Charcoal Mountains

What is it I find so compelling about this landscape? I asked myself in recent days. It's not the natural color, because that's really not too appealing - in the color sketches I already changed the unappetizing brownish-beige eroded hills to purple and lavender, to contrast with the unremitting green. No, not color, but form. So in the past couple of days I've gone back to black-and-white. Yesterday I did a couple of ink drawings, helpful but not worth showing here, and today, this charcoal drawing, and tomorrow I think I'll continue with some larger charcoal studies.

When I left off painting, some 15 years ago, I was still doing pretty realistic work. What you see here is way more of an abstraction than I ever did back then. My question now is how far I want to go, for what reason, and in what media. Working abstractly with shapes, texture, line, color, and with positive and negative space is not foreign to me at all -- this is how I see graphic design. But I never really put the two together in painting, so that's the adventure ahead.

In the drawing above, I like the area on the right but it needs to be balanced by a different treatment of the lower left; I also want to make those two areas related while still being distinctly separate and different. The waterfall is too stiff. Right now I think the lefthand area reads like fields, which flattens the waterfall and makes it into something like a road. But that can be worked on. I love charcoal for its dense contrasts and its malleability; you can even erase it, or sculpt white lines in it with the edge of a white eraser.

And digital media also gives possibilities I never dreamed of when I was doing art before - this little thumbnail, for instance, makes it easier to visualize the composition and the dark and light areas within it. 

How far do I want to depart from reality? Maybe not quite this far, but there's no way to tell except to experiment. Working intensively on one subject appeals to me, and it's teaching me a lot about looking, about making visual and emotional choices, and about persevering in a new way. If this were a design job, I'd have no trouble with that, but I've always been an impatient fine-artist, probably because I was always trying to produce something decent in a very limited amount of time. Now that pressure feels much more removed, both because I do have more time, and because my attitude is different. I feel like I'm just beginning.

Comments

[Hannah Stephenson]

How exciting--feeling a new project or method or process take hold! If I could have a talent that I don't currently have, I would love to be a skilled visual artist (and also be more athletic, truthfully) :).

[Dave]

Nice work, Beth! I like this direction.

[Kim]

I'm impossibly literal; I prefer your realistic work, but I am still quite interested to see what you do next and delighted that you seem to be stretching and enjoying yourself so much.

[dale]

:-)

[Clive Hicks-Jenkins]

You've headed into the world of European Expressionism here Beth, a place of exploration I've always found to be particularly enriching for my own work. The truth is that once you get to a certain level of abstraction, whether the shape is a road or a waterfall is neither here nor there. It's how it 'feels' that counts most. I've also found that quick, developmental sketches are a fantastic means to quickly move ideas on.

Have you ever looked at the abstracted landscapes of Ivon Hitchens? I love his work. This particular one is an example of how a painting can be open to many interpretations by the viewer, all of them valid. I see one thing, you may see another. Marvellous!

http://www.bournefineart.com/Artist/p/artist/649

[Jean]

I'd love to read more about your relationship with realism. Why were you previously always a realistic visual artist? Did the unfashionability (Alice Neel much on my mind right now, with her her current major London exhibition) of realism in visual art (then) have anything to do with your doing less of it for a long time? (then, and also now: I'm pretty ignorant about the visual arts and may be quite wrong, but for example I would see someone like Clive Hicks-Jenkins as a much rarer and more surprising bird than a writer of magical realist fiction). How did /does your bias to realism relate to your politics and/or your art as a writer - or maybe it doesn't?

[Beth]

Thanks, Hannah, I'd like to be more athletic too!!

Glad you like it, Dave, thanks for weighing in.

Kim, hang in there with me! Thanks, Dale.

[Beth]

Clive, you've hit it on the head. I've always loved European Expressionism but haven't explored this direction myself. The prints of the German Expressionists, "Die Brucke" in particular, have always hovered as a major influence though I find many of them too dark and tormented. Gauguin, on the other hand, I love, but I don't know much about contemporary artists who have followed this direction.

Thank you so much for pointing me toward Hitchens - as you predicted, I love these paintings! And this inspiring quote from him: "I try to use a notation of tones and colours so that the design flows from side to side, up down, and in and out. I am not interested in representing the facts as such until this visual music has been created."

