the cassandra pages

The Blank Page - and some November fields

 

The only way to get over the fear of the blank page is to encounter lots of them. The first page of a new sketchbook is always the hardest, but the subsequent ones get easier. I’ve started on a project of painting twenty 11 1/2” x 15” watercolor sheets. That’s five large sheets of Arches cold press, cut into quarters. I’m hoping that by the time I’ve worked through all of them, I’ll have learned some new things, and possibly had a breakthrough.

Above is a sheet that’s been soaked with water and then taped to my desk with masking tape. I run a sponge around the edges first to dry them a bit, and then apply the tape, pressing it down again and again over the succeeding minutes until it adheres well. This is to minimize the buckling of the wet paper as it dries, and the stretching also allows for the addition of wet washes or re-dampening the sheet during the painting process.

 

The swatches at left are the palette I’ve chosen for this piece. Just six pigments: ultramarine blue, quinacridone burnt orange, yellow ochre, hansa yellow, sap green, buff titanium. The blue and orange mix together to form many colors, from dark blue to a range of browns and greys, perfect for the November fields and woods that are the subject of this picture.

While the paper is still wet, the first washes need to go down - but if it’s too wet, they’ll run into each other. Sometimes you want that, sometimes not. I painted the ochre fields and a background for the woods first.

 

The sky had an initial blue wash, leaving the clouds white, and then as the paper dried I further defined the sky/cloud edges and added some grey shadows in the lower parts of the clouds.

 

The middle of the paper is still damp here, allowing me to create softness in the hedgerow and the shadows on the field. The woods were drier when I put the dark trees in, and I went back with a sea sponge to blot out the bits of field showing through them and soften the tops of the trees.

The foreground trees couldn’t be painted until the field area was drier. I’m still learning how to judge what will happen when I put my brush onto the paper, and the exact moment when I should do that. The result depends not only on how damp the paper is, but also how wet or thick the pigment is that I’ve loaded onto the brush, and whether that particular pigment is opaque or transparent.

 

The calibration between all these variables is very tricky, and only experience with specific materials, as well as years of practice, add up to judgement. On the other hand, it’s often speed and unexpected events that give watercolor its spontaneity and vibrancy, so being too careful is a detriment. That’s the Zen quality I want to aim for in this most difficult medium — having such a mastery of the technical aspects that I don’t have to think about them, and can let go. I’m not there yet, but hopeful that this project will result in progress.

 

I had a hard time photographing the final painting — the image above is too contrast-y, and the colors are washed out, but when I adjusted those parameters during editing, I couldn’t achieve a good balance. This detail shows the subtlety a little better:

 

In the end, there are things I like here, and things I don’t — the painting does get across the colors and mood of the rural northeast in these last days of November, but it’s too detailed. No fussing or second thoughts, though: I’m just going to move on to the next blank sheet and make another painting. This is only number 3!

It’s easy to imagine a flock of wild turkeys on these fields. Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends!

Maintaining One's Practice...notes on self-preservation

Like many of us, I am very anxious about the election. Even though I live in Canada, I’m a dual citizen, the U.S. is my country of birth and where I lived for the first fifty years of my life, and it’s where members of my family have lived, worked, and tried to contribute to society for three centuries. We voted several weeks ago by absentee ballot. I care — a lot — about what happens today, and not just for the sake of America itself.

I also realize that our lives are going to continue, no matter what the outcome is. We’re going to get up on Wednesday, and Thursday, and next week, and next month, and we’re going to have to keep going and continue trying to be our best selves. Worrying and obsessing aren’t going to help. Am I sleeping well? Not particularly. But I’m trying to exert some control over what I actually can control: my attitude, and how I fill my time. Maybe what I’m going to share here will provide a break for you from all the news today, and remind you that there’s always more breadth and depth — and color! — in each of our lives, waiting to be discovered.

