Unhelpful thoughts

At times I think the most stiffing, unholy thought I have is, "I don't have time"

- I say this to stop myself from sketching something that fancies me in the neighborhood.
- I say this to stop myself from sitting on a blanket near forest park, to sketch the surroundings.
- I say this to stop myself from grinding an outing to a hault so I can study something longer.
- I say this to stop myself from teaching myself to sew shirts for us.

Unless I'm on my way to my day job, I have NOTHING but time. I need to stop thinking this way.

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Some of my paintings are a wrestling match, I sneak up on the idea and have to pounce before it scampers away, and then it's a tussle to get it onto the paper. I'm wrestling with a face on a picture right now. I spent all of last Saturday trying to get an expression just right -- trying things, painting them out and trying again. It's the sort of struggle that makes you question whether the entire thing wants to even be a painting or not, whether you pounced on it when it was on its way to someone else, to become a sculpture or a song. But there's something about the idea, it just works so well for this picture, if only you could just get that face right.



This painting though, this one on the easel, came to me all at once when I read the passage. It was fuzzy and vague, but all complete. It was as though I'd peaked behind a curtain and there it was. I sketched out what I thought it might be, and whoa there it was. And then I blocked it out on paper and yes, it's still there, just as I hoped it would be.

Because it looks so good to me now I hesitate to add too much too it -- I don't want to over work this one. I don't want to rush past the finish line and start laboring over something that was supposed to be finished before I added this or that unnecessary thing. Less can be more sometimes. But that's a fine line, and it's rare that I am alerted to the approach of that line so early on. (I tend to barrel through things in cases like this, carried on by the frothy insouciance of youth.) It takes a lot of effort for me right now to take a step back and asses. This painting is very generous, and has been screaming NOT YET! WAIT! MAKE SURE FIRST! It's demanding my full and undivided attention, and because of all the other things going on in my life right now, it's also very patient with me. I talk to it every day that I don't work on it, asking it to wait, and thanking it for waiting.

It was a combination of Other Things To Plan For and a solid week of temperatures over ninety degrees fahrenheit that drove me out of the apartment -- and out of the city -- last weekend. It was supposed to be my last full day to work on pictures before things get truly crazy. Big car trip, that friend of mine's wedding, and something else I'll tell you about here in a few days. But it was hot and I had a really good painting that wanted me to wait and think about it, to wait until I wasn't so distracted any more. So I took my distracted brain for a drive.



I joined up with some friends camping on the coast, near a tiny little functional town. Two members of our group were listened and experienced clam diggers and oyster-finderes. I didn't witness this but I did enjoy the results of their labors, eating my first raw oyster fresh from the bay. It was magical. I walked along the bay for a long time in the early morning, marveling at the blackberry / morning glory / other-things thicket, watching innumerable tiny fish jumping, spotting kingfishers, herons and cormorants. Just the thing for a distracted brain.

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Impoverished vs. empowered

I have an insatiable appetite for audiobooks, podcasts, old timey radio, radio documentaries, and anything else that amounts to someone reading me a story while I paint. Lately I’ve been delving into Radioworks documentaries, because my local public radio station played the one about coal about six months ago and it made me want to save energy and be a better citizen. It also, frankly, made me think a lot about material consumption, how energy drives our habits, and so on. (So you can see where this is going).

The latest one I’ve listened to is about the American dream. It made one unable to avoid considering all these perks the previous generations get -- inventing the suburbs and housing vouchers for WWII vets, the Job Corps in the 60s, etc., all this emphasis on boosting the white middle class -- at the expense of everyone who isn’t white and middle class. And eventually, it seems, at the expense of...well, me. And my generation. And the generations that come after me.

It can be incredibly difficult to avoid resentment when considering stories like this. Or considering the instances that remind me of them. That [x] percent of my friends are unemployed or underemployed, and those that have jobs are terrified of losing them. That [y] friends have stopped looking for non-shared housing, have given up on the idea that it will ever be possible for them. That a several of my friends really don’t have a fixed address. That I have a friend who took money out of stocks bequeathed to him by a deceased relative to buy land in southern Oregon, to try and build an earth ship down there. That it seems very, very wise to stay close to these friends, in case everything falls apart. As it seems likely to do. At any time. Not just for me, but for everyone.

That I want to go and read some happier books about poverty (spun for me as "sustainable living" and "homesteading") tomorrow at the bookstore. That I will not buy these books -- buying books is something those Other People can do, people these books were written for -- but instead will select a bookstore with a generous coffeeshop that I may sit and take notes for a while, as I would at a library. That I will place these books on hold at my library, and wait in line behind the rest of the city and read them later on. Or at least, flip through later on, somewhere between the day job and the real job, while dinner is cooking on the stove, waiting on the laundry downstairs to be done. Thoughts stray ideally to those who have the time to do a load of laundry all in one day -- sort, wash, dry, fold, put away. That those people probably don't have socks and underwear drying on a piece of string in the bathroom. That if those people dry clothes on a line it's more likely to be done in a yard, where the air smells sweetly of grass and trees and sunshine. Those people probably also buy new socks when the toes and heels wear out, and don't teach themselves to darn the holes in clothing -- something even my grandmother rarely did. Something I had to teach myself.

