Am I painting yet?

John and I occasionally play a family word game, based on our
different usage of the word "yet." (His less standard usage is, I
think, a 'Muricism from some early years spent in the Midwest states).

Our conversation might run like this:

J: "Are the cats upstairs yet?" (Meaning: Are they upstairs still? I
saw them go up a half hour ago.)
K: "Yes, they're still up in the sunny window. They haven't come down yet."

Hold this train of thought while I consider my Astrological Plants series. I've been thinking a lot lately about what is/isn't painting and whether what I'm doing with this series fits in.

These details of "Leo" pose the question. Do these drawn symbols, the splashes of orange/yellow texture created by applying plastic film, the collaged patches, the lettering, constitute real painting? Or just using paint for -- a design? an illustration? Certainly, the leaves of the plant are closer to the Right Stuff. In fact, this kind of treatment (the loose brush strokes building up the form, the easy blend of colours) would be called "painterly" by folks who have spent a lot of time moving paint around to create what in general is called a painting. This is what I have a great aim to bring to my real work -- but meanwhile, I'm determined to finish this series. Maybe I should just describe the pieces with that ever useful and ambiguous term "works on paper."

Years ago, when I took drawing courses at Vancouver Community College, my teacher (who made his living part-time from his paintings) told a story about meeting old art school colleagues, also "real artists," who laughed at him and said, "You're not still painting!!" Presumably, they'd dropped painting and moved on to trendy ventures like filming hour after hour of wind blowing through the leaves of a tree and displaying the film on three adjacent TV screens. (Not kidding: I spotted this at the Vancouver Art Gallery on my last trip. Can't we just sit outside and directly experience for ourselves the wind blowing through the leaves?)

I'm not sure we can blame it on Picasso -- the questions and debates go back much longer, with variations over time. But the famous film maker Jean Renoir, in his exquisitely touching book RENOIR, MY FATHER, relates this story:-- The artist Renoir was asked, "Who is the better painter? Picasso or Derain?" And he answered: "Derain, because he makes paintings." (which is not to say that that old rogue Picasso couldn't make grand paintings if he wanted to, but it's not his paintings that caused the stir).

So, yes, I'm still painting. But am I painting yet?

It's in the Stars

Our years of part-time living at Cloudburst, our property north of Squamish, finally brought together for me a plan for a series of paintings incorporating several of my long-term interests:--calligraphy, botanical illustration, and the symbol system of Western astrology. In 2007, I began to work on "Astrological Plants of the Squamish Valley." So far, I've completed Cancer, Leo, Gemini, and Virgo. Taurus is on the easel now. Maybe, just maybe, I'll finish the twelve zodiacal signs this year.

At the very least, the final product will be a great achievement in making order out of chaos, or at least complexity -- somewhat like the work I used to be paid to do??!!?

Here's how I play my game: The personality traits assigned to the 12 signs of the zodiac are widely known, but less well known is the assignment of almost anything you can name to a particular sign or its ruling planet: physical characteristics, occupations, geographic locations, and -- relevant to my series -- colours, metals and plants. With Gemini (my own sign), the painting incorporates the colours of its ruling sign Mercury, the image of a local plant that matches the traditional Mercury flora (a somewhat subjective assignment on my part-- but how could Black Twinberry be anything but Gemini's?), the Latin and common names for the plant, the glyphs (symbols) for Gemini and Mercury, and the sign's traditional image, The Twins. Virgo, the second image shown here, is also ruled by Mercury so I've played differently with Mercury's colours, which are blue, violet, slate, soft browns, and spotted, plaid and checked patterns.

But wait. There's more. Astrological lore assigns each sign to one of four elements -- earth, air, water, fire -- and so I decided to indicate these, using traditional symbols from alchemy:-- Air and fire are upward pointing triangles (air's with a midline); earth and water are downward pointing triangles (earth's with a midline). Thinking along these lines, though, I began to feel that astrology and alchemy perhaps represent a male worldview and that my series ought also to represent the feminine principle. Or maybe this rationale was just an excuse to do something, finally, with the images in a marvellous book I happened upon years ago -- Marija Gimbutas' THE LANGUAGE OF THE GODDESS.

Marija Gimbutas was a Lithuanian-American archaeologist who was the first to propose that the distinctive patterns on Neolithic pottery and monuments represented aspects of traditional goddess worship -- and the basis of long-standing matriarchal cultures all across Europe. Her book provides lavish documentation of these marks and patterns and suggests their relationships to aspects of the Goddess:-- fertilizing, energizing, regenerating, life-giving, etc., from which I selected likely correspondences with the four elements. Finally, I've added local "fauna" for each of the elements: Bee (fire), snake (earth), snail (water), butterfly (air).

It's quite an extravaganza, as you can see, about which one might ask some questions. The first: Why? Answer: Just because I feel like doing it. The second: Are these what you'd really call paintings? Answer: To be considered at a later date.