Yesterday, frustrated with my fragmented focus of late, I decided to act on a goal that I’ve mentioned here — to make a concerted effort to improve my watercolor paintings. The two main problems I’ve identified are the paper in my sketchbook, and the size I’ve been working in. Both limit my ability to use a full range of watercolor techniques, and to use larger brushes and a more expressive style. Years ago, before I began keeping a sketchbook as a sort of visual diary, my watercolors were quite different. I want to get back to that, and to improve from there.

The first thing I did was to cut up some sheets of beautiful, high-quality Arches cold-press paper from my paper stock. Then I did an inventory of my paints to see what I really wanted to have in my palette and what I might want to add or switch out. There’s not much change, actually, except that I want to substitute modern equivalents for the cadmiums eventually, since they’re toxic. So is cobalt blue, but I can’t do without it, so I exercise caution. Then I used the first of the watercolor sheets to paint some test swatches.

 

After that, I took a hard look at the watercolor palette I’ve been using, shown at right. It’s a small, hinged-top box, 6”x 4.5”, with 24 removeable wells. It’s perfect for travel and for use with my sketchbook, but both the wells and mixing areas are quite small, which means I end up being miserly with paint. It’s just not possible to mix up a big juicy quantity of color on such a palette, and that’s a requirement for large work.

I took out my own large studio palette, as well, but decided it was old, dry, and had far too many wells. Then I remembered the big, 16” x 11” palette that I’d bought years ago for my mother and brought here when we sold the house this summer. Yes! Perfect! I cleaned it, and set it up for myself afresh. This palette also has 24 storage wells for the colors, but they hold much more, the top seals to keep the paints moist, and the mixing areas are really generous. Here it is, with a “map” of the pigments below.

 

 

Once I had done that, I felt inspired and ready to work. Isn’t it odd how sometimes all we need to do, to clear the necessary space in our heads for a new start, is to clean and organize our physical space?

I soaked a piece of that fine paper in water, sponged it lightly, taped it to my work table, and began a painting of a view from our walk at the Morgan Arboretum a week ago. I had studied the reference photos and made some planning decisions about the colors, the shadows and light, and various technical issues I knew I’d be facing — in particular, how to show small bits of light on the leaves and twigs, falling through trees and foliage which were in deep shade - preserving or creating small light areas is a perpetual problem in watercolor. Several hours later, I had this painting in front of me:

 

At 7” x 10.5”, this is still too small, but it was large enough to reinforce my instinct about using good paper. The strong, medium-toothed, Arches paper responded wonderfully, giving vibrant clear color and depth in the shadows, standing up to soaking and wet washes, and holding as much detail as necessary. It allowed for pigment removal, re-soaking and re-working, dry brush scumbling, and scratching with knives and other tools.

It was a good experiment, and a good starting place for new explorations. Best of all, I hadn’t thought about anything else while I was working on it.

 

Singers need to sing, dancers need to dance, poets and writers need to write, artists need to paint and draw — and we need to do this on a regular basis, with focus and concentration. It’s so easy to let life intervene, and of course, sometimes it has to. But when we’re able to maintain a practice, day after day, week after week, then we can make progress, even if it’s in very small increments.

Our practice is a big part of what sustains us, through the good times in life and the difficult ones. And our practice is what helps us sustain others, whether through our creative work or just by being better balanced and more fulfilled human beings. Sometimes we need to jump-start our practice, and sometimes we need to do a housecleaning, or to take stock and rethink what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. That comes with this territory.

But we can’t let ourselves be de-railed by negativity or the endless opportunities for distraction, even as our hearts are filled with strong emotions from outrage to anxiety to compassion and grief. Today, I’ll work on some more art, and I’ll also play my flute for half an hour, and do some cooking. Over the weekend, I made bread for the first time in a long while. Winter’s coming. We need sustenance in all its forms.

