Stepping out of line

I've always loved to draw -- no wonder I still find it absorbing to do even elementary drawing exercises like the one above. This one, drawn "blind" (looking at the subject but not looking down at the drawing in progress) from a newspaper photo of two chefs smilingly showing off their creations, was proposed by a painter/teacher as a useful warm-up for painting. Its focus is obviously not on exactitude, but on "losing the edges" and capturing shapes within a broad form.

Many traditional artists consider "good draughtsmanship" a prerequisite for good painting, and I still try to follow Renoir's maxim, "Draw every day, even if it is something as simple as an apple. One can so easily lose the knack." At the same time, I've tried to  develop my painting skills, holding to the counsel of one of my drawing teachers (and many others): "The best way to learn to paint is to paint." Some years ago, though, I decided I would benefit from a little more structure and analysis and began to keep a workbook.

As I plan each painting, I record my initial impulse, what I aim to achieve, and, as it moves along, the process I follow. When the painting is finished, I make a brief self-assessment.

One thing I've repeatedly come to recognize is that my love for drawing -- for the crisp line especially -- is something of an impediment to my development as a painter. Again and again, I've considered how to "lose the edges" and felt that there's a hurdle here I need to get by.

Recently, some things have begun to click. In the spirit of "When the pupil is ready, the teacher will come," I happened to come across references in three different art books to Heinrich Wölfflin, an early 20th-century art historian and author of Principles of Art History: The Problem of Style in Later Art (and if that sounds ponderous, it's far less so than the original title in German, Kunstgeschichtliche something-something-something).

Reading the book offered me several a-HA moments -- ones which I won't try to summarize here. The key point for me at this time in my development is that Wölfflin was the first to make the distinction in artistic styles between the "linear" approach (think Dϋrer and Holbein) and what's been translated into English as the "painterly" approach (think Rembrandt).

Closer to home, consider my light-hearted "Conversations" series of about a year ago. "Conversations - 1" is painterly:

"Conversations - 4" is linear:

Wölfflin doesn't judge one to be superior to the other -- though it's clear that this thorough, analytical German loves art and gets most excited when he talks about the painterly. His basic premise is that the earlier (historically) linear style relates to the "tactile" -- the eye can follow the line around edges and shapes; in contrast, the painterly begins to rely solely on the visual, as the eye alone must make sense of what it sees before it.

One of the artist/writer/teachers who led me to these useful concepts feels that artists have a natural tendency towards either the linear or the painterly. Certainly this seems to be so in my case, based on a whole lot of personal artistic history, painted evidence, and my strong likes and dislikes. (Has Facebook forever ruined these words for us?). After all, what could be more linear than my recent "A Question of Scale"? 

Still, I've been shown a way to work alongside, if not over, that hurdle, and I'm giving it a try right now with my current work-in-progress. Alas, I'd already planned a composition -- in fact, a whole series -- that shouts "Linear!" but that will be part of the thrill of the chase. Wölfflin talks about "painting in patches" rather than "painting in lines" -- and my little wipe-cloth, at least, is already filling up with some painterly evidence.

Have an ICE day!

This winter's fierce storms affecting friends in the East and Midwest have brought a blizzard of memories. Oddly enough, one chilling memory comes from my mid-1990s meltdown phase at the place where I'd loved working for 18 years, from the first season we arrived in Vancouver.

It was the era of so-called "re-engineering" and a gaggle of consultants, each with secret knives out for the others' backs, inflicted the Cult of the Team on our previously happy and well-managed workplace. As the company wordsmith (oh, how I hated that word -- especially in the verb form, "to wordsmith", always used so casually, as if it were a mechanical skill no more intellectually demanding than...oh, polishing silver maybe), I was tapped for the Information, Communication and Education team. I.C.E., get it? The Cult Manifesto luckily did not require that we come up with a song and dance routine, but each team had to have a motto. Trying to play along, I won rave reviews for, "Have an I.C.E. Day!" and became the official dispenser of ICE® chocolate bars, awarded to any eager beaver who sent us an "idea for consideration," no matter how hare-brained. The writing on the wall couldn't have been larger or more threatening, and the rest is personal history. With much angst, I bailed outtathere as soon as I could.

But for someone who grew up in snow country, there are much happier ice memories than that. Can children today still be as enthralled as we once were by frost pictures on winter windowpanes? Many years ago, I read about an art technique for reproducing these lacy landscapes by placing absorbent paper and a colouring agent in a shallow tray of water and freezing it. My success rate came nowhere near that of Jack (...Frost...), but yielded some vaguely promising bookmark-sized results, which I found in my recent studio revamp:

I'd tried the article's suggestion to place leaves in the shallow liquid, but this as close as I came to the nifty illustrations accompanying the text.

