I was thinking. I really was. I was doing a lot of thinking about my art, where it was going, what I wanted to do with it. One thing I'd concluded, in keeping with my previous post about the pitfalls of intensive preliminary studies, was that I seem to work best when I go with the flow:-- when I get an idea I'm excited about, do a few black and white thumbnails to plan the composition, make a quick small-size colour study, and then plunge in.
So I got an idea I was really excited about..... The only thing was I could see that, for the effect I wanted for this particular set-up, I'd need to carefully size the objects to scale. This is a painstaking process that I've chosen to use only once before. You mark gridlines on paper (to serve as a stable reference to measure proportions) and then, as often seen in caricatures of artists, you view your set-up with pencil held at arm's length, sighting shapes and distances against the scale of the pencil -- then carefully marking these on your grid. If you create this grid on your proposed painting surface, you're now ready to go. In my case, I planned to "scale up" -- doing a half-size version and then transferring this to a second sheet, twice the size of the first, which would form a template for a painting of the same size.
Whew. It means a lot of measuring, calculating, pencilling...and erasing!
Contemporary artist Nancy Hagin, whose still lifes I admire, uses a simpler process. She takes a photo of her set-up and has it enlarged. Then she marks the gridlines on it, marks gridlines on her painting surface, and painstakingly transfers the shapes from drawing to painting surface.
I shouldn't even have used the word "simpler." It all takes a lot of time, concentration, and judgment. It took me about ten hours to complete the first drawing, and now, scaling up 50%, I'm at about Hour 20 -- and maybe 80% finished.
Among the many objects in my planned still life is the above pictured artist's manikin (femanikin?) similar to this one. In language uncharacteristic for me, I'll just say that she was a real bitch to do. Despite my lesson learned from Hemingway about resuming interrupted work, I've several times taken a wrong step when I've come back to this fiddly project. I had to do a major resizing of her hand and a double hip joint replacement, resulting in three repositionings of her foot. (-- illustrating why shopping mall rooftops that look good on the drawing board will sometimes cave in?)
Several times, I've asked myself if this is really worth doing -- but then, darn it, I want to see if I can bring off the finished piece that I have in mind. A quote that used to be posted on my old studio's bulletin board has urged me on:
When you feel the impulse to make something, do it no matter what the
cost. You can be sure of reward. So rare a thing it is to have a
desire that it is one's duty to act on it, and at once, for desire
evaporates if one delays. Forward, go to it! Be advised, act! That
is the most practical course one can take.
- Camille Pissarro in Letters to His Son Lucien, quoting his letter to
another son, Georges
I doubt that it was "so rare a thing" for Pissarro himself to have a desire (and I have tons of ideas myself) but his son Georges seems to have been a bit of a drifter, in need of his father's empathetic encouragement.
In any case, Forward, go to it! Maybe I'll pick up some positive vibes from a wizard I know (whose recent Best of Show award is by no means reflected in her off-the-beaten path blog) and eventually pull off some magic.