Mourning, remembering, and hoping

Today is a day of reflection for me. I am mourning every single life that has been lost or shattered because of the senseless, cruel violence of the past year, and I am reflecting on our part in it. I am thinking about the great frustration and helplessness that so many of us feel who have protested government policies, not just now, but going back thirty years and more. These policies have contributed to a war that now seems to be spiraling out of control, harming any chance for a lasting peace, making the entire world less safe, and harming the reputations and integrity of all the countries that are involved. What a complete tragedy. Although I have strong opinions, as well as fear for our own family members in Beirut, today is a day to reflect on man's inhumanity to man, not to point fingers. Why are we the way we are? How do these same tendencies affect life here in Quebec - because they do? What can I, as an individual, do better? How can I amplify my power as an individual to encourage the institutions to which I belong to stand up and speak out for justice and peace, when so many are being silenced? And finally, in such a world, with so much suffering, fear and darkness, how can I be a person who gives hope?

So here are some flowers to lay on this makeshift, virtual altar. They were a gift from close friends on our birthdays, have brightened our home and our days, and last night I finally painted them before their petals start falling. The beauty of the earth stubbornly persists, and if we look, we find it everywhere. Thank God for that. And I'm thankful for every way in which I'm able to experience such things and mirror them back to the world.

A year ago, I was in Edessa, Greece, a small city in a mountainous northern border region that has been torn apart by ethnic warfare for centuries. After reading the news, I went into a large Orthodox church to light a candle, and sit quietly for a while with the icons and the smell of melting wax and incense. Later I walked in the church garden, and looked out over the valley at its orchards, vineyards, and fields. I no longer pray to God to end human wars and suffering; I haven't believed in such an omnipotent deity for a long time. I pray for us to come to our senses. I pray for strength, and to see what I need to do.

View southwest from the old city of Edessa, Greece.


Today, as I look out my studio window here in Montreal, the trees are beginning to turn to their fall colors, and the dark clouds to which we woke are giving way to sunshine and blue sky. A light wind ruffles the leaves of the plants on our balcony. I can hear faint sounds of construction in the distance, because here, homes are being built, not destroyed. For today, for right now, this moment, I am secure and aware of how fortunate I am. I can use this moment to become even more aware, to tune into all of my senses and consciously take in their input. I need to do this several times every day: otherwise I might miss the gifts that are still part of the reality and mystery of being alive. 

 

Permutations of the Same Thing

It's been two months since I last wrote here, the longest break I think I've taken in the twenty-plus-year history of this blog. During the summer, we cleaned, packed, and sold my family home at the lake in central New York. Since coming back to Montreal, I've needed some time to rest from that labor, both physically and emotionally, and reconnect with my life here. I feel like I'm still doing that.

Just recently, I got out my oil paints and began working again on a small painting I started several months ago. I hadn't been happy with it, but put it aside for a while, not being sure what was wrong. When I looked at it again recently, I realized that there was too much going on in the foreground, which detracted from the main subject - the white cliffs - and that the composition wasn't working, and needed to be simplified. The finished painting is above, and the video below shows the process this piece went through. This view of dramatic cliffs and and olive trees is along the road from Patras to Corinth, Greece, and I must have taken some pictures out the window of the car as we sped along the highway. 

 

 

Even though personal affairs have been in the foreground of my own summer, I haven't been ignoring the political landscape. Like so many American voters, I was dismayed by Biden's performance in the debate, and relieved when he finally stepped aside because I was certain he could not win the election. I will vote for Kamala Harris, but unlike many Democratic voters, and, it seemed, almost everyone at the made-for-tv spectacle that was the Democratic Convention, I am not jumping up and down with enthusiasm. I wish I could be -- a woman president, at last, and of a younger generation? And a person of color as well -- these are very good things, which I welcome. However, the picture that we have all been looking at, throughout Biden's presidency, needs a radical reworking. Only Bernie Sanders named the elephant in the room, when he called for an end to the horrendous war in Gaza; there were no Palestinian voices at the convention, which was deliberate of course, in spite of the thousands of protesters outside. I understand and share the relief that many feel in having a viable ticket with Harris/Walz; the alternative is unthinkable. But the problems America faces are so deep and so entrenched now, and these candidates, I am sorry to say, do not represent real change. I wish them well, I hope they win, but militarism, rampant capitalism, and a belief in American exceptionalism are not going to solve the problems facing ordinary people, abroad or at home, or save this fragile planet. 

