A New Painting Now Hangs From Clothespins Above My Art Table
In my last post I wrote about feeling like Old Mother Hubbard and not having anything in my cupboard to share nor hanging from the clothespins above my art table. I noted this after three of my paintings were published, a three page spread, in a book printed by a small press in San Francisco.
Too, I pondered what I would paint going forward as I felt this three page spread had closed a long chapter of my work which focused on the Iñupiat statement, "The ocean is my garden." Hence, there are delphiniums swaying under the sea as rockfish swim by in one of my published works and is used as the cover art for this blog.
Also in my last post, I wrote about perhaps not painting fish anymore. That was noted too quickly as there are many types of fish swimming through bodies of water here in the Pacific Northwest. As you may have noted in the photo of my very recent work opening this post, I still paint fish. Here is a close-up photo of two herring-inspired fish from that new work:
I mostly draw my artwork free-hand. I do occasionally use tracing paper to initially sketch a very specific plant from a botanical reference book. Once I have muscular memory of how to draw that image, I let go of the tracing paper and return to working free-hand.
What I truly favor about drawing free-hand and without a guiding image is that my work is pulled from my own memories. This is also why I have moved to often using windowpanes in my artwork. Each frame sings its own song. If you look at one frame carefully you will see an entire painting.
The below quote by illustrator Edward Ardizzone, noted in Drawing for Illustration by Martin Salsbury (Thames & Hudson, 2022), speaks of hand-drawing from memory:
"Drawings made from memory are very different...
the drawings will inevitably manifest on paper
in a different way, emerging through the filter of
memory and feelings about the subject... The
line itself will be imbued with different character,
often revealing new possibilities and direction.”
His words echo my own positioning. My artistic goal is to add more complexity - movement and texture (texture in watercolor painting?) - to my work while increasing tone, color and atmosphere.
It felt risky to do so as I have publishers and followers who favor my earlier artwork. Why not keep repeating what works? Yet, the other question looping through my mind was/is, "How can I sustain elements of my earlier work within my new, more complex work? This is what I think I have achieved in my recent work Advaya, which means non-duality; no division between the past and the present or between what is above and what is below, as well as so much more.
Yet, let me slow down here. I didn't just jump up from my couch where I am often found reading one book or another and start this new work. It was a slow unfurling which moved from mental reflection to physical action. Pablo Auladell, a well-known illustrator, notes in the same book which I referenced above, the following:
"The first thing that comes to me is the name, the title
of the project, and then a vision, an image that appears
more or less clearly in my mind and becomes a sort of
atmospheric, aesthetic pattern... All this means that in
the first stages, I draw very little and think a lot."
Please note that I added the underlining and did so as this is exactly how I work. I do see the complete image in my mind before I start sketching. This can be good, but also restricting as there must be room for flexibility and change as you create (the exception might be commissioned artwork).
I do try and stay with that initial image I see within the mental landscape of my mind as it was formed from much reflection - thinking a lot - and evolved from the visual library which I walk forward with continually adding new elements to my autobiographical or core memories.
I pause for a moment remembering the well-known writer John Berger’s statement, “Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away.” Art walks from my mind and onto the page. Yet, like all path-walking, geological or metaphorical, if you lose your focus (distracted, exhausted, etc.) or direction - you might lose your step for a moment or longer.
I am very careful when I am painting. I cover areas I am not working on as a pre-caution against accidents. Yet, accidents are named that for a reason. They happen without intention. I was up late one night painting some of the berries red in the top windowpane of the painting and, yes, a painting accident did occur.
I woke the next morning and immediately looked at the work I had completed the night before. I stood in slippered feet staring at a splattering of small marks of red paint where I had been working. I then looked at my left elbow and forearm (left-handed painter) and saw very similar red paint marks. Here is the good thing about being a painter for several years, I didn't freak out or think, "Well, this work is ruined!" Instead I immediately thought, "So, let's fix this." I sat down and did just that. It changed a small part of the drawing, but is not noticeable.
The first photo shows the random, red paint marks. The second shows the work post-fixing.
