Greetings

After the euphoria of my early March life drawing sessions, I found myself wanting to again be making a painting. The days were still long and dark, and I selected some dark objects against a dark fabric -- with some glowing colours beginning to emerge like the promise of spring.

Long-stemmed dried roses had been waiting in my studio for their time to shine -- keepsakes from a beautiful retirement bouquet I was given in 2010. As I went out to buy a brilliant fresh primrose to put in my little thrift shop flower pot, a title suggested itself: "Past and Present." The dark winter; the coming spring. Perhaps a symbol for this stage of my personal life.

Working on my last half-sheet of wonderful artist's paper, I laid in the basics of what I expected to be a rather serious painting.

In early stages, I began to develop the darks:

Trying not to bog down in my usual (and unfortunate) propensity to dwell on details, I continued along until I reached this point:

Here, about a week into my Very Serious Painting, I was coming to find it Very Seriously Boring. Shapes and colours just weren't bouncing off each other, and I faced the panel each morning with grim resolution.

There are several things one might do at this point. I chose the most exuberant: Wipe it out! I washed the whole thing over with a combination of its brightest colours.

-- and then I began again. I freed myself from the idea that this would be a serious important painting called "Past and Present" and just flung into it.

After another week, there was not much more I could do. Self-evaluation? Not a great painting, but those colours would draw my eye and I'd probably buy it -- if I found it on a greeting card rack. So here it is, with its final light-hearted title, "Greetings."

Sometimes it's best to just accept what life churns out.  As the sage Lao Tzu said, 

"Let life ripen and then fall. Force is not the way at all."

What goes around...

Have you been holding your breath? Treading water? ...as you've waited to learn the next developments with my Aquatic Sketchbooks and the old/young Czech guy who sketched dancers in movement?

Get ready! It's a dramatic episode.

A brochure for this year's International Dance Festival caught my eye at the library. I always watch for these, not because I'm an aficionado of dance, but because they always have terrific photographs of dancers. Flipping through the program, looking for useful poses to study for anatomy drawings, I happened to spot something that was there Just For Me!! -- A notice that during the Festival, there would be a modest art exhibit and -- thrillingly -- ten days of free noon-hour Life Drawing Sessions at the Festival's home base, the Roundhouse Community Centre. (For old building and train enthusiasts, the original Roundhouse was the western terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway where ...the trains that went around, came around....)

I was just in time -- the sessions started in two days, and I saw that I could squeeze at least three sessions into my calendar. No treading water for me -- I was floating on air as I surfed into the Roundhouse that Friday and settled my big sketchpad and materials at a table, after catching a glimpse of the art exhibit's showpiece.

I'd been away from life drawing for 20+ years and was so excited, I could barely calm myself. But then I channelled my revered teacher Kimon Nicolaides and his counsels: "It is more important that your studies capture this comprehension of movement, of gesture, than that they contain any other single thing."

And lately, as I re-read a chapter of his famous book, I found the following marvellous invocation. (This paragraph is the kind of thing that makes the eyes of contemporary art students glaze over -- or so I conclude from on-line Comments such as those posted here. The only intelligent comment-maker is the one from Kelowna, BC!)

Try for the present to think of the gesture as a thing in its own
right, distinct from the form which your eye sees...This thing we call
gesture is as separate from the substance through which it acts as the
wind is from the tree that it bends. Do not study at first the shape
of an arm or even the direction of it...Become aware of the gesture,
which is a thing in itself without substance.

- Kimon Nicolaides, THE NATURAL WAY TO DRAW

And now: On with the show! The set-up was terrific, and the first day's model was great -- a woman of about 60 who I later learned has worked professionally as a clown. I gradually found a working rhythm and managed some of the great poses she did in her stripy tights and scarf, tank top and loose jacket.

She even stood on her head and also held a rather long pose with her tongue stuck out! I wondered if she'd travelled to Tibet where I understand this is how one says "Hello."

At the session's end, I left one of my sketches for the "Interactive Wall" (bottom of the centre column) and floated out ...

-- rather pleased to have been considered a Tribal Elder by a young Chinese engineering student who asked me what medium I was using "that is not so dirty as charcoal." (Answer: Conté crayon)

The next week I was back, equally excited but not as in synch as I'd felt the first time. The young model's boxy shirt was obstructive.

Not to blame the model, I remembered that sometimes you're in the flow and sometimes you aren't. Once I'd warmed up, I caught a couple of her interesting poses.
 

My third and last session was both thrilling and challenging. The male model did terrific poses in the familiar art class sequence of several 1-minute poses, then 2-minute poses, then 5-minute poses, and a final 10-minute pose. You need to have your wits about you -- and I didn't always.

Are you ready? Here are the five 1-minute poses:

Here, on two sheets, are the five 2-minute poses:

Now, on two sheets, the five 5-minute poses:

And...ta tum...the final 10-minute pose. I *really* wanted to finish with my best -- and I did:

Back home, I sat at the sun-splashed table in the front window and caught an amazing reflection of golden hearts from my cherished cat mug (that holds coloured markers!) onto the program announcement. Call it "The Way to My Heart."