The Quiet and Wondrous Woods

World-weary, last week I took myself off one afternoon to Montreal's Parc Angrignon, wanting to walk along the water and hear some bird song and, I hoped, clear my head and lift my spirits. This is a park with a lot of water, and it also has large tracts of undeveloped woodland. I'd never walked in those woods before. They beckoned to me, though, and in I plunged -- and to my surprise found many native wildflowers, growing happily and undisturbed. (I was glad I visited when I did, because I also saw a lot of little poison ivy plants starting to unfurl in some of the same areas.) Since we all need some beauty and delicacy these days, here are some pictures of that afternoon -- take a few moments and walk with me.

White trillium.

Jack-in-the-pulpit

Wild ginger

Yellow violets

Bellwort - new to me. Thanks to G. for helping with the identification.

Red trillium.

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I also spent some time sitting on a log, sketching a view across this channel of water. A day or two later, I made the much more satisfactory watercolor at the top of the post.

Spring has been very slow to come to Montreal this year. Finally, this week, I put the house plants out on the balcony and started potting some annuals and herbs to grow there for the summer. It feels like a huge relief to be able to be outdoors, and warm there, again.

Snowy Fields, Taking Flight

As many of you know, my big project during the winter and spring a year ago was a group of twenty charcoal landscape drawings. They eventually formed the core of my book Snowy Fields, along with two essays, one by me, and another, about my work, by Michael Szpakowski. It's been a pleasure to send that book out into the world and to hear back from many of you with appreciative comments. I'm both grateful and encouraged by readers' reactions to both the artwork and the writing, since I haven't done a project like this before.

Some of you asked if any of the drawings would ever be for sale. I've decided to make most of them available following a small exhibition and talk in Hamilton, NY, on May 1. Some have already been spoken for, so if you're interested, please do let me know as soon as you can via email: cassandra dot pages at mailbox dot org. The grid above shows the drawings and their availability (red dot means unavailable). The drawings are signed and framed behind plexiglass with archival mattes, and are priced at $295.00, plus shipping.

I also have two oil paintings for sale that belong to the same series. This one is quite small:

Spring Thaw. Oil on board, 8" x 9.5". $325.00 framed.

And the other is larger, in a really beautiful gallery frame. (The color is more accurate in the top image.)

View of Chenango Valley, looking toward Sherburne from North Norwich. Oil on board, 12" x 16". $750.00 framed.

It's never particularly easy for me to decide to let my work go, especially when the pieces aren't prints but are one-of-a-kind originals. However, I'd much rather have my artwork find homes where it will be enjoyed than to have it sitting around in my storage drawers. I've tried to price these pieces fairly and reasonably so that more people will find them accessible. Shipping will be calculated depending on the destination but I'll do it as reasonably as possible.

The other very good thing about finishing a big project is that it clears creative space for new ideas. I'm not at all sure what will emerge next, but I plan to keep drawing and painting, staying open to inspiration without trying to force anything forward, confident that eventually the work will coalesce around a new idea, informed by what came before but not repeating it. Maybe Mediterranean, maybe Quebec...we'll see. I don't think the next body of work will be wintry, as much as I like the graphic qualities of snow. We are definitely ready for spring up here!

A Year in a Sketchbook

Over the weekend I finished the last pages in my current sketchbook, with the watercolors of artichokes and fruit that are shown below. This particular sketchbook was started back in the fall of 2022, so it spans more than a year -- today, the view out my window is very much like the first page in this video, painted in January 2023, just without the snow.

Last winter I did all the drawings that went into my book Snowy Fields, in much larger drawing pads -- that explains the big time gap between the second and third pages in the video. I also began a dedicated sketchbook for our trip to Greece, and I keep a small pocket-size sketchbook in my purse for metro-sketching and car trips -- so that's why this larger one covers so much time. In any case, I thought I'd make a video of the pages from just the last year - late winter 2023 to mid-March 2024. I think two pages are missing, one that I tore up and one that I gave to a friend. The next task is to gather up the courage to draw on that very first, blank page of the new sketchbook which is already waiting for me on my studio table.