Well, why not try again? I first used some diluted acrylic paint as my colouring agent, with indifferent results:

Maybe ink would work better? Emptying the last of some waterproof India ink into a small tray, I had my best luck:

Well, ink seemed to be the answer but the only ink colour I had on hand was red. What the heck. With a salute to friends who survived the Polar Vortex and all the stress and emotion that must have gone along with it, I poured it on, with this result.

Pretty cool, eh?  But meanwhile, the best ice cube story of the season comes to me courtesy of my oldest friend's (AND a Polar Vortex survivor) remarkable food-and-fascinations blog -- scroll down in her New Year's post to see ice cube trays like you've never seen before.

Santa will find us

Our second holiday in our new home, and we know for sure Santa will find us this year.  He won't have to follow the neighbourhood cats' tracks to our basement door.

He won't have to trace the aroma of Snow Loaves on our next-door neighbours'  bakery assembly.

No doubt, he'll remember our distinctive ever-leaved oak tree (even though the snow has melted now.)

When he reaches our chimney, he'll have no fear of flames below...

...because as much as we appreciate the heat of our electric fireplace, this weird moulded plastic is so darned hokey that we've disconnected the Log Function, and luckily the "fireplace screen" is dark enough to hide it from view.

He'll know he's found us when he checks out the mantel (make that pseudo-mantel) and discovers four awesome socks, handcrafted and special-delivered by our Bellingham artisan friend who combines the inspiration of 60s-style tie-dye with environmentally sustainable bamboo fabric!

Let it snow! -- and Happy New Year.

Another day dawns on The Colourful Past

A few months ago, I introduced my plan to occasionally turn out a painting in a proposed series, "The Colourful Past." My goals are to put my fascination with old architecture into paintings, to work in a semi-abstract manner, and to be adventurous with colour.

I've just completed the second in the series which yielded, along the way, many serendipitous moments, in the vein of the phenomenon outlined by one of my most important "virtual teachers", Mary Beth McKenzie:--

While an initial concept is important, you must allow a painting to take its own course. It will grow in stages and each stage, or your reaction to it, influences the next. A painting has its own existence and reality, and you have to follow its needs, making changes freely. Often these changes take you in another direction, opening up new possibilities that are sometimes more interesting than your original idea. You have to allow a painting to evolve.   (- from A PAINTERLY APPROACH, Mary Beth McKenzie)

My initial concept was based on the similarity of three neighbouring houses just around the corner from our IGA. Each of the three adjacent houses has a curious 4-windowed eave in the front of the roof, and I've been fascinated by this set of triple triangles.

The same hand -- or like-minded neighbours -- must have been responsible for transforming these boxy old homes into carefully maintained minor showpieces, painted in what might seem to be improbable colours. I've wondered if these colours were inspired by Vancouver's "True Colours"  program, which promotes heritage house paint colours. The city partnered with a commercial paint manufacturer that produces commercial house paints to match the colours of paint chips and fragments that a heritage advocate painstakingly scraped, layer upon layer, from old buildings.

I set to work on my layout, finding that a Purdy's Hedgehog box made a perfect template for the triangles.

This was a rather nice heritage synchronicity since Purdy's Chocolates is one of Vancouver's oldest purveyors of fine yummy stuff!

Working along (with occasional thoughts of those Hedgehogs -- but the box was empty!), I got as far as replicating the houses' fascinating colour schemes. Originally I'd thought that this, along with a textured background that lightened from bottom to top, would be enough.

But something, or maybe a lot of somethings, was lacking. Hmmm. Those fascinating window panes. What would they reflect in reality? It was here that the painting began to take on a life of its own. Spending time with my own reflections, I remembered a quick sketch I'd made in late summer of the colours of the dawn sky.

The three houses face east. Why not let them capture this reflection, with sky colours similar to the house colours?

Trying for a somewhat "realistic" treatment of the reflection travelling along each triangle's four panes, I was struck one morning by a happy synchronicity with the cocoa-brown of the lowest triangle: the conclusion to one of the great poems of one of my favourite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins. (I've always chosen to view -- and read -- him as a pantheist rather than the Jesuit that he was.)

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can feet feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings

With the series of four panes full of reflections, I took one more step, perhaps a risky one. With thoughts of those bright wings, I decided to place the dawn sky -- the sky that would evoke the reflections -- in the background. The day I made this decision, I concluded my early morning studio hour and went outside to put out the trash barrel. There above me was a confirmation (as I chose to see it) that my risk was worth it -- a stunning rosy-fingered dawn of the kind JT and I enjoyed through all the clear days of November.