Flexibility in your "vision" of the work also invites a dialogue between you and the work. I paint a fish's face, add its eye and it stares back at me letting me know I forgot to add its gill. I remember vividly painting one of the last fish in this work. When I finished painting its face, I laughed aloud, leaned forward, looked at it and said, "Hi there, I think I know you."
This has happened to me before. It happens when I paint the eye on an animal after painting its body. The eye "looks" at me and there is this moment of advaya, non-duality between the artist and the painted subject. I also think of it as painter's bliss. I don't think of it in egotist terms positioning me as "creator." Instead, I think of it as this organic interplay of elements in which I am one of.
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Now lets swim down an ancestral river together, one that washed waves of spotted, textured kelp into this new artwork of mine. It also might be a good time for you to take a reading break.
One of my other goals for this new work and future works was to invite the viewer to see the shared movement of what is above and what is below, a non-dualistic look at the living within the sea and within the sky.
I also wanted to move away from using a white gel pen, which I used much within my earlier work. Instead, I wanted to shift to more shading, color contrasts, texture and minimal highlighting. I wrote in parentheses in a paragraph above "texture in a watercolor painting?" My answer is, "Yes."
I additionally noted that I have walked the shoreline of diverse beaches and will walk more in the near future. My bare feet and ocean-wave-wet kelp know each other well. I can see within my mental eye the sticky, pocked marked and calcified sections of a fan of seaweed now.
Recently, I twice-visited (going again next week) the must-see art exhibition The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art at the Portland Art Museum.
My great-great grandmother, Virginia Albertine Walker Slocum, wife of the legendary author, Joshua Slocum, lived much of her non-seafaring life in Australia. Her second son, my great-grandfather, Benjamin Aymar, was born there.
Above: Virginia Albertine Walker Slocum.
Virginia is the daughter of an English/American father and has a maternal, Indigenous ancestry; mother or maybe grandmother of the Lenni Lenape tribe whose ancestral homeland, Lenapehoking, is now called Manhattan, NY.*
Their family relocated to Sydney, Australia at the start of the gold rush. Virginia spent many of her pre-married, adult days riding horseback and camping under the stars in the Australian Outback. I have this thread of shared, ancestral memory / thought that she also viewed Australian Indigenous art drawn or carved into rocks, painted on housing or across a sheet hanging to dry in the summer heat. This made going to see the PAM exhibit feel deeply personal, as I am quite sure many others felt also.
I had slowly painted the kelp in my new artwork and added white dots into the colored paint a few days before first attending the exhibit, something I had not done before. When I walked into one room of the PAM's exhibit, I felt this certainty that the texture I had hoped to create had been as I saw an echo of the dotted-patterning within my work in front of me.
I returned home later in the day and let my eyes slowly wash over Advaya. Many artists talk about being influenced by other artists or artworks. The work I saw at the exhibit and other work by Australian Aboriginal artists has had a significant impact on my art.
I spliced together inset photos of both my work and the two Aboriginal artworks above. I created two, separate, collaged images. For me this duplicates how my minds often works when I am looking intently at a work of art within a gallery / museum.
“The best thing a work of art can do is take our minds with it.”
Anne Carson
Before I finish writing about my new work and that long thread of ancestral memory, let me share one final thing. When I attended a lecture about the Australian Indigenous art exhibit, I looked down at the rug running across the floor and for a brief moment felt emotions washing across my face.
In my new painting there is a blue ribbon running through it and pulling together all of the windowpanes. I saw this same thing on the oriental rug in the lecture hall. My mother filled each shared space of our various houses with oriental rugs just like the one in the hall which is pictured below. There was the blue ribbon that thread itself from my childhood into my artwork.
A day or two after I finished my new artwork, I returned to a draft of a poem and finished it. The flow of my watercolor work became a wave of creative energy which river-washed into my poetic work. The title of the poem is Cloud and Blue which refers specifically to cloudberries and blueberries. It's already in the hands of publishers. I will write about this poem in my next post.
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*Family history can be difficult to verify when it’s several generations back in that history. Some members of my family have been absolutely certain about Virginia having a Lenni Lenape mother while others question if it was her mother or grandmother - this generation of Slocum ancestors will find the answer.
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