mindfulness

A long and luxurious studio session yesterday afternoon followed a meaningful and satisfying cello practice in the morning. It was the first day that I had really plunged into either activity with attention and patience since we returned from Spain.  In both cases, I actively resisted the impulse to leap in and accomplish something. Instead, I allowed myself to relax and interact with each moment of what was happening.

While I was away, I was aware of a sense of distance and perspective from both activities, and a sense of seeing them -- and myself within them  -- from almost a third-party point of view.  Jerome and I talked about being anthropologist-observers of, rather than participants in, the cultures we were visiting.  I also took on that role when thinking about home, painting, and cello.  I kept that sense of observer yesterday, just long enough to change the dynamic of both the studio session and the music session.  The result, in both cases, was a mindfulness that let me ignore the mindset that pushes for production and encourage the mindset that stays in the moment and engages with what is going on.  It is much more rewarding, and I need to cultivate it more.  Perhaps that is a project for this winter: to not worry about forward progress in cello, or producing finished paintings, and just be in each moment with each activity, and let things evolve.

In the studio yesterday, I brought out a painting that needed some line work.  For some reason, the piece made me think of a ruined castle that we visited in Gormaz, Spain (above).  Caught by the memory, I picked up a ceramics needle tool and let my hand travel the road up the high hill on which the castle stood, then delineate the ruins and the fields in the valley below.  Then I put down more paint.  I ended up working on the piece for nearly an hour, lost in remembered sensations from that day a few weeks ago.  I didn't even think about how the painting might (or might not) turn out.

In cello practice, I focused on intonation, the exact sound of the notes played, their purity and their relationship to each another.  Again, time went by without my noticing.  I was completely caught up in the task at hand, and I heard nuances that I had never heard before.  I explored minor thirds in various iterations without thinking about anything but the sounds.  I wasn't working on a piece, and I had no further goal at that moment than to play with as perfect intonation as I could achieve.

In both cases, the small accomplishments clearly will contribute to later goals, but I achieved what I did because I paid no thought to those larger aims, but focused on what was going on at the moment.  And, at the end of the day, the satisfaction was deep.

back home

This is our third day home from Spain, and jet lag and a nagging cold caught on the trip are giving me a sense of suspension in time and distance from daily routine.  I am in the midst of cleaning my studio, a ritual that I have used before, after an absence, to help get back into a productive mode.  Opening the door yesterday brought an interesting mixture of reactions as I re-engaged with current work.  I felt a strong desire to get rid of older pieces that are neither cold wax nor abstract.  My more recent pieces in cold wax just feel so right.  Not that I don't still have favorite past paintings -- and in a wide variety of styles! -- but those pieces hang in the house, while most of the old paintings in the studio are pieces that I never let out the door because I wasn't happy with them.  I'm still not, but rather than hang onto them to "fix" them, as has been my tendency in the past, I now just want them gone.  One exception, a piece for friends that is nearly done, a semi-abstract landscape of our valley.  I need to settle down to finishing that, and I've been avoiding it.  It pulls me into past methods and, to some extent, into past insecurities...the same reasons I am wanting to toss the old work.

I was somewhat surprised by feeling such a strong re-commitment to abstraction and to the cold wax process.  I wasn't aware that I was questioning it.  The reaction may have been strengthened by not getting into a statewide juried show to which I submitted an old piece, pre-cold wax and pre-abstract.  Creating that particular painting accomplished many things for me at the time, over two years ago now, but  as a finished piece it also never quite worked (and also has never sold).  I think that entering it into the show was partly to find out and decide its final worth.  Which is, that it was a great process piece, but wasn't my voice.  An image of "Three Sisters", 22"x24", is above.

Spain

I am writing from Girona, Catalonia, toward the end of our long-anticipated vacation in Spain.  Our time has been spent in Castilla y Leon, Aragon, and Catalonia, and while I haven't painted -- I ended up leaving even the pastels at home -- and my fingers are itching to get back to my studio, I know that I have been absorbing shapes and colors and impressions that will feed my work for some time to come.  In these regions, there is much that is ancient, from the Celtiberians through the Romans, the Visigoths, the Moors, and the Spaniards and Catalonians, to modern-day style and experimentation, and the art and architecture overlay each other in mostly complementary ways.  I will be interested myself to see what might come out of this once I am home.

new pastels

I accompanied Jerome and a pair of friends up the mountain today on a (for them) fly fishing expedition.  While they practiced casting, I rehearsed sketching using NuPastels on a Strathmore drawing pad, to see if the medium would suit me on our imminent trip to Spain.  (We leave on Wednesday, and I would not take my oils even if I could -- I'll have little chance to paint.)