Here's the final painting "Dawn: Three Neighbours on Quebec Street" (with its evolution here) 

I'm starting to plan and prepare paper for the next in the series, as well as for my next still life. Another day dawns in the studio...

...and I couldn't resist one more plunge into these colours -- taken November 25/2013 with the last quarter moon just visible in the upper right quadrant.)

The Big Picture

Recent ruminations on my not-quite-magnum-opus "A Question of Scale" evoked some old memories on a related issue -- the question of size in artworks.

Some of the best experiences of my working life took place at my next-to-last workplace, a renowned non-profit that fundraises for children's health. As the assistant to the VP responsible for the fundraising team, I was the designated hitter to support the exec team's twice-yearly off-site strategic planning sessions.

I don't think there will ever again be a conjunction of stars like that group -- three brilliant, funny, off-the-wall executives and an inspiring facilitator whose attitude towards the capital-C corporate world was expressed in her signature wardrobe of Birkenstocks and LL Bean flannel shirts. Well, I'm semi-brilliant myself and quickly got a reputation with this crew for not only being able to See the Big Picture but to translate their effervescence into orderly notes. One day, with just a touch of stress, I said, "This is like being the playground supervisor at a preschool for gifted children!" -- and that cemented my status as The Flipchart Queen, without whom no strategic planning day could take place.

These sessions were typically held in a meeting room at one of Vancouver's posh clubs, courtesy of one Board member or another -- and the thing about posh clubs is that they're likely to have some interesting art work on the walls. In one early session, when I was supposed to blend into the woodwork ("This isn't for the notes"), I enjoyed passing the time staring at a beautifully conceived brown- and purple-toned painting of a single garlic bulb on a canvas about 5-foot square.

Verrrrry interesting. I, too, am enchanted by the beauty of garlic bulbs, and a sprouting bulb starred in one of my first paintings in the 1980s:

Mine measured a mere 14" x 20." Suppose I'd made this on a huge canvas? Would it, too, have found patrons at a high-end club?

In the same era, I had a similar thought when we met in a top-line downtown hotel. Walking into the lobby, I was struck by a series of 6-8 framed drawings, strikingly similar to some I'd made myself of the intersections of philodendron stems and leaves. To fill its walls, the hotel had opted for giant drawings -- perhaps 3x5 feet each. When I got home, I pinned my three up in sequence -- each measuring a modest 10x14 inches:

The posh club/hotel scenario came back to me two summers ago, when I decided to paint over a very bad early landscape (colourful rocks and driftwood along the shore -- shown almost obliterated in the title photo above) for my experimental "Eyes on the Northwest". Even as I painted them out, I was drawn to some of the splashy segments of this failure:

Just suppose, instead of measuring 20" x 26", this eye-popping Fauvist shoreline -- or segments of it -- had measured 5 x 6 feet. Would it have found wall space at Vancouver's Four Seasons Hotel?

These kind of what-might-have-been questions are typical, I suppose, as one ages. Still, in this lifetime, it seems I've been destined to a certain uniqueness -- such as being the only currently living human, I'm sure, to slow down and squint at the 19th century engravings along the dimly lit hallways of the upper floors of Vancouver's Terminal City Club.

Whether or not Bigger is Better, let's return to the subject of garlic for an important culinary alert from JT, our family's garlic aficionado. For years, he's put up with the diminishing returns of soft-necked garlic, which produces many cloves per bulb, in ever-decreasing size until, near the centre, they're virtually unusable.

Now through the accident of an overheard conversation in the produce department, he is being abundantly supplied with the magnificent hard-necked variety -- apple-sized bulbs producing just 6-8 large cloves, each of which packs a whammy. The hard-necks -- a whole bulb and a view of the inner tough neck -- are shown on the left below, compared to the diminutive soft-necked bulb and cloves on the right.

Certainly, our family home has always been vampire-proof, as I'm sure is the case at Vancouver's preeminent tennis club, thanks to its Big Picture "Garlic on Duty in the East Meeting Room." (...or something like that...)

Danse macabre

Happy Halloween! In another amazing convergence, I happened on an old drawing exercise just at cucurbit season. The drawing exercise, I'm sure, was originally inspired by the Japanese artist Hokusai (October 31, 1760 - May 10, 1839) who did some fascinating drawings of skeletons in action.