And does that make me impoverished, or empowered? Or both? I go back and forth on that every day. When I see people with new clothes on at the bus stop or the grocery store I think, that's okay. I spend my money on supplies and food. But when I have to wear a shirt that I've patched in the armpit to a job interview, as I did about a month ago, I feel ashamed and unwashed. (Despite the fact that the shirt is clean, and ironed. And under a nice jacket.)

Some of it is just the love of the craft. After so many years of being unimpressed or uninspired by what department stores have to offer me, I honestly do prefer the look and feel of a hand knit sweater over a factory made one. I want honesty in the things I wear and use. And I hate the idea of sweatshops, slave labor, wearing what They say I should wear and all the rest of it. To say nothing of Monsanto, bad farming, corn subsidies and all. But I also -- strangely -- cannot really say this with my purchases, because I am neither rich nor (it seems) middle class. I cannot shop at boutique grocery stores and get all natural grass fed meat or organic legumes. My votes in this area must be made with my lack of purchases, and this isn’t a very compelling argument in a country obsessed with consumer dollars.

It’s hard to say too how much of this is just youth. Most people just starting out are on a tight budget. Most of those youths historically didn’t have expensive habits to keep up with (cell phones and internet, for a start. Electric bills that much higher). But also most of those youths who came before me were not facing the waning baby boom and its subsequent strain on social security. Most of them didn’t watch a global economy go through growing pains that sent entire forms of currency to utter ruin. Most of the Tough Choices that faced these generations were just, it seems, pushed further down the road.

Again. It is so difficult to avoid resentment, bitterness in the face of these hard realities. And in the face of other people’s good fortune. I’ve been struggling with that a lot recently. There are a lot of illustration conferences, workshops, and classes wrapping up lately -- opportunities I had calendered, in the vain hope that I would save enough to go to them. I didn’t, people had a marvelous time, and I stayed home and worked.

Deep down I think there’s something to be said for staying home and working. It’s one thing to seek the artistic lifestyle, it’s quite another to make art. At the end of the day I think making things is going to be more useful. More powerful. It will get one further down the road. It’s just not as immediately compelling as travel and new friends and advice-from-professionals. These events have a way of bringing up questions I didn’t know I had. Of sorting out the tangle I see when I look at the “let’s bring it to the next level” folder in my head. It’s this immediacy that makes these events so tempting, even though I’m fairly certain I could think of these questions, seek out answers from kind colleagues, and build my own path -- without paying an enormous outright fee. My version just takes some time. We’re so about immediacy these days, aren’t we? It’s really not a productive way of thinking. I need to slow down.

And I really do have it so good, compared to a lot of people in this country. I have a very safe, stable home life. I have a partner who is invested in my creative life, who pushes me to excel. I live in a place that encourages an active lifestyle -- there is good city density in my area, things are walking-distance from me, or a quick bus ride. There are trees and neat people watching and colors all around. My day job is very active and I move every muscle I have every single day. I know different sorts of people. I go outside every day. I have clean, drinkable water, that comes to me in facets. Hot AND cold.

Things will come around. I am a firm believer in slow and steady wins the race, that way of thinking has been very good to me. I don’t want to go into debt to push my artwork into the world, (we’ve talked about this before), becuase debt and borrowing money is what got me and my generation in this fix we’re in. So I have holes in my shirts, so I darn my socks. That’s better for everyone in the long run. I want to be light on this earth and be a Good Artist and that’s all. And I guess at the end of the day, as long as I can keep my tricky feelings straight, that’s all that really matters.

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Branching out

In an effort to push the Charles Dickens pictures through to completion -- and in an effort to take advantage of a rare opportunity -- I am subletting a studio downtown. From someone I really, really admire.



I’ve resisted doing this up to now, partly because of the expense, and partly because the opportunities previously open/available to me were not a solitary shut door, but rather a shared space, which I don’t think would work so well for me. I really need to be alone to really get work done. Solitude cuts down on the distractions.



And the lack of things cuts down on distractions. When I talk about this to people I tend to emphasize how empty it is, and how much I love that. They look at me like I’m crazy, because I think what people want to see when they think of an artists’ studio is the beautiful, shambly mess that I work in at home. And I have that at home. What I needed was a monistic cell to close myself in, that worldly things would not interfere with my art-making.



Don’t get me wrong. My home studio is a dream -- more than a dream -- and if it were on its own level in the apartment, or had a door that closed, things would be easier. It’s hard to explain. I’ll let Mr. Rockwell help:

“After marrying Irene I’d moved my paints easel, etc., out of Remington’s former studio and into our apartment. But it was no good. When the grocery boy rang the doorbell I had to lay my wet brushes on a chair and walk down a long hall to let him in. The same with the butcher’s boy, the postman, and every wandering salesman who thought our door looked promising. I couldn’t get any work done. So I rented the top of a garage on Prospect Street.”