I have sketched outdoors before, but always representationally. I wanted to see if I could, first, go abstract and, second, make the NuPastels work for me.  I sat by the stream, breathed in the fine autumn air, felt the sun falling across my shoulders, and absorbed the color palette around me.  I started with a shape or two from the hillside across the stream, then ignored the scene and painted.  I struggled with the colors so much that I didn't do much with composition.  But the point was to test the materials, not produce a painting.  (Pastels are work. Give me oils any day.)  In addition to test-driving the materials, I was able to explore the medium enough to be satisfied that it will do.  I am a novice at it, and "it ain't oil & cold wax", but it will do.  In fact, it will give me a chance to focus on some things like edges and value, two elements pretty much missing from my effort today.

autumn

Late September has brought beautiful fall weather, with mild temperatures during the day but enough cold at night to set off intense foliage colors -- especially on the 10,000-foot mountaintops that surround our valley.  The aspen leaves are brilliant gold, the mountain mahogany are rusty red, the native grasses are golden tan, and the sky is that brilliant blue that is a specialty of the Colorado Plateau.  We have taken a couple of "leaf peeper" drives over the last week, and I think that the intensity of those visual experiences has carried over into the studio.  I find myself reaching for the yellow-to-burgundy spectrum with blue contrasts, such as in the 8"x8" shown at left, which I finished yesterday.

I cherish the richness of our autumn colors, the more so because the coming winter will bleach out all foliage, and the red cliffs and blue sky will stand vigil over a gray and dull countryside. The vitality of these months will be frozen into stillness, and daily life will be less invigorating.  A more contemplative time.  For now, each day unfolds with a freshness and a crispness that invoke apple cider and pumpkin pie.

judging

I was one of four judges for a plein air competition (part of the Escalante Canyons Art Festival) today, and had the challenging but exhilarating job of evaluating other artists' work. The quartet worked well together, at a professional level, and I was proud to be part of the team. It was also an educational experience, since we had to verbalize the criteria we were using and then apply them. Put simply, we looked for basics (composition and rendition, as in use of color, value, brushwork, perspective, etc.) and also for a certain "plein air" quality, of freshness, I suppose, among other things.  At the end, we looked also for a more enigmatic quality, perhaps a uniqueness, a daring, a clear message. Something that made the work stand out beyond just good execution.  We worked hard, and it wasn't easy.  But we all felt rewarded by our efforts. In addition, for me, it was a good reminder that I need to apply some such criteria in evaluating my own work. Probably not perspective!  But certainly color, value, composition, brushwork, edges, etc., etc., etc.  This is one of those lists that lives in my head, as I mentioned a couple of posts ago, but it would be useful to drag it out with more salience than I usually do, and use it to try to look at my pieces objectively.

In a conversation with one of the other judges, who had questions about my own work, I also was reminded of one of my basic touchstones: Paint from something real.  This goes back to the summer that I studied with David Dornan up in Helper, UT.  After a winter of "going abstract", I presented him my work at the beginning of my stay, and his immediate reaction was that the paintings lacked a groundedness, that they came out of my head and went nowhere.  Paint something real, he said, meaning that even if I paint in a nonrepresentational manner, I need to ground myself in reality.  For me, this is entirely true, though I acknowledge that it wouldn't necessarily be so for someone else.  This has become one of my mantras, and especially when I lose the thread, or the momentum, this is one of the tenets to which I return.  I don't know why I don't keep it in my head at a consistently conscious level.

What did I do that summer?  I painted bricks, or rather, I created paintings of bricks. Still life's of bricks. Abstracts of bricks.  Studies of light on bricks.  The bricks provided a reality, and I learned what it meant to "paint from something real."  A representational example from that summer is shown above.

momentum

In the studio this morning for the first time in a couple of weeks, I had to wonder what had happened to the momentum of early August.  The easy answer is that it dissipated into the process of physical therapy for my wrist, which has been painful and distracting.  The more truthful answer is that I allowed myself the distraction of the wrist therapy, along with a variety of other distractions (like the kittens, at left).  So be it.

The more interesting question is how to regain that momentum.  I spent a couple of hours in the studio this morning, adding paint to some old pieces.  The process was familiar but I had a hard time regaining the mindset, as it were.  When I am working well, I have in the back of my mind a whole series of thoughts and concepts from which I can draw (no pun intended) as I move through the creative process.  The clearer the access to the mindset, the happier I am and the better I work.  This morning, there were cobwebs in my mind.

Fortunately, there are easy answers.  Keep showing up.  Read past journal posts to regain the mindset. Relax. Work. Play. Nurture the enthusiasm. Enjoy the journey.