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.

subdividing the concept

Thanks to my notes and Rebecca's handouts from the workshop in Mineral Point, plus several sessions of just sitting and contemplating my works-in-progress in the studio, I begin to see a next step in this journey of mine. It is to move beyond -- or, rather, into -- my concept of the landscape and geology of the Colorado Plateau and Capitol Reef. To subdivide it, as it were -- after all, no one painting could possibly capture it all anyway --  and look at each painting as an expression of some aspect of this place. At the same time, I'd like this subdivision of the big picture to move away from the pictorial into the conceptual. The "some aspect" that I address should be not river but space, not cliff but solitude. That is, I should shift the focus and respond to each painting in terms of what it is beginning to say, conceptually or emotionally, rather than what it is beginning to look like. This is the point at which to get away from form and into conceptual content. This follows an idea described by Rebecca in her talk about visual thinking (where conscious thought and intuitive response meet); it also follows a precept from David Dornan all those years ago: to tell a story, to paint human emotions.

So: after initial random splotches to mess up the bare gesso, and a few layers of contrasting colors and random textures and marks, and a few more layers inspired by an aerial or landscape composition, enough paint will be mindfully built up that I can begin to move to a conclusion that brings the painting together to say something. At this point, with reference once again to Free Play, I want to create not with form and technique but through them, using them to express some meaningful idea in an abstract way. What that will be, I still don't know, but that is my next task with my current set of close-to-finished pieces.

This whole train of thought was triggered in part by my signing and titling the one painting that was essentially completed in Mineral Point. Storm, Bryce Canyon, above, was never deliberately intended to be anything specific, but as I look at it, that title is my verbal response to it. It evokes feeling of the chaos and uneasiness of that area southwest from here, which is subjected to some of the harshest weather in the region.

moving along

I have had an energetic and productive week in the studio, augmented by helping a friend evaluate her progress in watercolor painting. I have no great results to report, however; I seem to be muddling along, though I sense that I am moving forward.

The main reason for this post is to make a visual record of the latest iteration of the three panels that I mentioned earlier in the week. "Houses" has become "Goosenecks" (at left) after an aerial photo of the famous gooseneck curves on the San Juan river inspired a few new layers. It now presents a stuck-in-the-middle challenge: it has quite a bit of paint built up, and I'm not sure where to take it. I am tempted to mess it up, but it seems to be too far along to add much more paint. I like where it is, but where is it going? I'm not painting the Goosenecks, I am painting ... what?

 "Zen" has received some added marks, plus some transparent layers. I also felt the need to add a structural note through a stripe down its left side. Like "Goosenecks", I'm not sure where to take this next. Again, I like what is happening, but I'm not sure where it should go. My thoughts from last month about getting unstuck from the middle should be helpful here, and I think my next activity will be to return to my notes from Wisconsin and step back from painting for a day or two.

Finally, "Wingate" (below) has morphed into "Trees", since I turned it sideways and impulsively added some copper leaf dancing across the top. Like the other two pieces, this is fun, but not finished.  Where do I go now? Hah!

refining the concept

Three panels in the studio are clamoring for attention:  "Houses" and ""Zen"(both mentioned in previous posts), plus "Wingate", one of the pieces I began at the Mineral Point workshop.  All the workshop pieces arrived safely last Thursday, and have joined the many other panels on my studio walls. The near chaos of having so many pieces on display prompted me to rearrange and clean the studio, so that even though there are still too many panels around, the small ones are tucked behind the door, and the larger pieces are those that I see when I walk in.
Although I haven't been working exactly systematically since getting home from Wisconsin, I have been consistently pursuing the vision that I conceived there of rendering the country in which I live by abstracting the geologic processes and formations using cold wax techniques. A day away from the studio yesterday led to me waking up early this morning with that vision on my mind, and multiple ideas of things to try. This is what happened every day during the trip, and I welcomed the renewed focus.
All three of these pieces are currently in that "middle" zone of having developed in interesting ways but still lacking any sense of completion. It is time for re-vision work on all of them, and the pre-dawn clarity of the early morning brought inspiration for each. The first two have had a couple of layers of "aerial" treatment, with patterns and textures inspired by photos and maps. "Wingate" is one step further along, with some initial portrayal of layers of rock as we see them (the image above is the piece as it currently exists). All three are the result of the process I conceived in Mineral Point, and are confirmations of it. In each, initial random chaotic layers gave way to loose compositions based on actual aerial views provided by maps and photos, and are now ready for revision into "portrait" views of the layers of Capitol Reef.

aerial perspective

This morning for the first time I tried using aerial photographs for compositional inspiration. I have an old file of photos cut from various magazines that chronicle the Colorado Plateau and its many formations. I have occasionally wondered why I was collecting these, but they are exactly what I am looking for now. They have, of course, been themselves composed by their creators, but I don't use them literally. Rather, some aspect provides an impetus for a mark or a gesture. Each photo that I used this morning spoke to me in one way or another, as portrayals of this stunning landscape and the geology that created it. And each provided many possibilities for gesture, whether it was the curve of a river, the outline of a mesa, or the step-like ledges of a cliffside.

The composition seen here is based on a close-up photo of a sandstone formation, carved by the wind into graceful ridges and ravines. I like the almost Zen-like mood that resulted. This is the fourth or fifth layer on the panel, and I am thinking that, rather than just cover it up with something different, I will let the feel of it guide me with later layers. The challenge will be not to let it get "precious" and feel that I can't change it.  Still, it has such a lovely flow that it may just carry itself along to completion.