- Norman Rockwell, from My Adventures as an Illustrator, pg. 133

There’s also just the difficulty (for me) to get the creative juices flowing in the same room where my partner is laughing aloud at reddit antidotes, suddenly saying, “Oh. Are you sure?” while I’m in the middle of retrieving someone’s belly from the muddy background, and I have to get up and look at a picture of a “Pilot Car - Follow Me” truck headfirst in a river. Funny, yes. Conducive to the creative process, not really. Asking my coffee mate to stop talking to me at home while I’m working feels rude because with this set up I work all the time, to varying degrees of focus. And he is a saint and will actually quit the place when I need “office time” is completely amazing. But sometimes you just need a blank space. Without internet access, fabric, canvas, and a kitchen to distract you.



I’ve had access to it since May 23rd (about ten days ago) and just about every day I’ve gone in. And it’s perfect. A little blank slate for me to cover in drawings -- affixed to the wall with that magic 3M stuff. I’m not really going to move anything in, I’ll keep it in this blank little way. Well...aside from some refinements such as an electric teakettle. For some reason I hadn’t remembered that long term desk sitting requires a great deal of tea. I don’t notice it at home, because I have an oven in the next room. It seems I don’t so much listen to muses as turn vast amounts of tea into pictures.

I have sole use of this space right up until ‘Fair, and so I go down there as often as possible. Sheer bliss. I have already done exquisite work in there that I will share with you soon. After ‘Fair I have the option to co-rent the space and we will share it tag-team style -- when one of us needs it we can text the other and ask if that’s okay. I hope that works out. So far the space is being very good to me. A great step out of the house and into the world.

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Hard work vs. bribes

Bear with me here.

There's an episode from Spongebob Squarepants where Spongebob and King Neptune have a Cook-Off to see who is best at making a crabby-patty. (I forget the reason why. Do we need a reason?)

They do this Roman Colosseum style, as befits a Great God Of The Sea, to a huge crowd of spectators. There is elaborate set-up. We see King Neptune raising his arms and two magic seahorses descend from the heavens and grid him in his cooking-apron. (Spongebob puts on his hat.) King Neptune raises one hand and wheat springs from the ground, and with a zap turns them into burger buns. (Spongebob places a bag of store-bought buns on the table.) King Neptune levitates great sacks of vegetables and calls upon a school of swordfish to slice them to perfection. (Spongebob, with great care, makes one tomato slice with the edge of his spatula.) King Neptune zaps his burgers on a mighty, shiny grill. (Spongebob rubs two sticks together to make a campfire.) And so on. In the end King Neptune makes hundreds of crabby-patties, sufficient to feed everyone in the crowd. Spongebob just makes the one.

The kicker though? King Neptune's patties taste awful. The crowd spits them out after one bite. Spongebob's patty, eaten by King Neptune himself, causes great choral music to sound. Clearly superior. He concedes defeat.

I'm hoping real life plays out this way in the area of proposals/manuscipts/portfolios. I have seen some very well-designed, beautiful self-promotion materials in those books and magazines where one can find such things. I have also seen beautiful-yet-rediculously-over-the-top-things, like custom milled soaps in biodegradable packaging.

I mention all this because this evening, on a Very Well Known Publisher's facebook page, I saw a superbly ridiculous book proposal delivery, which involved treats, poetry and a singing telegram.

On the one hand: I get it. If I were in charge of inquires at any publishing house it would certainly be tedious to sift through the massive volume of hopeful submissions, and it would therefore be very thrilling to get a little gift or something weird. But mostly, it makes me -- the small time newcomer on the block -- feel very, very small when I see stuff like this. I don't have the budget to hire a singing telegram. I don't have the budget to make custom-print envelopes. I print my own business cards on my fancy art-print printer. (On the paper I paint my illustrations on, actually. I don't think you'd know if I didn't tell you. The look pretty professional.) I am amassing what I hope is a concise business identity for myself. I am making delicious pictures to stuff my portfolio with. I am also working a lot.

I hope all of this can somehow stand out over a singing telegram, but it's hard to know sometimes.

I commented something more succinct to this effect on the publisher's facebook page where I saw this, but I deleted it because I am a Coward. And because I do want to submit work to these people, and want to be taken seriously, despite my lack of singing telegrams and baked goods. I want my work to be celebrated for being good work, not because I bribed someone into celebrating it.

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Trying to hone in on this one character. Once I nail him down the others should (I hope) come easier. Most of the other characters have real-life people driving their look but I could never find a satisfactory reference for this guy, and because of that his face is a little amorphous to me. I know generally what his key features look like, but I don't see clearly how his entire face should look, and that makes coming to terms with him a little challenging.

A good challenge though. I've been putting off building concrete techniques for approaching faces in my work which seems insane given most of my pictures are fairly character-driven. It's long overdue, these face studies.

