Starting a New Piece for a Series While Contemplating Surrealism in My Continued Art Work.

 

I recently went blueberry picking (I did again just yesterday) and afterwards I sketched and watercolor painted the work in my last post and seen below. I favor this piece and have it hanging above my art studio desk. It looks very much like a branch of a blueberry bush, which is what I was going for with this piece.

 

A few months ago, during Parent/ Teacher conferences, I sat listening to one of my student's parents talk to me about his work as a crab fisherman and the incredible significance of herring for him to be successful at getting a large haul of crabs. Too, how herring is vital to all subsistence and professional fishing here in Alaska and in other areas of the world. A few weeks later I sat down, drew herring and kelp, and then watercolor painted the image below:

 

Shortly after completing the painting of the herrings, I started a series of work titled "The Ocean Is Our Garden." I was told that over a course of several decades by my Iroquois Seneca stepfather, Barney. When I first moved to Alaska in 2011, I was told it again and by many since then. 

 

This statement specifically references ocean animals and plant life. I asked myself what if I took that statement literally and had flowers, fruit and/or vegetables in the sea, even if it didn't make sense in terms of actuality but did in terms of dream imagery, memory and/or artistic statement?

I initially painted two works for this series. The one below, which is also the header art for this blog, is called "The Ocean Is Our Garden: Pacific Yellow-Eyed Rockfish and Delphiniums." I chose delphiniums because the word partially sounds like dolphins, which do inhabit oceans, and so provided a little play on words. 

The second painting "The Ocean Is Our Garden: Salmon and Arctic Poppies" can be seen below. This painting was recently published in the Penn Review, the literary journal of the University of Pennsylvania (June/2023). This is my second painting to be included in their journal. More on that publication in a future post.  They published it with the edited title, "The Ocean Is Our Garden."

https://www.pennreview.org/the-ocean-is-our-garden

Now I wanted to take the painting of the blueberry bush branch and the herring (both above) and put them together in a third painting for this series. Yet, I didn't want it to just be an echo of the two above. I want the series to include related but diverse work. This was/is my challenge. This brings me to the following quote by visual artist Julie Mehretu, "That’s what I’m interested in: the space in between, the moment of imagining what is possible and yet not knowing what that is.” I was doing exactly that. I was asking myself, "What is possible and yet not knowing what that is." 

 

Part of this questioning has to do with exploring how to include surrealistic art concepts within my own work. I have a great love for surrealism, yet very limited experience creating it. The next question was, "How can I slowly move from one painting to another towards surrealist work?"

 

What defines surrealism? Surrealist painter Andre' Breton wrote, "Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought." One of the most iconic surrealist painting is titled, "The Treachery of Images," (1928) by Rene' Magritte.  In this work, Magritte includes the inscription "Ceci n'est pas un pipe" ('This is not a pipe') below his painting of a realistic looking wooden pipe.

 

 

But, if it's not a pipe what is it? This is the question that Magritte poses the viewer. Too, is a painted object the same as reality, a real object? 

 

Marie Watts, a contemporary American artist whose work I admire and viewed last year in the show "Each/Other" at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, re-frames Magritte's work in her piece, "Companion Species (Is this a pipe?)," (2020). While asking the same questions as Magritte, she extends those to include, "Are these wolves?" Or the statement, "These are not wolves. This is not a pipe."

 

 

According to ARTLEXT, an online art dictionary, surrealist art often has "dreamlike and uncanny imagery depicting mysterious environments and landscapes." Too, "a distortion of reality with contradictory elements and random associations." These are just two of the nine descriptions posted.

For me the question Watts asks, "Is this a pipe?" is similar to my artistic inquiry regarding the statement "The ocean is our garden." I am asking the viewer, "Is this a garden?" or making the statement, "These are not fish." I don't include that question or statement in the title of any of my current works, but it is on the back burner. My work is expanding. It is gaining complexity.

I often dream what I am going paint. Or I will be out biking and the whole scene of the composition walks in front of my mind's eye. I have honestly almost crashed when this has happened! Trying to explain this and write a visual representation of what I experience when "seeing" the work before it's painted makes me think of recently watching, via the web, the preview phase for the jury of the figurative contest at the MEAM, the European Museum of Modern Art. Paintings were carried out one by one and held up for jurors to collectively and individually observe. That is somewhat like what I experience except no one is holding the work up. It just comes into my mind and becomes part of my visual library. 

 

In my dream for my third painting in the series spoken of above, I saw a blanket of blue, which became the title of the work after it was finished. It was a sea of blueberries, including stems and leaves, within which fifteen herring floated. The blueberries were various shades of blue, and sizes.  The herring were also diverse in shape and expression.

I started the work the next day. First I drew and cut out herring stencils from heavy-weight paper. Next, I traced around the stencils and then hand drew details on each fish. I referred to a watercolor sketch I had done for my initial herring painting to guide me:

 

 

 

 

 Then, I painted the leaves and the blueberry elements:

Lastly, I painted the fish. Yet painting the fish took several steps. First, I simply watercolor painted each of them:  

 

Secondly, I added highlights to the outline of the body, face and more: 

 

Next, I used a blue pastel pencil to shade-in the entire background up to the tape. Thinking the piece was finished, I removed the tape along the edges, signed and dated it. I hung it up on my string for art and posted it on social media:

I received many compliments on this posted work from family and friends. But, when I texted photos of it to my father he asked, "First flowers in the ocean with fish, now blueberries and fish? Do herring eat blueberries in Alaska?" No, Dad. Another friend texted me, "Do blueberries grow in the water there?" Hints of surrealism are popping up in my art.

 

Yet, the night I posted the work on social media, I woke up from a dream knowing it wasn't finished, and it wasn't.  It wasn't about perfectionism. I work hard to avoid that. It was about what was left to do. I needed to add a camel colored outline, highlights and accent marks on each of the fish's body and face. 

 

Let me stop for a moment and state that it can be a really scary thing to go back and fix what you think is necessary to finish a work after others have said how much they love it as it is - but if your gut is telling you it's not done, it's not done and you take the risks to finish it. I did.

 

 

I re-posted the finished work on social media with these words:

 

I received even more compliments, as well as a self-awareness that it was finished.  

 

Now there are three paintings in my series. The one above is titled, "The Ocean is Our Garden: Blanket of Blue." I am already thinking of my next painting which may or may not include crabapples and halibut. Actually, there’s a pretty good chance that it will, unless I dream otherwise.  ©

 

 

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