I try to work quickly with my very limited imaginative and artistic resources. My process: 1. Deface the white paper with some color of some sort (pastels, watercolor, etc.) 2. Add birds or something to animate the scene. 3. Stand back and accept whatever comes out. 4. Don’t fuss and then move on.
Between Heaven and Hell
Prometheus or Pieta
Falling Birds
When traveling, I leave my paints at home and use colored pencils more. As usual, I was up early, this time in Brunswick, Maine at my mother-in-law’s. After brewing coffee for everyone, I settle in her favorite chair and look out the windows to her well-designed garden. And then the doodling begins.
A scrap of art paper glued down suggested a fruit bowl filled with overripe persimmons. The mantis is vexed by the cloud of swarming fruit flies. She prefers purity.
(collage, watercolor, ink)
Some examples of 19th and 20th century Mingei style wares below.
It just occurred to me, the connection between a general fascination with utility poles and the criss-crossing grid of wires and thingamajigs and some abstract grids I’ve been drawing lately. I’m so glad that mystery is solved!
05-18-21-squirrel06
05-18-21-squirrel03
05-18-21-squirrel05
05-18-21-squirrel01
The world is filled with empty spaces. As you repeatedly divide space from the macro to the micro, the more uninhabited it becomes. Eventually, we are left with a vast infinity between atomic particles. We are more not-here than we are here.
A blank sheet of paper presents similar questions. It represents 100% possibility of containing everything known in the universe of human comprehension. A crayon mark or drop of pigment on the paper is like the initial milliseconds of the Big Bang. A flag has been planted into Chaos. Space has been addressed and a strategy will emerge and grow as the chaos slowly takes on a recognizable form. More drops and washes of color are added. Loose grid lines and organic forms further define (or limit) the universe that is forming.
And so it goes, this tension between abstraction and a representation of reality, until in my case usually, a reality forms. There is Up. There is Down. I see a Horizon and Depth. I see Light and Shadow. How predictable! But then I run from this predicament and add a bird, a figure that represents consciousness and a sense of history and even culture. This is the bird brain: an intersection of Mind and Mindlessness.
01-03-21b
01-12-21a
01-13-21a
01-17-21a
02-05-21a
Overnight, in the blink of an eye all the trees have been cut down, fires have come and the animals have fled. In the aftermath, squirrels return, disbelieving and bewildered. “Where is our home? Where will we sleep tonight? Shame on you!”
04-16-21a
06-06-20a
06-16-20b
06-26-20a
Blue and Yellow is an attractive color combination for me …and I don’t have a drop of Swedish blood in me. This color scheme is always fresh and balanced even when the core hues veer to an impure fringe. It suggests open vistas and the basic color experience of a day at the beach.
03-25-21b
03-25-21a
01-20-21b
01-01-21a
I guess you could say that there are three basic efforts in my current art practice. They look quite different to most viewers. Maybe it looks as if three different artists share my name and life:
1. working on children’s picture books to be published (my day job)
2. a daily practice of nature drawings of birds and landscapes (my in-between job)
3. imaginative doodles and paintings in sketchbooks (my wee hours of the night/early morning job)
I ask for your indulgence: It’s this third category I want to talk about. Lately, it’s become difficult to sustain in an energetic way because the cats interrupt my process. It’s 6:00 a.m. and they plaintively meow at the door. I’m afraid they’ll wake up the sleeping house so I let them in. And pretty soon, I’ve relinquished my rocking chair and watercolors to them and I go check email across the room. oon it’s time to go outside and draw the ducks (my other job).
The end result, right now, is a meandering knowledge of the importance of this pre-feline art-making. But I have a less precise sense of the direction it’s going in or why it goes at all. However, I do feel that these warm-up exercises are important. Significant insights and ideas have emerged in the past and I assume will in the future. Until then, we have odds and ends.
02-27-21a
02-28-21a
02-26-21a
02-17-21a
02-24-21a
Some snakes emerged from my dip pen this week. I think it’s worth knowing that the paper I’m drawing on is not traditional and it effects the types of lines I’m able to draw. And this affects what comes out of the pen.
So, this paper: when I order ink for my printer they always tuck in free sample packs of photo printing paper. It’s very glossy on one side and it curls up slightly. I draw on this glossy side. The crow quill nib catches or skips or moves unequally across this artificially smooth surface. It’s just a thing, not a big thing. But it does have an effect on what happens when the impulses travel between my head and my hand. Sometimes this is the most important and revelatory part of making art: the plumbing between the mind and the material.
Poor snake, he seems to be stuck on the telephone wires…
06-07-11a: a very colorful snake from 2011
06-14-11a: Making a new friend…
07-05-13a: Eve and the serpent sharing an apple
Be alert! Before the day begins or as the sun is setting, crepuscular hunters dart from the shadows hoping to find a sleepy mouse.
02-12-21a: The sun is setting and the owl sets out to hunt.