A weird side effect of all this face work I've been doing is that lately I have this socially-unfortunate inclination to get really into your face if I'm talking with you right now. Everyone's got such a different structure and it's beautiful to behold. My fascination is genuine and pure, if a little unsettling.

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This is about all I can show you of the five pictures in production, or of the roughly 16 thumbnails on the storyboard. Soon I can at least post a teaser picture and tell you what it is I’m up to exactly, but first I’ll have to finish that picture. And I know you’re eager (so am I!) but you can’t rush a picture. It shows, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s not fair to the picture.

There's a very important phase of painting called sit back and take a look. It's a phase I'm in the middle of with three of these, and a phase I really struggle with. To start a picture, I find, doesn’t take much discipline. I tend to jump right in. (Which sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.) But removing yourself from the process of creating in order to regard your painting critically, in order to see where it’s going, to decide whether it’s working, whether it’s going to work. That takes a lot of guts. And far more discipline, because my first inclination is to shove forward when I encounter a problem. And that also can mean starting over, or running a good painting into the ground. Over-painting something. I struggle a lot with allowing myself to sit back and take a look. I tend to get nervous about the time ticking away.



It’s one of the reasons I was so excited to find this book at the library not long ago: Picasso Paints a Portrait. It’s a photo-essay published in 1996 from a collection of photographs taken in 1957. And it is exactly what I wanted it to be: it depicts, simply, Picasso painting a portrait.



Moment for moment.



Line by line.



I love the progress pictures of the face itself, absolutely. I love the glimpse inside his studio.



What I love best about it, though, is the acknowledgement of this all-important step. The stopping and looking and considering where to go next.



It helps me so much that Picasso has a path he’s following, and that he gets a little lost sometimes.



And that he waits. He lets it happen.







For as long as it needs to.



I am immensely comforted by these pictures.

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I think a lot of people feel this way whilst filing out applications of any kind -- employment, public assistance, housing. You have to put a lot of yourself into them, particularly if you want them to be good. And you do, don't you? Of course you do. You must do your very best. And because of that it takes a lot out of you.

To counteract this I try to remember to fill myself back up. The zoo has been a great helper for me in this department (see previous entry). Making these cookies at long last also helped, immensely. Making lots of loose, happy colorful pictures helps. All sorts of things help.

Graditude moving us forward

Filling up with lots of warm feelings from nice people lately. I feel like every time I reach out my hand -- nervously, tentatively -- someone new takes it and squeezes all the fear right out of me. It helps immensely as I try to move forward.

Moving forward isn't possible without a heaping does of maitri, which is a word I've learned from another new friend, Pema Chodron. If you haven't listened to the recordings of her talking things over with retreat attendees you must. True Happiness is a good one, but Getting Unstuck was the one I started with. I'd start there. It really gets you accustomed to the sort of listening experience she's offering.

I had two neat things happen to me this week. The first was a splendid tiny art show with a German art student.

My friend Dustin the video artist had a little get-together after his most recent opening, and Liv had come, being an video artist herself and interested to find people who do things. And in that magical way that these things happen she and I got to talking about painting and art school and whether or not getting an art degree matters. I seem to know a lot of art students right now -- mainly post-modern types, which is, be fair, a very different school than mine -- and we talk about this a lot. I’m always curious to see what people are getting out of school. Liv has a delightful way of talking about her school.

My school...it is an old building, and it is filled with people...and that’s it! It is an old building filled with people..

We met again to talk about painting and she told me she’d been wanting to do a little show of all the paintings she’d made while visiting Portland. And she wanted to know if I’d like to hang anything with her. I said of course, and a few days later we sat in her Uncle’s garage-turned-studio while a curious little knot of people chattered happily around the paintings.



Liv’s paintings are very geometric -- mostly tiny shapes or lines scattered across a white background like tiddly winks. She’s been painting on linen and had a huge piece tacked slightly away from the wall, and when the wind blew it would roll gently and the effect was very good. Almost like the lines and triangles were dancing. My contribution was that gardener I just finished, and it was wonderful to see people crowded around it gleefully pointing out details. “Look! He’s planing leeks!” The show was very small and very wonderful.



This week I also had a brief phone conversation with Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw, an illustrator I’ve admired for years.

I had hoped that we could chat like friends and colleagues but unfortunately I was basically like Lucy in this picture and got quite tongue-tied. There was no cause for it because Jenny is as down to earth and generous as I’d hoped she’d be.

After our conversation my hopes and plans now have outlines and arrows. It helps so much. I feel like a little tiny kid setting out into a great big world, sailing a paper boat into a churning sea of unknowns. But at least now I have a map. It’s hand-drawn and a little winkled because I keep squeezing the edges. But I wouldn’t want it any other way.

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I have been trying for what feels like years to get some pithy sentences together about what it is I actually do, or want to do. What makes me different from other illustrators? What makes me worthy of an art directors (or, most importantly, a reader’s) attention?

I feel differences, and I see them, but it’s very, very difficult for me to say them.

