Making my mark

Well, mark making was the name of the game as I continued my "Fundamentals of Drawing" course at Emily Carr University of Art & Design.

After plunging in with 100 drawings of the same object, we settled down quickly to master some essential skills.  First up:-- Developing grey scales using different media. Object: In ten evenly graduated steps, create a band of tones from white to black.

This can be fiendishly difficult. Zoom into the blob in the lower left corner below, and you'll detect an exasperated, "I give up."

With that mastered (ha!), we used these tonal basics to make geometric shapes appear as three-dimensional as possible.

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Our homework assignment was to use the same techniques to draw one or more pears, as 3-dimensionally as possible.
 

Approaching the midpoint of the course, we learned that useful knack of Looking Like Real Artists. You know:-- holding a pencil out at arm's length to assist in gauging proportion and comparative sizes. Using this method in class to lay out some differently sized and positioned objects seemed awkward to me.

 ...but I had fun replicating the arm's-length pose at home:

The following week we experimented with creating textures. Our homework was to draw five identical objects and cover them with improbable textures. How about these light bulbs decked out in crumpled paper, puckered fabric, wrapped yarn, snakeskin, and tire treads?

To make all the tiny little marks that comprise the whole takes hours and hours, but it can also have a calm and meditative effect -- just what I needed.

Our homework assignments became more challenging with each week -- a lot to cover in just one blog post. So I've decided to continue next time with the adventures of the following three classes. What do you think? A bright idea, no?

Second thoughts, second try

Does this look familiar? It was my first try at "Twist and Shout - #2 in the Flash Mob Series", just after a long second thought about its progress led me to paint it over and aim for a second try. As I confessed before, a series of dubious decisions had led me to this disorderly mob:

I went back to square one, the original pencil layout of eight figures --

Although I planned to change some of these, I was determined not to invite any additional guests to the party.

 

Things went pretty smoothly this time. As the figures developed, I tried out different background colours.

And at last, I signed off on the final version. (You can see the steps along the way here.  Not at all as much fun as they used to be in the old Picasa slideshows).

That's not to say that this is the final painting in the series. Just remember: Flash Mobs are everywhere.

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.

When worlds collide

Is it a collision or a convergence?

This promotion photo for a spring Vancouver dance performance started something for me, something with an irresistible momentum that's just gathering speed.

Eventually it came together with a bunch of other stuff floating around in my creative ether:-- The street scene at Budgie's Burritos, the serendipitous Roundhouse drawing sessions, my determination to recycle old paintings and clean out my old Aquatic Centre sketchbooks, and my channeling of Serge Hollerbach's "Shrimp on a Bed of Lettuce."

Oh, yes. And then there's my occasionally expressed suspicion of current word usages -- "lean in", for example.

Well, let's just call all these things packed into one space a Flash Mob -- because that's what's happening here in The Yellow House studio. All those impulses arrive every morning about 6:30, take up different poses, try out different skin tones, have various colours applied to them -- and eventually, something like this emerges:

This one eventually produced "Lean In," the first painting in my new hold-onto-your-hats series. After the pencil study, based on poses from my old sketchbooks, the first step was to select another sacrificial painting. In 2003, I *loved* these Sitka spruce cones, but it's time now for some second growth forest.

Once again, I resolved not to do a painstaking scaling-up but worked directly with water-soluble white pencil for the initial lay-in.

This approach was not without its problems. I soon realized I had too much space on hand and needed an additional figure in the upper left corner.

When I first painted the background, the underlying pattern of the spruce cones created a weird energy.

And how about these wild patterned tights?

Early in the game, I cropped some of the right side and some of the bottom edge to pack this flash mob closer.

I'd been working away for about two weeks when my friend B took me to see "West Side Story" starring (well, as far as I was concerned) her gifted son Michael as A-Rab, one of the Jets gang. At one moment in one of the fabulous group dance routines, my mouth fell open: "Ohhhhhhh my god........if I could paint this!".

Next morning in the studio, I couldn't resist lightening the hair of the central figure. Then, as I worked along for another week or two, I found myself referring to this figure as "The Michael."

I had to laugh at myself when I overheard my internal dialogue...."What about this arm in front of The Michael?....hmmmm, tomorrow I'll work on the turquoise suit...oh, right...and I better adjust The Michael's..." And of course, all this played out to the irrepressible (interminable?) background hum of "When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way..."

Here's the outcome -- "Lean In," Flash Mob Series #1. (The usual step-by-step slide show now takes place in Google Photos. Too bad Picasa has been disabled.)

Well, I feel totally affirmed in the direction I'm going. I'm always thrilled when I discover I'm thinking in the same vein as a master artist, and here's what I *just* found in one of my drawing books (- Figure Drawing, John Raynes).

You can check out Pollaiulo's flash mob here. And seriously....... don't you think the Vancouver photographer who started me on this trend MUST have seen Fernand Léger's Les Acrobates en gris (1961)? (Currently on my bulletin board; photo taken at the Musée d'Orsay in 1993...sigh)