Sycamore House

A friend at work commissioned a painting after seeing and admiring Mistletoe House.  It surprised me to realize it's been over six years since I painted Mistletoe House.

He inspired me with a photo of a painting his father had done at age 8, of a mill with a tall house and a tall mill wheel above a pond with a duck (Donald) floating upon it.  It was impressive and expressive for an eight year old and evocative for my friend.

While on vacation at Black Mountain recently this watercolor seemed to emerge from the page.  I started with a lot of random blind contour lines from interesting photos, as I usually do, and this was the result after I cleaned up and dreamed over it.  Most of my watercolors leave more to chance or to work out during the painting, but this composition was almost completely decided with the drawing.

Here is the painting partially completed.  I tend to go yellow first, and then lay in a first few layers of glaze moving around the painting as I realize what colors different areas should be.  That phase is like doing a puzzle, sometimes I can only see one step I understand, and I don't see the next one until I complete that one.  Then it feels like painting in fog, where I can only see a few feet in front of me.  Sometimes the work follows more conventional methods and I work up the whole surface from light to dark.  Other times I block in all of the darks to get the overall composition and then I work color over the light and dark.

Regardless of the start, most paintings finish the same way, working the composition and emphasis, making fewer and fewer decisions until there isn't anything left that seems to need or want doing.  While there was no duck in my mill painting, there were the usual fish.

19 x 19 watercolor on Arches 140 lb hot press paper.  Sold.

Am I Back?

I took time away from blogging because I felt my art and life were becoming a performance, and I was no longer even the one writing the script.  This permeated most parts of my life at that time.


I've had trouble with this before - the feeling that I am just another observer; my life is a piece of fiction being created as I go along, not something I'm living but something I am play acting.  Art adds another whole dimension of fiction on top, when this is going on...


So I stopped blogging and tried to draw and paint without an audience.  In fact I haven't drawn or painted much - some sketching, a drawing or two, a few watercolors.


But I have a renewed restlessness, a twitchy feeling that my pause is over and something new will now begin.  And I felt moved to write about that.  And other more random things...


Like the painting above - but more on that later.


Like the self assembled Neapolitan ice-cream desserts I've been having in a tiny blue and white bowl after dinner.  I carefully combine equally slim teaspoon scoops of chocolate, vanilla and strawberry Talenti ice cream, always in the correct order, so I can take spoon-nibbles of all three flavors.  It's the right amount and it brings back memories of childhood when this was one of the more interesting flavors available.  The three flavors never mix, but rather blend like harmony in the mouth.  I love dishes that do that.


Like leaving work today and getting into my Infiniti coupe, with the black leather interior (her name is Anginetti, and I also call her Ginny or Cookie) which had to have been 110 degrees.  I open the glove box and (always with a grin) got out my black deerskin driving gloves (not an affectation, they improve my grip and let me relax my hands more on my long commute - and what else should you have in a glove box?) which were also 110 degrees.  I'm lucky the pipsqueak (another nickname) has as powerful an AC unit as her lovely growly engine.  I like nearly everything about my commute.  Including the podcasts I listen to when I'm not listening to home-made mixed CDs (more on those in subsequent posts - we should all be telling each other what music is turning us on - it's still far too hard to find new exciting music).


And today, on my way to buy jeans before going home (more on that below) there were small squalls blowing in from the southwest.  They left towering precarious looking clouds, some backlit brilliantly against a slate grey gloom and others nearly black silhouettes against the sunlit cauliflowers of more distant banks.  I gawked openly as I crossed the mall parking lot, amazed at the mile high profligate outpouring of lights and shadows and gorgeous organic shapes, and I said aloud, as I often do, "What an astonishingly beautiful planet."


When I am buying jeans I want them in several colors, but the REQUIRED color is traditional indigo.  I like them faded or not faded, but I don't like the gasoline variety, or black, or blues so dark they border on a combination of Prussian Blue and Payne's Gray.  Those are not American colors, and I think of "blue jeans" as the quintessential American garment.  I wear them all year, no matter the heat.  I think of my personal uniform as a time faded plaid flannel shirt tucked into blue jeans with a contrasting color tee shirt peeking out through the collar.  I finally found what I wanted in a couple of pairs of Lees - I haven't owned that brand in decades.  I grinned at some Wranglers (what I wore through most of my childhood) but the material is noticeably thinner.  I tried on some Levi 505s - they don't hang well on me and I have never liked Levi pockets.  They don't get pockets.  I'm absent minded and carry two full sets of my keys, too many pens, and a fat wallet - I need real pockets.