Specifically, I want to know what to say to people when they ask me what I do. They often ask me this when I’m drawing in an enormous sketchpad in a public place. What do you do?. Why, this right here! That makes it easier. It’s not finished products, but they can at least get a sense of style. But how about when I’m out in the world? If I have paint all over my fingers and the middle-aged cashier at the grocery store asks me what I do?

I’m an illustrator I’ll tell her. And the next question is always, always, always:
Oh really? What does your stuff look like?

And that’s the kicker. That’s what I’m struggling with most. When someone who has no Art Words asks you to describe your work. (And let’s face it, Art Words are not necessarily universal, and therefore I don’t think we can rely on them.) I’m always at such a loss. Everything you say sends them off in the wrong direction. You say “watercolor” and they think of pale seaside landscapes. You say “abstraction” and they think Picasso. You say “surreal” and they think of Dali. You edge towards something a bit more descriptive -- “blocks of color and linework” -- and they feel alienated. Though I don’t necessarily want to pigeon-hole myself I have gone as far as, “remember those illustrations in the old Golden Books books? Scruffy the Tugboat, that kind of thing?” and people have looked at me blankly and said, “no”.

I have to be honest and say that sometimes I just say to people, if I could describe my work than I’d be a WRITER, not an illustrator. But that’s a fairly anti-social answer. I need to come up with something. You need to get them within the ballpark. Illustration is so vast. People don’t know if you mean Norman Rockwell or Blueberries for Sal or those vectored atrocities accompanying the PSAs our bus lines have up right now. It’s all illustration, and it’s all really different from what I do.



Of course I am thinking of all this again because I am trying to psyche myself up to go to AIGA Portland’s meet-and-greet next week -- another thing I’ve been trying to do for what feels like years. I get a bit nervous when it comes to meet-and-greets, particularly if I don’t think I’ll know anyone. I am very capable of being open and chatty and social, I just tend to prefer to be at home, working.

But that IS work, part of me says, getting to know people in your field is really important.

And it’s more than that. I have been really hungering for other illustrators to talk to. I have a few artist friends -- a sculptor, a writer, a video artist and most notably a painter -- and we can talk about process. Catching whiffs of muses, getting in a groove, getting in stride, hitting roadblocks, the freedom we find in having rigidity elsewhere, balances. Technical things about the mental process of making things. But as yet I don't have someone to talk to about abstraction, simplifying, subjective perspective, color-mood, the relative merits of light and shadow in a given picture. And what the hell do they do with that darn “what do you do?” question.

Maybe that will be my ice breaker on Wednesday.

Every once in a while I’ll sit and brood over this “what do you do?” question. I’ll open up my enormous “what do you do?” file on the computer, open every document. Trying and condense some and make more in the process, write new lists on paper, make tons of sentences, try to string them together. At the end of the day, surrounded by stubs of smudgy writing, terribly assumptive words, stilted ideas, I always come back to some of the artists I admire.

Did Eric Carle write out an elevator pitch or a mission statement? Did Maurice Sendak or Tomie DePaula or Ezra Jack Keats? Of course not. They just went for it. They made little brochures, made samples, and made a go of it.

Or at least, that’s how I envision things for them. I envision them struggling but in the way we artists are supposed to -- with our pictures, not with words.

To you, these merely a lovely pale yellow, a gentle powder blue, and little palm trees. And really, that's enough. It's enough for them to work in this piece I'm putting together. It's exactly what a little whimsy like this needs.



To me though, these fabrics have enormous sentiment. They are: my childhood security blanket (yellow), my brother's childhood security blanket (blue), and the last little bits of one of the shirts Mom wore so much during that time in my life (the trees). My brother, my mother and me. All in this painting.

If you watch the Reading Rainbow episode with "The Patchwork Quilt" by Valerie Flournoy, you learn about how a REAL quilt is made, with fabric from people's lives. What always stuck with me was the ending, when a piece of the old quilt was put into the new quilt. Somehow this activates the new quilt to me -- it gives it that extra spark of needed life. It gives the new quilt a soul of its own.

It reminds me of other things made up of pieces of existing things. Making new plants from a cutting, or the seeds from last year's plants. Sourdough bread starters that are fed and kept alive rather than made from scratch. Fire lit from a burning stick pulled from someone else's fire. Lighting a whole room by touching one candle to another's flame. Somehow there's comfort in that reliance on what we already have. We took care of it so well that it is still around to give to others. And the more we give it away, the more of it there is.



If I keep using these dear pieces of fabric in paintings, they aren't going to be more, they will be less and less until they are gone. But on the other hand if I put them on canvas then they are out in the world instead of stuffed into the milk crate on the shelf, so in that way they continue living. Especially if I tell you this story. Then those colors up there are more than just a lovely pale yellow, a gentle powder blue, and little palm trees. They have weight and depth and soul all their own.



