhat surprised when I looked at this blog today and realized that nearly a month has passed since I last wrote.  I have been painting, a lot, but I have not been writing.  I sometimes create posts in my head while I work, but I haven´t been sitting down to write them out.

In part this is because the painting has been going well; in part it is because life outside the studio has been busy; in part it is due to an annual late-winter funk that I tend to fall into.  Still, I like to celebrate good paint flow as well as to address concerns about it not flowing, and I regret not having recorded some of the insights that I have had over the past weeks.  If indeed they are still lodging somewhere in my head, as I believe they may be, I can´t access them at will.  I should jot down at least brief notes as ideas occur to me, for later reference.

This coming week is necessarily a production week, since I have to get at least a half dozen pieces to the gallery here in Torrey before we leave on a trip next Monday.  Gallery 24 will open for the season while we are gone. I have close to thirty panels under way (most of them small), but only a few that I am willing to let out the door.  Still,  I don´t need many, and I will finish up quite a few more soon after our return.  Perhaps during that time -- and as I approach the one-year anniversary of this online journal -- I will improve my habits of testifying to the creative process that I experience.  Such, at least, is my resolve.