Smudging My Almost Finished Artworks.

 

Can you see the water rising in my new painting? This is one of my favorite acts in completing an artwork. It's when my paintbrush is no longer in my hand. I instead hold a General's pastel chalk pencil. It's the color 4403 Indigo Blue, the background color for many of my recent paintings. I don't draw with it. I smudge the work with its dust and the water rises.

I use two very specific stones that I found at Nome beach, one has a flat surface and the other is a hag stone, to create the dust. I rapidly rub the tip of the pencil across one or the other, or both, creating a small measure of particles. I rub my right pointer and middle finger in the blue dust, lift them over to my almost completed painting and smudge the color across the page. 

It's this hyper-focused, physical / tactile work which re-positions me from sitting behind the fine point of my prehensile gripped paintbrush to standing bent over my hand which is engaging in the work more like a potter with clay than a painter with watercolors. Lastly, I use a tortillion, or blending stump, a pencil-like stick of tightly wrapped paper with points at both ends, to evenly smooth out the blue across the paper. 

The first time I did this, smudged my work, I felt slightly nervous as I am always cautious not to touch my artwork while I paint as it may still be wet and blur or splatter. Too, I keep a piece of blank white paper under the side of my hand while I paint so as not to imprint the tiny net-like pattern of my skin onto the work. Only the fine bristles of my brush touch it. So, to then rub my fingers firmly and rhythmically over it, smudging it, seemed contrary to all of of my caution, but timing is everything.  

I wait for the work to be completely dry before I start. I create the indigo blue chalk dust, rub my fingers into it, then place them on the surface of the art work and smudge the color across it. I strongly favor the physicality of it; the feel of colors.

I celebrate the sculptor, the potter, the fiber artist, and all others who engage physically with their work from starting point to finish. We painters stand back from it and our brush does the touching, of course there are exceptions. Yet, this degree of separation, the space between the artist and the canvas or paper, has been vastly written about by art historians, theorists and critics for hundreds of years.  

The act of touching the artwork, other than a dab or two of linseed oil here and there, with the human hand had implications regarding the spirituality of art and its purity of beauty. The artist expressed something higher than themselves. Wassily Kandinsky' s famous text, "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," published in 1912, is still widely read and celebrated. 

This made the artist a unique being, a genius, amongst the crowd. Yet, if I can call myself an artist, and I do, so can my neighbor. I taught myself to paint. Actually, I learned during summer camps as a child and tucked that learned knowledge inside a pocket in my heart sleeve until I found myself living alone 350 miles above the Arctic Circle. I then pulled it out and nurtured it so it would grow. It continues to. Sometimes I invite my own spirituality into the act of making as silence calms me and in that serenity I find a sacred peace. Sacred is a word I privately define. It has no hierarchy.  

Back to smudging my work, corner to corner.

This smudging of my painted paper with my blue dusted fingers is a curl of a wave, the pulling of a shade when night falls, a shift from anticipation to actualization. When the dust of blue is smoothed into every corner and across the page, I lean back and see the work fully. I then slowly and carefully remove the painter's tape.

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 Finally, I sign and date the work.

More about this recently finished artwork in my next blog post.  For now, it's hanging on the line above my art table. ©

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