As time goes on I get more meaningful fabric (sleeves cut from a button up, those unmendable pajama pants, fabric we used to make the lunch bag) and use it alongside the older fabric. An overlap develops. The line between the fabric from before and the fabric from now blurs until everything I have to work with has value and meaning in an vibrant, pulsing way. And I pour that onto canvas and make pictures of things I love with things I love. And the feeling grows and grows and grows.

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Whilst reading Leif Peng’s blog, Today’s Inspiration a while ago I saw a title that grabbed me: Forty Illustrators and How They Work by Ernest W. Watson. It was, I assumed, the inside scoop from mid-century illustrators and designers. Yes please.

The library didn’t have it, but they did have another book: Creative Perspective for Artists and Illustrators.



The first night I had it home I positively pored over the thing. Watson writes about perspective from the angle of a designer-illustrator, which is not often the angle one receives. It’s lovely to read about, since illustrators have a unique place somewhere in between reality and abstraction.

In reality, no picture -- photographic or otherwise -- can duplicate what our eyes see. For one thing, the camera picture is recorded on a flat plate of film; the retina of the human eye is concave.

(the illustrator’s) function, usually, is to depict the facts and events

Illustrative skill involves considerably more than the training of the eye and hand to see and record the correct appearance of things observed, essential as that is. There are those who can make reasonably good drawings of things they are looking at, but who are lost when they try to construct objects “out of their heads”. They have a photographic eye, but they lack imagination.

it is this conflict that fascinates me most about the problems of perspective. I have been particularly taken lately by the cubism-influenced illustrators, who stretch things flat and let one see as much of the scene as possible.



Yet when I stumbled upon Peter P. Plasencia’s pictures in that book, I was dazzled by his brilliant use of space within his little tiny box. And, frankly, I was a bit dumbfounded. How did he do that? He’s clearly obeying rules, but when? In what circumstances?

Conflict between design and perspective in picture-making ...his picture actually may be more convincing when his lines do not conform to photographic reality.

What’s clear to me is that what reality looks like and what actually works in an illustration are two very different things. You do HAVE to stretch that road flat sometimes to fill up the picture. You do need to show something from an impossible angle occasionally to keep something interesting.



I’m not sure if this is where Watson is going with “creative” perspective, but he is at least coming to this stuff in a non-traditional way. He, like everyone who knows what they’re talking about, writes endlessly about the need to just sit down and draw. Technique is taught quickly, but executing that technique in an effective way is something nobody can teach anybody. It all comes from drawing. Drawing, drawing, drawing. Drawing every day.



I recently got back in touch with a high school art teacher and I have been trying for three weeks now to articulate why it is that I am so hungry for this stuff. When I knew her, I wanted nothing to do with the color wheel, perspective, the elements and principles of design. At the ripe old age of fifteen I felt I’d mastered the basics. I had plateaued. It’s what happens when you stop exploring, when you refuse to grow. When you decide you don’t need any more learning. I once without a trace of humility informed a drawing teacher (this same drawing teacher) that I couldn’t think of a single thing to improve on.

I had no goals, but I had no shame either. That’s not a good combination.

I think part of this was the vast difference between having confidence and assuming you are The Greatest Thing That Has Ever Lived. One is that drive to push through the hard stuff, the other is deciding you don’t need to go through the hard stuff because it’s beneath you.

I was too firm in thinking I was The Greatest, and it took a portfolio rejection and essentially being barred from taking art classes at my University to make me realize my mistake. No. You are not the greatest. In fact, you have a lot of work to do.

Rather than fighting the system I took a step back and got an English degree. I don’t regret it. I think I needed to jump into a completely new field to learn to be open to ideas; new and old. To learn how to learn again. And anyway at that art department, I could not have learned. What I wanted to learn was the stuff I was learning from this book the other night -- about the hinged box and doors and how to measure proportions with squares. What they were teaching was two point perspective. Rigidly, I might add. Frustrating to the observer in me who was, without realising it, seeing things with many, many vanishing points.



Distance made me hunger for more. I started collecting fragments of design, keeping track of things I liked and why. Slowly but surely I was developing my own weird pathology of How To Make Pictures. Noting what details to pay attention to. Pushing the perspective. Pushing the colors to certain family groups I’d grown fond of. Now when I find books on topics I’d previously snubbed as being beneath me I pore over them with a fanatical zeal. Anthony tracked down a book on color theory a few months ago and I’ve been devouring that book just as eagerly as this one on perspective. Maybe moreso. Something about scholarly writing on the qualities of certain colors is just electrifying. It’s like finally taking preschool 201 (Or really, more like preschool 988). Colors! Shapes! Interaction!

These books lead me to things I may or may not already know, and they get there on paths I’d never heard of. And once these paths are taken, they are much easier taken again, and can lead to even more places.

There is a peculiar feeling that I have now. The more I learn, the more questions arise. The more facts I find, the less I know in a way, because it just spurs me on to keep searching. It is so important to keep the mind receptive. To never close the flood gates by feeling you have complete knowledge of something. The minute you do you cease to evolve, cease to grow, and cease, essentially, to LIVE.

