kometes

Ink and watercolor on foam board/c. 9.5" x 8.75"

Webster's says that the Greek word for comet is kometes, comets of course those sparkling sky travelers with a tail that precedes them or so I've come to understand.  Hard to imagine the object essentially moving into or toward what appears to the eye as "exhaust", if you will.  Certainly it is the flare/flair of light that attracts the attention and the cone shaped light like the product of combustion for those with feet on the ground.
So my lines curve and shoot about from my hand; my hand directs the brush as if the movement were the "product" of my mind.  In fact, sometimes it feels like I, me, my mind, is simply the observer and I am chasing the process and seeing the result while it forms as I rush into it. 
The lines or rays flowing from her eye, like the brilliant waves of light from a comet, herald her arrival.

Making pictures

18" x 24"/pastel and charcoal on heavy Bee paper

Clearly there was thought put into this but as I look at it the calculations disappear from my memory.  I think that's a good sign that something ethereal, transient yet strong was involved in the process of assembly.  How lucky for me!  At least that's how I look at it.  Making pictures likely has something to do with trying to hold on to time or maybe more precisely to a moment....which is time, I know but when I think of "time" it is usually in chunks so I'm trying to differentiate, be precise.  Photographs can hold the future off or hold the past too I suppose but I don't often put a camera in my hand when picture making. Maybe it is something about it's precision...even if the image is manipulated and looks distorted, out of focus, untrue to reality or abstracted in some way.  The required calculations are made on a level of consciousness that as a mark maker I don't have to be involved with. Or so I'm thinking.  Maybe photographers have totally uncalibrated results, too? 
I wonder if the exercise of comparing hand rendered art to photographic art is worthwhile?  Certainly, I think, the immediacy of a gesture with charcoal, pencil or pastel in hand and the resulting mark(s) is different than the capture/impression of pixels...it seems almost that the difference is like a vacuum cleaner to a broom.  The camera sucks in all the available stuff; the broom is guided as it collects.  Interesting comment from someone who knows nothing about photography, huh?
I like trying to figure stuff out but maybe like some, try working at it with less than an adequate amount of information! 
I do know from looking at this piece that I got myself perfectly.  If the lens were pointed directly at me it couldn't have captured a better representation.

Charcoal and oil

While speaking with an artist acquaintance last week the subject of working in a series became part of our conversation.  For whatever reason I have chosen to work on individual pieces with a rather random, perhaps whimsical approach.  The fellow I was speaking with offered a suggestion that I think I might try to implement.  He offered that if I were to choose a subject and purchase a sufficient quantity of paper or canvas I'd have an easier time and an opportunity for efficiency in the work.  He offered that many gallery directors prefer to exhibit a series of related works.  That certainly sounded reasonable.  So, I think I am going to work on that.  Maybe I'll start with 25-30 or so sheets of exceptional paper, lots of really good charcoal and a few soft pastel sticks.  

Work in Progress

For me, a massive oil.  I keep looking and wondering if I can do it.  36" x 48"; maybe a half-dozen times to the canvas, including almost eight hours yesterday....and I'm absolutely unsure of where I am headed with it.  So far, not too frustrating.  Not sure about it but I'm "listening" and for the most part enjoying the search for balance and tempo.

New Art

Small piece I did two weeks ago using gouache on foam board. The colors don't reproduce too well; I scanned it right on the glass....no photo...and the copy still disappoints, me at least. Anyway, I like the way the paint slides on this surface, dries in puddles so that it is more and less transparent along the brush-path. This is like impulse, reflex, spontaneous line and blob-making that really just catches arm movement and some conscious idea of where to push or lift or drag the brush and what colors to place next to others. Fun and fast!

Faces and figures

I like the way it sometimes feels that artwork can suspend time, but alas it really only records it. That's better actually because with time one can grow, positive change can occur, knowledge can be increased.

Recent figures

Each of these sketches was done quickly using watercolor and/or gouache and at least in one instance graphite. Something like three to five minute poses and the work was done on mat board.

When I look at them they strike me as efforts to order lines, curves and volumes. In that process there seems to be a dividend paid (at least it seems to me that one is paid!). Each piece seems to have a "weight", a certain personality, something projected or withheld by the subject which, again, it seems to me transcends the conscious effort to organize lines, volume, etc. Art making is exciting that way!

Style and medium

Well, it may not be a crisis but somehow I'd like to get past a nagging, dragging concern I have about where to go with my work, which I seem to have saddled myself with recently....like within the last day or so. Maybe just this posted examination will help me! So, I'm thinking... "maybe it should be oils only(with a BIG brush); maybe just ink, maybe just water media or maybe I should try acrylic again?" Or maybe I need to write a cohesive artist's statement and go from there. After all, I will not know what my art is about if I can't explain it to myself, will I? What about explaining it to someone else? "Well, thanks for asking: yes I like beautiful images of things........and.....the paint is colorful and I enjoy the............mess!"

Do the paintings have to have a meaning I'm conscious of as I make them? Do I have to have a plan, a completely thought-out idea for an image before I begin? Can I understand all of what there is to understand about the work as I do it and move from idea to idea, canvas to paper and back again? This is what has attached itself to me and I can't seem to flick it away!

I like what I like (and choose to reference in my work) and sometimes I put what I like through a filter (me) and scramble the reference just as I feel like scrambling it. Today I was working on a small (9"x12") oil picture of three trees......I've painted these trees a half dozen times, I think and never tire of them. The image was realist/impressionist with dream like qualities when I went back to it after a day's absence. But I couldn't figure the thing out...how to make it cohesive, consistent, interesting and not dead in the sense that the eye would fall and stay in one place. It seemed to me that my thoughtful, realist hand was winning out over my not-thinking abstracting/expressionist one and that was detracting from what could be a more satisfying piece. I think: "the realist approach is a fall back, one to be avoided at all costs" but then I'm confronted with a question of perspective and I want expressionist depth everyone can see and appreciate as perspective. For some reason I think that is difficult to accomplish but I want to make something like that!

But what are they about, these pictures I make? I look at copies of images I've done and wonder: "learning a skill, looking into my head"? Certain subjects are repeated but not so much the technique, the style, the brush stroke, color or lines. It is as if the work for me is really just experimental...not in the sense of a never seen before style, not like Cubism was new and maybe experimental but more in a "use all the known styles/techniques" kind of way.

Maybe that's it?! Maybe I really want to invent something new! As if.............!!!!

So, here are some images, including one of the interior of my work space, which illustrate, to some degree, the dilemma.