[Beth]

Jean, honestly I think I became a realistic artist for two reasons: it was easier for me technically, and easier emotionally, when I was young. I was always fascinated with the beauty of the world-as-it-is and I guess it felt safe to try to capture what I was seeing rather than to re-interpret it. And when you do realistic work fairly well, you get a lot of positive feedback. I sold paintings from the beginning and people always commented positively. But once I learned "how" to do it - because a lot of realism is simply learning techniques and repeating them - I got dissatisfied with the work and with myself. I was moving in a more expressionist direction when I stopped, and I don't really know why I gave it up, except that writing took the place of art in my life for many years. Now, coming back to art, I don't seem to have the same hangups; I'm less afraid to experiment and risk failure and I don't care nearly as much about the reaction of others, or the "market;" I'm doing it for different reasons.

That was already happening before, but the internal changes are so much cleaner and clearer now. But no, I don't think it was a political bias, though I was definitely influenced by the disapproval of that teacher I mentioned before. I think it was more that I had trouble breaking out of convention, trusting myself to be inventive in all aspects of art - I study and play classical music and never tried composing and don't improvise much; I write non-fiction rather than fiction. On the other hand, I do have a vivid imagination! Now I can see that this immersion in reality can be fruitful. There's a discipline that's helpful, there's technique, and there's a lot of thought and observation not only about the visual world but about meaning and symbolism.

I agree with your insight about Clive! His friendship and fascinating blog, as well as his willingness to simply go in his own direction, have been very encouraging to me. I also don't see him as a conventionally realistic painter, not at all. Realism can go in many directions, and I think my work will always be grounded in the real world of nature and objects and people, because I love them so much.

[Marja-Leena]

How exciting and full of possibilities your experiments are, Beth! It's indeed so freeing when one does it all for oneself. Enjoy!

[Natalie]

Beth, this charcoal drawing is absolutely wonderful and feels like a real breakthrough. I hope you're not going to re-work this particular drawing and I'm eager to see how the next drawing or painting will develop. As Clive suggested, Hitchens is a great inspiration. There's also the American landscape painter Richard Diebenkorn, and Nicolas De Stael whose work takes off from reality but then creates another reality by means of colour.

In my own work,and particularly the painting I've been posting stages of on the blog, I've been asking myself similar questions and the internal monologue never stops as I'm working. Sometimes I wish that I'd never had the art school training or seen great works of art so that my eye and hand and brain would be entirely innocent when faced with the blank canvas. But of course that's nonsense. Now you've inspired me to go and think/write/explore these issues further, maybe in a related blog post.

[Beth]

Thank you, Marja-Leena. You are one of the artists who inspire me to keep at it!

And to you, Natalie. I feel like this drawing breaks new ground, for sure, and I'm quite pleased to see it happen. The next one, much larger, is different but I'm not sure it's any "better" - tell me what you think. I will probably do one more and then get out the paints. (And yes, I'm glad I never went to art school, but I've certainly looked at a lot of artworks.) Your own work always seems to retain an innocence, Natalie, so those teachers must not have been able to din it all out of you!

How wonderful that we have the internet and can encourage and talk to one another, across all these miles.

[Vivien]

This is a very powerful drawing - I feel the shapes as very vibrant and all reacting to each other. And you've suddenly gone very far from more illustrative work (not that I've got anything against that sort of work - I tend to be rather drawn to it). I much prefer semi-representational/semi-abstract work like this to completely, or almost completely, abstract work. I saw the Howard Hodgkin exhibition recently in Oxford, and because it moved so far to abstraction I couldn't really remember any individual paintings!- just a vague impression of the atmospheres - sea shore, rain, autumn etc. Whereas a drawing like yours which stays tied to a definite place is much more memorable. I wonder if anyone really remembers an abstract painting? Kandinsky, Pollock etc - wonderful paintings but I just retain a hazy impression. Anyway, well done!

[Beth]

Vivien, this is all much appreciated. I agree with your perceptive observations about abstract art, and tend to be less pleased by abstraction that veers toward the ethereal because they sometimes become (to me) watered-down, hotel-room artworks that are mostly decorative rather than powerful. The best of Abstract Expressionism appeals to me because it really is emotionally powerful. I was looking at Diebenkorn recently, whose work I've always loved, and all of it remains memorable; I like Motherwell for the same reason. In both the gesture is important and often immediate, and both painters were keenly aware of form, line, color and knew exactly what they were doing; the paintings look spontaneous but if so, it's a zen-like spontaneity with hours and hours of practice behind it. I don't feel the same way about Pollock, for instance.