Do live. And learn. And practice. Practice, practice, practice. Practice every day.

Connections

Okay kids. Wow. I think I got it.

You remember my recent breakthrough with the easel and the drawing board. Since then I have with a few exceptions begun my mornings with a quick crayon session. Even a couple unrelated scribbles helped me get out of that weighty am I really good enough nonsense you sometimes encounter as you approach your desk, and instead you are transported into that magical observant place where you can just notice the shape of things. And all you want out of life is to copy them down.

This inevitably led to my bringing crayons and the drawing board with me to the Oregon Country Fair, and resulted in those big crayon studies of what I saw. The result was not necessarily better than my attempts to capture journeys in the past -- things were not nearly as detailed as they needed to be to really be accurate -- but it was a LOT more satisfying. What I was seeing and feeling was BIG STUFF. So it was nice to record things in a big way.

I have gone to some really amazing places in the last couple years. Ireland with my Mother in 2008, a two-week camping holiday in Canada a year later, San Diego a year after that. Travel has always been a deep love of mine, and all the while I have secretly hoped someone might pay me money to go places and experience them and then report my findings to whoever would be interested in the sort of things I notice. So whenever I've gone somewhere I always feel that anxiety -- perhaps even more than you do -- to capture the experience.

I say perhaps more than you do only because I illustrate things. In a way that's really my job all the time. I capture experiences, feelings, emotions. All those things cameras do not capture.

Furthermore during the trip to Ireland I learned something -- cameras are not fast enough. My mother and I both had cameras with many memory cards, but we often lamented that the thing we'd wanted to take pictures of was usually just after we got it in our head to press the button. We had internet available at every place we stayed and adequate downtime every evening set aside for emailing loved ones back home to give them a day-by-day account of events. This morning we caught the bus outside the pub in Cork, changed buses in Tralee. Ate dinner at this place outside Bunratty Castle. All true but it somehow doesn't capture what the three-to-five hours on the bus was like. Rushing past rolling hills and stone walls straight out of a storybook. The alarming skinniness of the roads. The thrill of seeing bilingual road signs, placed in places that made no sense to our American brains. The tiny towns passed through, with tiny shop fronts and Easter egg colored houses. Buildings crowded around the road. A man in a check cap and patched trousers walking with an ancient terrier. And these things were addressed in the occasional prosey email, but there was still so much missing. The color of the stone walls and how it matched the man's jacket. The sound of people muttering to each other. How can you capture it all?

The next adventure was Canada, and I tried doggedly to document everything. Snapshots of anything that seemed promising, sketches, painting on the fly. I even had a gluestick and collage paper with me, and I faithfully kept every single piece of paper we were given or came across. It was a mess -- way too ambitious for the timeline we were on. And of course in the end the car window was smashed in and I wound up mostly only talking about that, and it's a shame because that was one of the most beautiful trips I have ever been on.

After that trip it was clear that I needed to simplify my capture approach. In San Diego I only brought my pen and notebook. And with the exception of the Museum of Man, which I badly wanted to sit in front of and paint for a few days, I actually did really well. But I ran into a new problem.



My simple pen studies had a satisfying feel to them all on their own. But whenever I tried to iron them out, or add color, or turn them into a more polished painting, I was somehow never able to capture the charm of the original drawing. I've had this problem a long time actually, in several other facets of my drawing-life. Different stages along the way. It was something I wanted to confront, but something I never got around to. Other things kept demanding attention.

Since then when I go on journeys I take nothing more than a pen and that at least solves the anxious burden of Capturing Everything. It helps you let go when your supplies are limited. It also helped me hone in on Which Details Are Important and get a grip on how I saw things, so that eventually I was able to do things like paint that picture of the Tillamook Cheese Factory without taking any pictures or any written notes at all.



So at this point I have these stories I want to tell, these pictures I want to make, about these bigger travels. They are all backlogged in my brain and keep getting pushed behind other things. Added to this we are constantly going on little weekend excursions. Constantly. Remember, Anthony lived in Eugene for two years before he moved in this summer, so there were many, many weekends spent on the road. The baby cooler is in constant use, the roadmap is marked up with highlighters and tattered from the number of times it gets stuffed down between the passenger seat and the gear shifter. Now that Anthony lives up here we are able to explore east and west more often. We go on more walks into the hills and take little mini-vacations to the rural countryside. Make our own minor discoveries. This is a beautiful state and I am pretty strict about not working on weekends, preferring instead to go out and explore.

I guess what gets me is: I am really good at going on adventures. My last trip to Colorado was a 72 hour affair in two different cities with three different groups of people and it was as slick a little operation you could ever hope for. I just wish that my digestion of my adventures was as solid.

So. With all this bubbling around my head, in the far and distant background. This next thing happened.

I have a new cleaning-client who has a house situated near a wooded hill. When you look out one of the upstairs windows, you essentially see what I drew as a crayon study the other morning:



I drew it because it's a beautiful view and I can't stop thinking about it. In fact I actually cheated a little and worked on this crayon-doodle for two mornings. The second morning -- yesterday morning -- I mostly just darkened some things, and colored in that orangey square in the foreground.

