Listen up!

It's back to school time, and there's lots to learn. I've headed off to Emily Carr University of Art and Design for a continuing studies course in Fundamentals of Drawing.

No, this is not me -- unless in an alternate universe. (And if you'd like a mini-photo tour of my walk through Granville Island that brought me to this point, click here.)

Our instructor Frances (whose magnificent and large-scale drawings of trees are shown here) is passionate about drawing and reminds us that, "Some of the basics you might find tedious, but you must do them again and again to learn your craft. And if you find it too boring -- maybe drawing is just not for you."

Our utilitarian classroom has lots of good vibes from art students who have been willing to hunker down and get on with it.

In our first class, we experimented with making different kinds of marks with different kinds of media. Our first week's assignment was to select a simple object we liked and to spend three hours drawing it with different tools -- "Oh, maybe 100 drawings," Frances said. Gulp. What's more, each drawing was to express an adjective of emotion or line quality.

Back home, I gathered my forces and materials -- 100 smallish sheets of different kinds of paper,

...an array of drawing tools....

a Florida seashell I've had since I was ten years old and, oh yes, a list I developed of 100 adjectives.

Are you ready? I won't hit you with all one-hundred, but here's a start:

At about Drawing #20, I understood why Frances suggested we choose an object that we liked. It would have been grueling to do this with something to which one was indifferent.

Oh, let's do one more:

I hope this has been an intelligent and informative post. If not, I think it at least meets the specifications of the graffiti on the air conditioning unit outside our ECUAD classroom.

Make no mistake...

 

You've probably heard of writers saying that as they worked on their novels, their characters took on a life of their own and told their own story in a way that had never been planned. Sometimes a painting develops like this.

"In my case all painting... is an accident. I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don't in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do. "
- Francis Bacon 

There seems to be a fine line between planning ahead and going with the flow -- "listening" to the painting and embracing any accidents or mistakes. (But let's leave Francis Bacon's own paintings for another day -- or maybe never).

I've been on a roll lately, continuing with my "Flash Mob" series. I'd expected in this post to be unveiling the second in the series, "Twist and Shout." Here's my scale pencil study:

 

I know my work has a tendency to get too tight, and once again -- rather than do a methodical scaled layout -- I decided to plunge right out. I roughed in all the figures on my large sheet, and they seemed to be going brilliantly. But then I saw that I'd left far too much space between the sprawled figure at the bottom and the central figure with knees bent.

Well, what of it? I would just add another figure to link them vertically on the page. After all........

"The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything."
- Edward Phelps

And I *really* liked the way this figure began to shape up.

I also didn't like a large figure with outstretched arms from my very first pencil sketch. But I *loved* the results when I replaced it with this doubled-over figure, stretching arms over her back.

What the heck? I was working in a time-honoured tradition here.

"You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once."
- Helen Frankenthaler

One of the constants from the early layout was the female figure on the right side -- and by golly, her leg started looking like something Toulouse-Lautrec could be proud of, I thought modestly:

At the outset, I hadn't quite seen how my complementary colours would take an adventurous turn, but it was happening.

"Only now I'm learning to enjoy not being in charge of what the next stroke will do to the whole painting. I'm still learning that there are no mistakes only discoveries."
- Fernando Araujo 

But still, I hadn't quite solved the problem identified in Week One:-- the excess space between the two guys in the centre. I decided I'd better add another figure in there.

It wasn't quite right, though, even four days later. Maybe something larger?

I plodded along for another four days, and this wasn't right either. Remember the flash mob of impulses and ideas I've reported as showing up in my studio each morning?

They were starting to complain -- loudly. It was turning into a riot!! At the same time, one of the lights in my studio burned out -- but another light went on.

Face it:-- This was not working. Despite all my enthusiastic accommodation of the original mistake of too much space in the middle...........the whole thing was still a mistake.

I thought it over for 24 hours, and the next morning I turned the paper upside-down...

and painted the whole thing over:--

I've started again -- back at the original pencil sketch -- consoling myself with the thought that I've truly grasped the lesson of contemporary artist/writer Richard Schmidt, one of whose maxims is: "Never leave a mistake on the easel."

It can only get better, right? And Scott Adams, creator of "Dilbert," sets the bar high: "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." (It's worth following this link just to see what Adams had to say back in March about everyone's unfavourite presidential candidate).

You'll be seeing more of the "Flash Mob Series" very soon. And just look around you -- flash mobs are everywhere.

Summer afternoons that linger on

Just a postcard on my bulletin board now, this painting is my first love -- "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," by Georges Seurat (not to be confused with Stephen Sondheim). I discovered it as a young teenager after our family moved to the sterile flatland of suburban Chicago and a classmate who "did art" introduced me to The Art Institute of Chicago.

I'd rarely seen "real art" before, and I was enthralled. Partly, I was awed by its sheer size, about 7 x 10 feet, as you can see it here in its Art Institute setting. But most of all, I loved all the people -- doing their own thing and achieving a calm unity. My other first love -- my first boyfriend -- gave me a large print of it for my birthday. With my mother's help, I carefully chose a frame (this was real grown-up stuff!!) and hung it in my bedroom, where its tranquillity saw me through the remaining years of teenaged angst.

(A brief aside: The Art Institute of Chicago has one of the finest Impressionist collections in the world -- not a bad place to fall in love! And the actual island of  La Grande Jatte was a huge draw to other Impressionist artists, as detailed in this wonderful website.)

One of my important virtual teachers, Harriet Shorr, wrote in her book THE ARTIST'S EYE about the lasting impact of early loves:--

Certain objects call to the painter because they resonate with the
painter's sensibility -- an attraction to particular kinds of forms,
to particular kinds of space. These attractions are formed by the
innate visual sensibility of the artist and, perhaps of equal
importance, the art that, as a young person, the artist first saw and
loved. These primary influences, which together help to form an
aesthetic sensibility, are what lead the artist to her subjects.

Coincidentally in a bulletin board revamp  a few months ago, I pinned the Seurat postcard next to a photo of one of my early paintings, "Driftwood Pieces" (copyright 2003).

I suddenly connected "La Grande Jatte" with my tendency to pack a lot of shapes and objects into my paintings -- not always a good idea, but usually an irresistible impulse.

Might this also have influenced me to enjoy making studies that pack lots of figures on a page?

...or that connect one figure in continuous motion into a whole?

 Maybe Seurat's spaciously placed Parisians are even (paradoxically) the source of my current plan for a series of intertwined figures. Hey, maybe this was really "A Sunday Afternoon Flash Mob on the Island of the Grande Jatte."

Well, one thing's for sure. This is someone's monkey, even if it's not mine -- and it might even be someone's Schipperke puppy.