The exercise proposed in my drawing book is this: Cut out a newspaper photo of a figure (dancers, athletes and rock groups work beautifully) and, with reference to anatomy charts, draw the bones that underlie the figure's position. Here are the reference photos for the two dancing skeletons shown above:

It's not easy, even in this casual playful mode. The pelvis, which someone described as "an elegant bowl" and the rib cage present particular challenges. As Dylan Thomas said in another context, "Oh, easy for little Leonardos!"  Whether or not it was easy for him, Leonardo permanently set the bar high:--

We saw his actual drawings in a travelling show of Leonardo's works from the Windsor Castle collection. It was the year after JT came home from the hospital, and we took a break from his busy rehab schedule for a special trip to the Vancouver Art Gallery. Along with the rest of the throng, we oohed and aahed until at a certain point JT said, "Maybe we've had enough now. This is starting to remind me of the Physio Department."

But back to Cucurbits and Friends! Here are this year's carefully chosen few -- with two small bitefuls (?) from the unidentifiable volunteer vine that sprung up in our garden in July.

Now here's my prototype plan for "Dancing with Cucurbits", showing the source photos with yellow paper stand-ins for the gourds:--

And here's the final version...definitely non-archival and intended Just for Fun:--

Projecting ahead to Cucurbits 2014, things can only get more exciting. We have a wonderful bond with our new Chinese neighbours (okay, we're the new ones; they're the established ones) based on my enthusiasm for their front yard trellis and its output:-- the same fascinating squash that was grown by the elderly Chinese man in our old neighbourhood.

This friendly couple has twice presented us with two of these intriguing vegetables. I was advised to wear gloves or use a paper towel when peeling them although theirs were not as spiny as those I saw on our old street. Delicately stir-fried with garlic, they taste something like a cross between honeydew melon and zucchini.

Searching for more information via Google Images, I learned that what I thought were "Chinese vegetables" are actually chayotes, native to Mexico and Central America.

Nonetheless, we've come to call them "Anita's squash" -- and Anita has promised to give me a whole plant next year! If all goes according to plan, our tiny front yard might actually sprout a Chinese-style trellis, and I'll be able to document the entire unfolding of what was once The Great Cucurbit Mystery.

"A Question of Scale"

About this time last year, I was just getting established in my new basement studio after all the months and angst of moving from our old house. Placing some of my cherished artifacts on studio shelves, I became fascinated again with their shadows cast against the studio wall/ceiling -- a similar fascination to the one that led to my 2008 painting "The Artist's Hand, the Artist's Eye." 

As I continued unpacking -- congratulating myself on saving treasures ranging from my mother's antiques to my own hoards of clam shells -- I couldn't help but note how much I enjoy unique labels on bottles and boxes, preferably anthropo- or zoo-morphic. (Maybe I should have gone into package design?) Then I suddenly remembered a coffee break conversation from an early drawing class.

The topic had shifted to our instructor's painting experience and he casually said, "Do you know what has always intrigued me about paintings?" "Colour!!" we answered in chorus. "Well, sure," he said, "but I'm talking about scale." Scale? We looked blank. "You know -- you'll have a canvas, maybe 2x3 feet, and on it are all these little people in a crowd scene -- or maybe a bowl of fruit with lemons larger than could ever be possible." Scale.

Suddenly, it became irresistible to play with this idea within a painting. I rearranged some objects to illustrate the point:

Then I decided, in keeping with the theme, that I'd need to do a carefully planned layout, to scale -- a decision that would cost me about 45 hours of work before I even set paint to paper, as described in a previous post. 

I started with a 10" x 13" drawing, which took me a mere 20 hours:

-- and eventually scaled this up to 20" x 26", the size of my painting paper -- to which I then transferred the outlines.

To accomplish the transfer of the same-size layout to my painting paper, I cut away sections of the large drawing, bit by bit -- more painstaking work, which much later yielded some amusing moments when I could place the pencilled figures against their painted counterparts.

And now...ta tum...five months in the making, here's the final painting: "A Question of Scale" (copyright 2013).

So what do we have here, contained within a space of about 520 square inches? Three human figures of different sizes, each larger than a mountain (see the blue mug) and smaller than a brandy bottle (Metaxa -- a delicious treat in days gone by; white wine does nicely nowadays); a wren-type bird larger than a seagull and a leopard's head (see the Metaxa box); two mugs of different sizes and two similar bottles of different sizes which, if stacked, would be twice the size of the mannikin human figure.

The evolution of this painting can be seen here  -- and it's not a process that I'm ever likely to get involved in again.

Holding this up against my general goal to make each painting "my best yet".... well, it's not. In fact, there are so many mistakes (about which the artist's lips are sealed), it could be a nice example of "What's wrong with this picture?" Still: I learned a lot and worked the idea out of my system -- but one has to wonder if the outcome was proportionate to the effort.