I stopped drawing nudes about a year ago.  Drawing from the model was amazing, frustrating, intoxicating, and discouraging.  I stopped when I realized I was not breaking into anything new, and the beauty before me was beyond my ability to capture or even hint at it.  I took from the experience some improved ability to see and to draw, and a lasting awe of the near perfection that is the human form, particularly the female form when gravity reveals the draping of flesh on bones.  Hips and shoulders can pause the world.


I have taken to drawing before bed, with no purpose, no plan, and no conscious control, in a bound notebook from a disheartening company.  I consider it an act of redemption - redeeming part of my past and redeeming the pages.  I do the drawing with a pencil designed by Louise Fili, called a "perfetto" (it really is), graphite on one side and red on the other.  I watch my hand create shapes and lines that might as well be produced by someone else, but I recognize them as mine.  They seem to know when they are finished.  They seem pregnant with meaning, but they are not talking to me.


Finally, about the painting above...  On a recent mountain vacation I put down some strokes of pure colors, also with no plan.  I was using an unnamed brush (Louise was too small, Tilde was MUCH too small, and Frondine was too big).  I stopped after only 5 minutes, with some orange circles, some pink shapes in a line, and green and blue coming up from the bottom.  It went home in that state while I finished Sycamore House (another post later).


This last weekend we bought a bouquet at the farmer's market filled with rudbeckia, a small sunflower, speedwells, and coreopsis of the sort where every stem has a different combination of reds and yellows.  The last make me vibrate inside, as do an array of different color seashells on a beach (like periwinkles, or ribbed arcs) or the different colors of the small velvet oak galls on white oak trees up north.  I used to feel the same way about the colors in a bag of peanut m&m's prior to the addition of blue.  Yellow, orange (nearly the perfect orange - just a bit too opaque and a bit too tinted), red, light brown, dark brown and the shock of green.  All a fan of analogous colors with one stand out (green).  Blue destroyed that perfect tension and they dropped the beautiful polished wood color of the lighter brown, so while I still eat peanut m&m's I no longer get that inner vibration.


ANYWAY... I brought the bouquet to my studio space, set it before me, pulled out the incomplete color splashings, and again, with little purpose or conscious attention to composition, scribbled coreopsis and black-eyed susans and purple speedwells.  Then I added two wrens and a fairy bluebird (they're Australian - with a tail I might have designed if I were fashioning birds).  I allowed the vibrations of the coreopsis and the perfetto pencils and some prismacolors to just do their thing.  I still recognize it as mine, but I have no idea what I was doing.  It felt closer to childhood art than I have been able to get in years, and it felt like a glimpse of the inner garden.  I have no idea how to finish it, or if it needs anything else.  It just was and is.

The Lily Pad Stop

Eh bien - c'est moi, Grenouille.   Etienne is doing the typing, and using his login for this post.  The occasion is the arrival, from AKUBA, the family of the sister of the cheri of Etienne, of this "lilypad" stopper for the wines.  This tower which supports the pad (en réalité a leaf of the lotus - view the pink seed box between my toes) is vin rosé from the Rhone.  I have never splashed in the waters of the Rhone, but I have heard the vin c'est très bien.  It was très émouvant for Karen to send this pour mon élevage et agrandissement.  I feel grande indeed, merci, AKUBA!

 

On other topics, Etienne said he has received several ribs from amis who are fatigued of his silence in the book of faces and the blog.  The cards of Christmas have delivered some of these ribs (he did not show me the bones, it seemed they were only marks in the cards).  Etienne is considering.  It made him laugh full of rue (avec regret).  Perhaps there will be more posts?  There have been paintings and drawings with no reportage.  Perhaps Etienne is owing others a "peek"?

Au revoir,

G

Magyar Ancestor

I have a completely unfounded and yet vivid view of my Hungarian ancestry.  This image captures some of that feeling.  He emerged on the paper, as did the cat.  If anything factual informed this face it was my recollection of my gentled fierce tempered Magyar grandfather.  Something of his humor and spirit (or how it affected me) show in this painting.  I don't recall him liking cats, though...