This is one very angry bird!
01-26-21b (mixed media)
Why is this bird angry? It’s angry because humankind has selfishly despoiled the Earth leaving other animals and plants without the resources they need to have viable life. Imagine walking down the street minding your own business and the squirrels and robins start to call you names and argue with you. They shout and tell you to go back to where you came from. They are disgusted with you and your species’ selfish behaviors. Imagine being called out as an entire species! Who might we negotiate with if we wanted to seek compromise and mend our ways?
But Nature appears to not have feelings. Life forms quietly become move anywhere might sustain them or go extinct. They don’t protest. They don’t make us feel guilty. Humankind doesn’t get a summons in the mailbox to appear at some tribunal. No. We just find ourselves slowly and slowly more alone in the world with this gnawing fear that life is out of balance.
Maybe we can begin by listening to the people who listen to Nature: the naturalists and biologists, the artists and scientists. Maybe we can start to listen better with our ears, eyes and hearts. And then we will scale back our ways.
We made it!
Inauguration Day (01-20-21a)
01-12-21a (pencil, charcoal, ink, watercolor)
One of my favorite artists is Martín Ramírez. He was definitely not included in my survey of Western Art History when I was an undergraduate art student. The closest we may have gotten was a mention of Jean Dubuffet and post WWII art. Ramírez was a Mexican cowboy and farm hand caught between various bits of lawlessness who went to El Norté in 1925 for work and eventually got swept up in the Byzantine immigration detention processes in California. He spoke no English. One bad thing led to another and he was eventually diagnosed as a schizophrenic and, starting in 1931, spent the remainder of his life in state psychiatric institutions where he started making drawings and collages on which is posthumous fame now rests.
About a decade or two ago, I saw a show of his large works at a museum in New York City. And I keep a postcard reproduction of one of his train and tunnel images near my work table.
The train emerges from the tunnel on the left and will traverse an open section of tracks in the center before disappearing into the tunnel entrance on the right. It’s a mysterious, surreal, hopeful and sinister dream-like image. One of those predicaments that offers no resolution. The only comfort, if you can call it that, is that we are only observers and not participants in the predicament.
The top image on this page is my own and it is more hopeful. Parallel lines and and colors start to define a space. Is it a map? Is it a subterranean tangle of tunnels? The birds (all for one and one for all!) will investigate. Their combined good sense will save them.
Still, I am moved and heartbroken when I think about Martín Ramírez’s life and the unfair things that befell him. At least he had art to help shape his tangled life experience for himself and others. It’s aggravating that he’s been swept up again into the art collecting machinery of this world. But how else would the story have come to me, to the world ? Recommended reading: “Martín Ramírez: Framing His Life and Art” by Víctor M. Espinosa (University of Texas Press, 2015)
Illogical behavior makes total sense, if that’s all you know.
Heh, heh, heh…
Whistling…
My 2021 calendar poster has just returned from the printers. I’ve put it up for sale on Etsy (here). You can also contact me directly if you’d like one for yourself. The cost is $8.00 US + postage. I can ship it folded and flat or rolled in a sturdy tube for a few pennies more. It is offset printed on semi-gloss 100 lb paper. It is 18 x 24 inches. Here are some pictures:
Me and Qi: best buds!
When the Mona Lisa is having her bath, my calendar is sometimes on view in Paris.
We’re getting a ton of snow today. Here are some pictures of inclement weather for you. Stay warm and dry!
A drenching rain transforms the moment.
A long, wet commute if you live in a city.
Stillness and fog.
Snowbirds make the best of it.
Vacation property for sale!
The old ship plows through the waves and wind.
After the storm, everyone can come out to play.
I was browsing through work from 2017. This is all uncommissioned, personal work. Some interesting developments. Here are a few things to get started.
11-13-20a: crayon, watercolor, ink
A little maxim that gives me comfort comes from Alexander Giroux, “Repetition is not duplication”.
In most of my drawing/paintings I start out with no idea what will ultimately end up on the paper. But I tend to make the same choices and come to similar conclusions. It can be a frustrating process where I’m frequently reminded of my imaginative limitations. Every work has its mistakes and some spur original thinking or sometimes, the remembering of some deeply forgotten thing of personal importance. It’s nice when those things find their way out into the art. So maybe, like exercise or therapy, art making is a path to some greater comfort or integration.
The interplay between my limited means (paper, choice of media, format, problem solving abilities and imagination) end up equalling what we know as “style” which can comfort the artist and their audience. But make no mistake, style is not the goal. The goal is the integration of the self and the proclamation of its beauty and potential usefulness to others. Can other people incorporate some of it into their own worlds? Can they support you and see the ultimate value of the artist’s selfish enterprise?
11-13-20b: watercolor, ink, pastel
11-10-20a: watercolor, ink “Beasts of Burden
10-25-20a: ink, watercolor, crayon
10-20-20a
