Back to drawing - hooray!

How nice it is finally to get back to drawing after travels and the imbroglio of daily life! Life drawing is a passport to sanity for me and makes me feel more centered again. That hush in the room as a dozen or so artists concentrate on drawing is like a benediction; it reminds me that there is this whole union of artists out there all over the place, quietly doing their best to create art in all sorts of versions and visions, all intense and passionate. A nice universe of which to be a part!

Time and time again, I read in the press the comment from an artist that only when he or she is actively involved in art-making is there a sense of coherence, even harmony, in that artist's world. When one is not drawing, painting or whatever the creation involves, then there is a feeling of disquiet, dislocation. It is true in my case.

As I peer at the intricacy of fingers clasped, or the play of light on muscles on an arm or across a back, time becomes meaningless, for a while. That is a good feeling. It makes me think of the quote I read the other day from Antoni Gaudi, the great Catalan Modernist architect from the later 19th and early 20th century (think of la Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona): "Everything comes from the great book of nature." Life drawing is certainly part of that enormous and endlessly fascinating tome.

Main Gate, Dragon, Antoni Gaudi, Guell Park, Barcelona

Trusting your Eyes

Mary Beth McKenzie, the highly acclaimed figurative artist observed, "Artists make things so much easier for themselves when they learn to trust their eyes".

Self Portrait, Mary Beth McKenzie (Image courtesy of the artist)

I was alluding to this aspect of art-making yesterday in a blog about "the selective eye". The artist's eye is a most important tool, not only for observing and informing the artist, but also in the other sense, the inner eye, which develops with experience, training, discernment, time and work.

Trusting one's eyes is almost the first important step towards becoming an artist. I was lucky enough to learn to draw by the Nicolaides method, always drawing from real life, using contours and gesture drawing to learn of the subject. "There is only one right way to draw – physical contact with all sorts of objects through all the senses," Kimon Nicolaides declared, and it is true, I have found, for me. His method involved not looking at the paper, but fixing one's eyes intently on the subject being drawn, to hone the eye-hand connection.

Once that eye-hand connection is made, you begin to be able to trust your eyes and know that somehow, almost miraculously, it sometimes seems, the drawing will work out alright. Later, I learned to trust my eyes in terms of colour selection and assessment, so that the paintings seem, mostly, to work from the colour point of view. But this trust is an ever-developing, ever-active business. The more you draw and paint, the more you observe and use your eyes in every possible way, the better your eyes serve you to create art. Precious tools for an artist - it behoves us all to take care of our eyes, literally and figuratively!
 

Art and Meditation

I recently read a fascinating review in Art in America (April 2009) by Edward M. Gomez, entitled Altered States. It was a review of the just-closed exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum on "The Third Mind", which examined the influence of Asia on earlier generations of artists. Apparently, many of those artists meditated, a result of their interest in Buddhism. Their ability to pay attention to matters deemed "ordinary" and to be able to "suspend time" derived, it was thought, from their practice of meditation. Artists as diverse as Arthur Dove or John Cage were cited in the article.

Thinking about the role of meditation in my own experience made me realise that although I do indeed meditate, I find that the act of making art is in itself a form of meditation. Most artists I know find that time becomes a very variable affair, since we all lose track of time very easily when creating art. However, I also find that I become much more efficient at using the rest of my time, away from art, to do all the other daily chores when I am working on a painting or drawing. I wonder if that is a common occurrence? It is also easy to pay close attention to whatever art and subject of art I am involved with, although I don't know that I would attribute that aspect of art-making to the practice of meditation.

When I am not able to work as an artist, I find I get really dislocated, and so it is a relief to revert to mediation to make life more serene. Brain circuitry in artists must be predicated on a daily "fix" of art, apparently!

The rhythm of observation and creation, drawing and looking, is indeed addictive. Even when I find myself inside because of bad weather, as happened when I was Artist in Residence once at Wild Acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, there is a meditative peace and serenity from trying to create harmony and yet accuracy in a silverpoint drawing. Even with the most humble of materials!

This was the result of two days of solid rain and yet I had little realisation of how much time elapsed during the execution of the drawing.

Blue Ridge Mountain Meditation, silverpoint 11 x 15" image, Collection of Evansville Museum of Arts, Science and History, Evansville, IN

Drawing as Thinking

In earlier posts on this blog, I alluded to the exploration and excitement of drawing. But as I try to work on a series of silverpoint drawings I am doing, I realise again how much the act of drawing is a form of thinking. I am working on a series based on a piece of music that I listened to during a Savannah Music Festival concert. The images began to flood into my mind's eye as I heard the music. Now I need actually to work out how I want to construct those images and what I am actually trying to say in the drawings.

Consequently, I am trying to think through the silverpoint stylus, in fact, as I work out the drawing.

Silverpoint marks and stylii, (Image courtesy of Anita Chowdry)

The exercise makes me think of a really fascinating document I found some while ago - Aesthetic Education, Inquiry and the Imagination, written in 2007 by Madeleine Fuchs Holzer, Director of Educational Development at the Lincoln Center Institute. In this document, well worth downloading, especially if you are a teacher, nine Capacities for Imaginative Learning are laid out. The first ones, Noticing Deeply, Embodying, Questioning, Making Connections and Identifying Patterns, seem not only very germane for teachers but for artists themselves.