Watercolor and pencil - 21 x 15.5 inches.

Click the image for a larger view.

By the end of my life I would like to have smiled enough to have crow's feet like these.

Dryads

A friend at work commissioned a painting of a dryad.  She wears a pendant that is a relief sculpture of a dryad, and has long been fascinated with the image.

The idea inspired several pieces, three shown here, and at least one more still on the way.  Since I was a teenager I've also been fascinated with caryatids and dryads, both of which combine the beauty of women and the grace and grandeur of columns and trees.

The first image that emerged was of a weeping cherry with her arms and hands up in her hair of blooming branches.  The figure I used as inspiration showed the beauty of youth and the lovely bow of her thigh over her other leg.  I tried to capture that bend of head and neck and the expression girls often have when they are focused on what their fingers are doing in their hair.  I was thinking of blossoms falling and the quiet immobility of trees that would allow the pink petals to lie undisturbed on her lovely curved lap

The next idea that came to me was of baobabs, large motherly trees with soft masses of concentrated leaves above and elephants below.  So I did a pencil and white charcoal sketch of Mother Baobab, tending young elephants, inspired by the strong face I remember when I think of Mabel Bullock, one of my highschool art teachers.  She inspired younger artists in the 1970's, particularly young African-American women.  Drawing this gave me time to feel emotions inspired by her fostering spirit, and the awe I feel for creatures like elephants (or artists) because they seem so unlikely and enchanted.  The reaching of the elephants around her emerged largely on its own - the kind of thing that often happens when I get out of the way.  If I ever paint this I plan to texture her bark with an African pattern, like Bakuba cloth.

Two other images came to me and I started both about a month ago.  One is of a pollarded willow, leaning out from a hillside, like the figrehead of a ship.  I pictured her with her hair and fingers arching back behind her, like wind blown branches.  I thought of her roots bracing her against the wind, gripping the rocks.  My friend bought this one, which was finished a few weeks ago.

The other is not finished (and not shown here).  It will be closer to the traditional depiction of a dryad in form, but will be a more crowded image and painted in a different, less realistic style.  I'm looking to move my painting closer to my internal world, to get into that walled garden I've mentioned before, and I feel this painting can help.

New Year 2013

New Year's Eve is a favorite day of my year because our cul de sac has a "Winter Wander" party organized by our fabulous next-door neighbors.  About 20 of us go from house to house, sampling some tasty party food plus a wine pairing.  The street is a magical combination of personalities and caring about each other.  All of our kids, from 4 to 24 years of age, have been growing up on this street, and in this atmosphere, with lots of outdoor play and the usual drama of waxing and waning childhood friendships.  The party is laid back, we come and go throughout the evening to recharge our batteries in our quiet house, and it ends with everyone in the next-door neighbor's TV room counting down and hollering and exchanging first kisses of the year, followed by corny jokes and ending with a few of us left, talking about movies, comics, books, music, and borrowing CDs.  Last night's party was as good as any in the tradition, and I'm still glowing with the memories.

Early on the morning of the eve I had looked out one of our front windows and saw the sun gilding the tops of the loblollies in the early blue grey.  Below them was our front yard Japanese maple, my slow sculpture these last fifteen years, full of large Christmas ornaments and strings of lights.  I decided to paint it.

I did an uninhibited drawing, using pencil, and then a brush and resist.  Watercolor washes followed, to make a dawnish blueness.  Then I removed the resist (it's like magic) and did the rest of the painting to express my feelings about this day, the light, the neighbors, the good fortune which placed us here, and these people around us.  Orange and pen lines and colored pencils.  After an initial push while the ladies in my house went to Zumba, I happily continued in all the odd moments of the quiet day.  By the party I had finished it, and I took this orange warmth of former parties into this year's party and beyond.

Happy New Year, everyone.  May 2013 be good to us all.

Sky Window

This piece is from several weeks ago.  It was painted over a few weekends.  It seems to be from a more wordless place than usual, to me, so I have little to say about it.  Watercolor - 19 x 19 inches.  Click on it for a larger view.

The Cherry Dryad which Grenouille mentioned in the previous post, is all but finished and signed. I'll show her later. The commissioned piece has inspired me to try several more dryads. Like the patron, I've long been fascinated by the subject, though I had not thought to paint it. I also got interested in caryatids, and drew them in highschool and college.