10 March 05
Daffodil Summer
The daffodils in our back yard are already getting past their peak. The one I’ve sketched here is the same one Pica was sketching a few days ago; it lasted quite well with a little water in the vase outside.
9 March 05
Exploring negative space
Kurt over at A Blog is a Happening has an interesting piece today on erasure. He was working on a charcoal portrait last night and he started with a darkened sheet and erased highlights to form the image. It’s an interesting piece on the challenge of self-knowledge.
My own exploration this morning of the negative spaces between these rose leaves is prompting thoughts about edges, and how edges can more exciting than essence (or actually define the essence). Nothing about this is original, but it’s satisfying to come to these realizations by means of graphite.
(The ground squirrels outside my window are very conscious of edges; for the males, most of their life is happening on the edge just now, as they guard it with their lives. I’m starting to see wounds: it’s a bloody business.)
And then a look at the Incomplete Manifesto by Bruce Mau makes me question my work, and how I often opt for a safe design because I’m in a hurry. Best not, I think. Tarry in the negative spaces a bit more… Get a bit bloody. I think… our life depends on it.
3 March 05
Foreshortenings
Working through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has got me to a point where I need to study foreshortening. I can look at Old Masters like Piero della Francesca and Michelangelo but the most contemporary exaggerated foreshortening I can think of is Frodo reaching up to grab the Ring, an image so iconic that it now gets referred to in other films.
So I put on the DVD this evening and paused at this spot. It’s one of the most difficult things to draw: the human hand, foreshortened. It’s a conjuring trick to get your hand to draw what your eye sees but what your brain is telling you can’t possibly be. I think I’ll be using the DVD player a lot for this exercise; it’s easier than getting a tame model to pose for 20 minutes at a stretch, over and over…
I might post one if I manage to get one that’s not horrible…
28 February 05
On Gallotannate Inks
From Evan Lindquist, an artist and printmaker at Arkansas State University, comes this set of pages about making gallotannate or iron gall inks. The best of these inks begin with a solution derived from oak galls which is then mixed with an iron salt. The resulting solution will then darken over time on the paper as it oxidizes.
Lindquist provides many old recipes for these inks, which are now out of favor. There is even a standard for govenment writing ink, suitable for use in post offices, issued by the National Bureau of Standards, U.S. Department of Commerce, in 1936.
19 February 05
Water, Water Everywhere
Today I submitted my final assignments for my online Roman Majuscules class. One of them was to render on watercolor paper the lines from the Ancient Mariner (and a description of our current weather); the other was to do in gouache a quote of our choice.
My choice for this was the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno, since I’ll be having lunch with an old friend and Dante fanatic on Monday.
18 February 05
The Somerville Gates
Residents of the Boston area who are unable to make it down to New York to view Christo’s The Gates should know that there is an art installation of similar note closer to home. And this time there’s a cat.
6 February 05
3 February 05
Canson Replies!
On December 14 I sent a letter of complaint to Canson paper in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
Today I got a reply along with six different gorgeous pads of Canson Mi-Teints. Apparently the pad of layout bond I was using was an aberration (I suspected as much—their paper is usually fabulous). In addition, I was suspected of being a former Crane Paper sales representative (I’m not, though my step-sister-in-law’s partner is related to the Crane Paper people, I’m not sure in what way). In any event I was asked to consider that if I were interested in submitting “some of your projects for consideration for display at Canson trade shows we would certainly welcome this.”
Not bad for a morning’s fulmination which was far more fun than anything else… make art, not war, should be my new motto.
31 January 05
Soup Precursors
We had vegetable and garbanzo bean soup this evening, into which went these kohlrabis.
30 January 05
Catching the Moment
Last night we watched Le Mystre Picasso (1956) by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Picasso created 20 images—paintings and drawings in ink on a transparent surface—that were captured on film on the reverse side. It was an extraordinary performance. Picasso’s gestural faces, for instance, are breathtaking, as are the calves of middle-aged men and pointy toes of bullfighters. He worked very quickly but would just as quickly rework something that he called “trs mauvais”—a complex beach scene complete with water-skier and couple in moonlight which still had the original strong compositional lines he started with. Most of the works were destroyed after the making of the film.
I first saw Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the late seventies. It is a huge, impressive painting, and it was given appropriate attention and weight and pomp. Franco had already died by then and you knew this painting was heading back to Madrid; through who knows what legal wrangles, it finally did get its own entire gallery (the Thyssen-Bornemisa, now housed in much larger digs across the Paseo del Prado), shown along with sketches displayed in a darkened antechamber, people whispering about it, the forbidden suddenly in their midst.
Numenius and I saw it in December 2003 at the new Reina Sofa museum in Madrid, across the boulevard from the Prado. It seems to need more elbow room than it has. There was a huge crowd around it. For all this, the painting has lost none of its searing power. These gestures: he must have painted them thousands if not millions of times, the eye with tears, the fat four fingers, the pointed howling tongue. They return again and again in his work.
Guernica speaks against the horrors of war. Against Franco’s, against Hitler’s, against all war. Against the senseless brutality that is the result, always, of war.
Who will paint the horrors of this one? Who will write the book? Who will compose the music? Or do the din of it all and the fatigue make such a painting, now, an impossibility?