Butterfly wing, rain, zig-zag

Sometimes I lose track of old favorites like this stitched piece from several years ago. They inspired so much. What followed lost the rawness of this piece, the rawness I find so compelling. There are only three or four of these on raw umber rubbed canvas, canvas that took on this leathery look.

New Songs: Nº 17 & 18

Color Tests

Trying to figure the differences in gouache colors in the purple-red range. Dry in the pans, two are indistinguishable–which two? Found a Rubin's vase drawing in a sketchbook from 2003–looks very close to the singers series.

Gouache & pencil

New gouache and drawing silver from a book at Norlin, not so settled but satisfying enough. And a sketch from a stunning photograph of a horse & rider seen from the air with the horse's shadow streaming out above them. From a book of aerial photographs of Turkey. Sketch eclipsed by drawing of a band of silver ornament.


More color testing in a different vein, made me think of open mouths, singing?

A book page from some time ago–a collaborative project, theme was things pressed. This is wire pressed into painted paper, paint burnished with shoe polish. Stitched onto old stained paper that was found with the original press. Wire imprint looks somewhat fetal.

Hallowe'en

Painting Techniques

Thinking about technique in this way:
Suggestion: what if the fruition of technique is confidence? Meaning gaining skill builds one's confidence. Making a collection of skills for skills sake runs the risk of the skills determining the painting, rather than the painting determining what skills or techniques are necessary to bring it to completion. If painters develop confidence in their general level of technical skill, then they are able to improvise technically on the spot–whatever is required by the painting. You've heard the saying, perhaps, that every good idea eventually becomes a business and every business eventually becomes a racket. So with painting techniques.
Isn't technique a beautiful word, with its ch & q?

Filming

Spent the weekend at Mountain Water with film crew filming [ARMY] installation. Great fun. Sorry no photos from the weekend–too busy. Here's an old beauty.

Soldiers in the form of fence pales for the installation [ARMY]. Upper ones face Greenhorn; lower ones face Blanca.

The Yi Singing

Nº11 in the series of songs, singing. Sometimes work can seem like it's going sideways into a parallel and wrong channel, and then the context catches up. Singing is a quality of voice associated with earth element in Chinese medicine; Army (Shi) is Earth over Water in the I Ching. The yi are the creative, receptive spirits of the earth and charged with singing the heart's song.
The character shows the heart below with the radical for musical note, poetry, uttered sound above. Beautiful.

Song

song continues

Theme & Variation

A little variation on "Song," a painting from February, like a story of a face on the moon.
There is a quote from a Barry Lopez story that always moves me (from his Crow & Weasel). In a speech Badger says, "The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. …Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive."

New Sketchbook

Some days in for this book started on April Fool's Day, this page some time before the 16th, flight drawings begin there.

Dream…

Tile patterns sketched from Zillïj, wonderful picture book of Moroccan tile.

Drawing

Drawing is an ongoing pleasure this winter-to-spring. Especially enjoying silver–using 4H pencils generally ignored in the pencil case. This small sketchbook almost full, maybe 10 pages left. May return to work bland pages.

Medallion

Painted Sketches

Working with the difference between seeing and depicting. This painting uses a sketch of field & snow patterns seen from a jet flying west over Kansas, probably. Maybe eastern Colorado. The sketches below are of land seen from above nearly straight down; the painting translates it, or distorts it, into a one-point perspective view and adds other blocks to fill the canvas. The ground was a beautiful silvery grey, some places deep and dark, others pale, ghostly. The sketch depicted in the painting is to the left of the clip.


Here's another painting combining a random grid pattern with another field & snow pattern. Again the softly lit colors, faded by atmospheric conditions, are difficult to re-imagine while painting.

Rings

Love drawing silver, rings, these last few days, from Anne van Cutsem's A World of Rings.

Drawing–Action Then Thing

What the World Shows Us, Sometimes

I saw a little hawk take down a pigeon in traffic today. They struggled between cars stopped at the light, pigeon feathers swirling about in clouds. When their struggle took them into moving traffic, the pigeon escaped, they both escaped the truck barreling down on them. Pigeon wheeled around a building, hawk in pursuit. Bruegel's "Fall of Icarus." Did anyone else see?

New paintings: Song (top) & Duet

Drawing Wakes Up Seeing

Am I mistaken or is this broken patch of sidewalk reminiscent of the bears I've been drawing?
Here's another pair from a walk today:





Moments later a flock of songbirds with yellow bellies flew overhead. Is spring really that close? Tomorrow is Groundhog's Day, the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. So the answer is yes even if I hadn't seen this sign of urgent love posted high on a telephone pole along 9th St:

6am Drawing

Drawing a stack of watercolor palettes is too much at 6am. But the bears… love them. Sketched from a photo series. The brown bear is a female, in the next two pictures she attacks the black bear, an inopportune suitor. These bear shapes are very appealing. Have been drawing & painting them quite a bit.

Have been looking at archaic space again. It is flattened, figures and objects in silhouette or profile view, "background" of indeterminant depth, areas of flat color in a limited palette–often red, yellow, black, & white, action arranged on a baseline. What else? Call it archaic not only because it seems to be historically old, but also because the root of archaic is arkhe, Greek meaning beginning, and this is how we start depicting space, as children. These are gouache sketches from my sketchbook of wolf & bear. Notice the Latin names spelled in phonetic Greek–lupus & ursa–a convention of Greek vases that I love.

More sketches from A Book of Rings by Anne van Cutsem, found at Norlin library (CU Boulder). Pages and pages of antique rings from Asia, Africa, & America–wow!

First thing every day

Happy to have a routine of drawing, though am switching to gouache & sketchbook for a few days. Here are some pages from December & January.

Dryads

Seems these paintings are dryads. Happened upon the reference somewhere and then the different kinds. Heard recently that Ecuador is the first country to protect other living beings, including trees and plants, under their constitution. Could it be? Cringe to think people cut down trees without a moment's hesitation.
Eddie Lenihan saving thorn trees in Ireland from road builders; or saving motorists from retribution?

When was I here last?

My retreat has been over nearly a month. What did I learn? To have a routine is essential. Get up at 6am, draw, take a short walk to welcome the day (during the "pink time" if possible), eat breakfast, head to the studio till lunch time. Afternoons are for business and errands. Evenings a little more painting at my desk with gouache, or study, meditate before bed, bed at 10pm. An alarm has been essential for rising at 6 because it's still dark.
The light is already changing. Mr. & Mrs. Fox were dancing, the skunks are out, the finches' song has changed; but the note I'm waiting for, the first note of spring, is the flicker's call. Unmistakably spring calling from the heart of winter.