Every one of those concepts helps as one is thinking and/or drawing. If you are drawing something from real life, the level of observation will dictate the level of detail you show in your knowledge and thus portrayal of the subject matter. Even if you later simplify the drawing, or painting, the knowledge you have gained from noticing deeply will enrich and inform the art. The same acquired essence of the subject will permeate the artwork though your embodying it and translating it into the art. A questing curiosity and willingness to venture into unknown realms will lead you to do better art - the questioning part is very much bound up with thinking with the pencil or silver stylus. What if I do this... or that? What will that convey and what effect will it achieve? The same elasticity and openness of mind allows one to remember back to other art seen or done, other experiences, other results; the new work you are thinking about creating will be enriched by the connections you can make as you are developing the art. Even identifying patterns, visually or otherwise, can be a valuable stepping stone to thinking of the best way to go in planning the art.

Ultimately, however, after all the effort put into the initial thinking/drawing stage, there comes the time to launch yourself into what you are being driven to create. And you know full well that along the way, there will be surprises and deviations... and more thought and more drawing – before the work is finished.

Hidden from Sight

Today, when the art materials industry and art instruction world have hugely increased in size, everyone can easily turn to art, either to create or to support its creation. The statistics abound to show what a beneficial multiplier factor the arts are to an area's economy, and the arts are viewed very positively.

It is, however, still, a rather solitary occupation to be an artist. No matter what the discipline, it remains a discipline requiring a person ultimately to produce something. In painting or drawing, for instance, it is mostly the artist's passion which will keep the creation going. In that dedication to creating a work, there is a lot that goes on "behind the scenes". When I conceive of a drawing or painting, there are initially decisions as to the medium (silverpoint drawing or graphite, for instance, or watercolours or acrylics), the format (horizontal or vertical, large or small), or is it going to be one piece or one in a series. Once those basic choices are made, there are then the decisions as to how to convey the concept, what to say, how to say it, why is it important?

Studies and exploratory drawings help the preparation. And it is at that stage, often, that the essence of the idea - the essence of a person's character for a portrait, or the spirit of the land in a landscape, for example - becomes paramount. What is "hidden from our sense of sight", as art consultant and author Roger H. Boulet wrote on draughtswoman Ann Kipling of British Columbia, is something that each artist needs to tap into, albeit often unconsciously. Paula Rego (see my blog entry of April 1st) was talking of tapping into this when she talked of the excitement of a voyage into the unknown each time she starts drawing. Intensity of observation, vitality of expression, a willingness to push through to evoke life itself - those are pathways to creation that each artist travels willingly, knowing they are important. And each of us, as artists, recognises that those journeys are lonely but rewarding.

Study for 'The Dance', Paula rego (Image courtesy of the Tate)

The Dance, oil, Paula Rego, 1986, (Image courtesy of the Tate)

"Seeing with new eyes"

I am still immersed in drawing spring flowers and was thus thinking further about looking at things as if it were for the first time. Change the light that is shining, for instance, on a white azalea, and it instantly becomes a new entity. That is an aspect of working from real life, particularly en plein air, which makes for perpetual challenges and interest. You have to decide to "freeze" light at one stage or another and then try and keep to that consistent light play. Otherwise, your drawing or painting can become rather incoherent if you are hewing to realism. On the other hand, it also means that you can do a completely new work, a new "landscape", without moving from your chosen site.

It is not only in visual art that seeing things in an active way brings rewards. I came upon a statement Professor Alison Richard, Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University (www.cantab.org), made in a newsletter about fundraising for Cambridge's 800th Anniversary Campaign. In it, she quoted Marcel Proust saying, " the real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes" and celebrated that the Campaign had brought new eyes to Cambridge. Fresh appraisals of all and everything are often worthwhile - from how the US Government is run, thanks to the Obama Administration's new eyes, to an interpretation by Ian Bostridge (www.ianbostridge.com) at the Savannah Music Festival (http://www.savannahmusicfestival.org) of Schubert's songs, that I have not heard since I listened to a long-ago recital by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. If one is open and curious, new landscapes abound.

Listening to the Schubert songs, I reverted to thinking visually, seeing colours in Ian Bostridge's beautiful sounds and interpretations. Somehow, in some of the Lieder, there were effects that Sonia or Robert Delaunay would have loved to paint, I felt. A capricious thought, possibly, but one I would not have had without metaphorical "new eyes".

Sonia Delaunay, 1914, Prismes électriques, oil on canvas, (Image courtesy of Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris)

"The 10,000-Hour Rule" for Art?

I was reading a piece by Malcolm Gladwell about the "10,000 Hour Rule" talked about by scientists. Gladwell, author of the bestsellers Tipping Point and Blink, has also written about the secrets of successful people in his recent book, Outliers: the Story of Success. The 10,000 hours in question are linked, it seems, to achieving success in no matter what field. Whether it is writing, computer programming, composing music or creating art, it apparently applies.

I deduce a simple, forceful message for artists from this: no matter what your medium, practice, practice, practice. You may or may not initially have huge artistic talent, but the message is that if you apply yourself intelligently and diligently to creating art, you can and will become a better artist. I find that both challenging and encouraging. The "Painting a Day" movement is really a marvellous step towards this concept, and one all artists should try and embrace, even if the results are not put on the Web. All the artists one sees going around in public spaces, a drawing book in hand, or quickly catching some scene with deft lines, are doing themselves a huge favour too.

Now that I have publicly reminded myself what I should be doing this very moment, I must be off to do some silverpoint drawing!

An example of one-a-day-Painting