In that inexplicable way these things happen, that orangey color got my attention. I thought about it all morning. It pulsed urgently in my soul. I thought about that canvas that I'd played around with a few months ago when I'd thought again about big-scale painting. I thought about those vague scaffolding studies I'd done after visiting the fairgrounds. I thought, I know what I'm doing what I get home..



Thus it was.

And as I was wrapping up I began thinking...what else can I do?




What about that great image of the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport?




Yeah, I thought. Let's try that.



So that's what I did today. It kind of feels unreal.

This of course does not capture the detail that the little gouache paintings do. So there's more work to do. (Happily, there's always more work to do.)

The jury is still out about all those complicated things I was worried about yet failed to articulate about abstract art, fine art, etc. There's so much baggage there. But what gives me hope is that for the first time in a long time I'm not too worried about all that rubbish. What's important to me is that I have finally figured out how to make big things on canvas again. To make with the big colors. And I've connected those little expressive drawings to a way to make them as big and colorful as I want them to be. The static drawings can be lifted out of the notebook and rocketed up to a realm way, way beyond where they started.

It's so satisfying to arrive here. To make that connection. Now I feel like I COULD paint the Museum of Man building. Tomorrow. With nothing but my memory of the place and my feeble attempts to sketch it.

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Feeling a bit off it but glad I stuck it out to see my favorite two clients, who are in their eighties, come back from their picnic at Wahkeena falls.

As he put it, “we spent the day at the Columbia Gorge-ous.”

We talked a little about the tourists who tend to stop, take the requisite picture and leave. “They don’t take the time to take it all in!” They said with deep sympathy. They began unpacking the styrofoam cooler they'd brought, filled with all sorts of treats that made me even more fond of them than I already am.

That night I couldn’t bare to do much else than flip through some of my big pretty books about picture-makers -- and there’s worse ways to spend a sick night on the couch I suppose. I was reading some of the final remarks about Mary and Lee Blair, about alcoholism (which, naively, I was shocked by, considering the warm strength of her visual sense.) The author muses that it could be because both Mary and Lee gave up dreams to be fine artists in exchange for financial stability.

Happy are those who do not draw lines. Maybe. This reminded me of an earlier conversation I’d had with this client when we discussed my work that she had seen for the first time -- in a Christmas postcard I’d sent out.

“I think you’re a fine artist,” she’d said.

.

Good heavens.



My paint is on sale at the art store this week (50% off!) so after getting that yellow I KNEW I needed, I high-tailed it back home to get to work on finding those other colors I mix and use every day.

Some of this has been rewarding. I did find that pistachio color!



Some of it has been grueling. I worked for almost three sheets of paper before I came even close to my lovely family of cream-green-purply brown.



And of course some of it has made great swaths of color that don't really sing to me.



I am recording all this on paper this time so that I STOP getting that weird grey-green color. It's a lovely color, it just really doesn't have a place in my pallet. (My inner, mental pallet that is. As you can see it takes up a great deal of my actual pallet.) Thus far it's been a lot of trial and error. Trusting instincts, and making clear and careful notes when a desired result goes against instinct. It often does.

There's so much here that can't easily be seen on a computer screen. I paint with gouache -- an opaque watercolor -- but not all gouache is created equal. You cannot take colors at their face value. A dark color may actually have a lot more transparency than you'd think, and transparency and opacity is the sliding scale on which colors assert themselves. A yellow with lots of opacity is going to look stronger than an orange with lots of transparency, even though the color as it sits in a big puddle on the pallet looks a LOT darker than yellow does.



Even if we're talking a dark army green and a lavender. It's all about how much paper shows through when it dries.



It's so baffling at first. How can a darker color look lighter than a paler color?! And when it dries is the key. Because man, that dark green looked a lot darker when it was wet.

Knowing about the transparency helps with mixing too. If I'm mixing a sort of wimpy dark color, it's going to mostly stand in the background. It will certainly affect the color, but it won't take over.



Whereas, if I have a really opaque dark color (like this mauve-y purple I use all the time) my mix will end up being mostly-mauve-with-a-touch-of-whatever.



Mixing white with anything seems to cancel out the transparency problem -- fine if we want a lighter color -- but it also (with a few surprising exceptions) tones down the vibrancy of a color a GREAT deal.



That's okay if we're going for the muted "tertiary" type colors. But no good at all if we want the power colors.



It's a lot like genealogy's dominant and recessive traits. It's not a simple 1+1=2. It's more like, I mixed this sand color with three things and twice I got something gross but that other time I got this crazy gorgeous lavender and how did THAT happen?! So you have to experiment. You have to just get the paint onto paper and look at it. And then by God you have to record your findings so you don't waste so much material next time.



And when you finally find something, and replicate it once to make sure you got it right, you cut out the little swatches to make a crisp, clear formula page.



And then you feel so much better.

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