This book is the latest in the series I've been keeping since I started drawing seriously again in 2010. I'm not nearly as prolific as some sketchers, but drawing and making watercolor sketches has definitely become a regular practice for me, and even more so in the last five or six years. When I look through the sketchbooks, I can see the improvement, and yet I feel there's still so much to learn and to experiment with. But it's not just about drawing and filling pages...the sketchbooks are really a visual diary, and I can usually remember exactly where I was, and some of what was going on, when I was working on a particular page. I don't make many notes - just the date and sometimes the location on the back of the sheet. Maybe I should - I rely on my memory being pretty good, but it may not be forever!

For those who are interested in the tools-and-materials side of things, this is a Stillman&Birn Gamma series 6" x 9" landscape format sketchbook - the paper is slightly cream-colored, perfect for pencil or pen-and-ink, and heavy enough to take light watercolor washes. It has no texture or "tooth", though, and won't stand much re-working, nor is it good for powdery media like charcoal or pastel. It's not a watercolor paper per se, but is versatile enough for me as a multi-media sketchbook. Most of the ink drawings were done with either a fine-tip fountain pen or a fude-nib Sailor pen, and Noodler's ink; the rest are either pencil, or pencil and watercolor, or direct watercolor with no preliminary drawing at all.

Spaces of our Hands and Hearts

Does the space where we work influence what we are able to do there? I think so. Space affects our mindset so dramatically that I suspect it partially determines how much work we do there, as well as its quality. Frankly, in today's world, we should be grateful to be able to do creative work at all, and to have a roof over our heads. So whatever I write here about "spaces" comes from a conscious place of privilege.*

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Ideally, the place where we do our concentrated work needs to be functional and supportive; it needs to suit who we are, and help us to feel good when we're in it. There are plenty of writers who've done their greatest work in rooms or chilly cabins piled with books and papers  -- think Seamus Heaney -- and artists, like Lucien Freud, who've worked in chaos. It's a question of knowing yourself, too.

It's hard for me to concentrate and work well when I don't have, as Virginia Woolf wrote, "a room of my own," even if that room is mine only part of the time. For most of my life, I've worked in somewhat makeshift studio spaces: repurposed or multi-purpose rooms in the same place where I was living. That's been OK when I was able to close the door and have some solitude and privacy, less so when I was working in a larger but shared space, or a space that other people walked through. For much of our time in Vermont, I did my design work and writing in a room that had, literally, six doors -- it was a former kitchen, with front and back outside entrances, a bathroom door, and doors leading to other parts of the house as well as the basement! I couldn't do artwork there at all, but, with my back to most of the doors, I was able to write.

Sometimes we don't even know what's good for us. After fifteen years, it was traumatic for me to leave our former large, dedicated studio space here in Montreal, downsize dramatically, and move into a 10' x 10' repurposed bedroom in our condominium. I thought it would be a disaster, workwise -- but I couldn't have been more wrong. The large studio had room to spread out, but it was always cluttered, and it was on one of the city's busiest north-south streets, with tons of traffic and a great deal of dust, as well as foot traffic and industrial noise from other tenants in the building. The best feature, for me, was a big wall where I could hang my work, and the ability to have separate areas for oil painting, printmaking, drawing, sewing. But writing there was difficult, as well as any kind of experimental work in general, since it was a big, open space I shared with my husband. I seldom had a sense of complete "head space", not because I was being interrupted -- simply because there was another human being in the room.

After a year and a half of working here in our apartment, I've come to love my new space (the picture at the top of this post is another view). The room is small but efficient, the north light is beautiful, and I have everything I need within reach, with most of it stored in cupboards out of sight. Instead of spreading out and working on several projects at once, I now do one thing at a time and put the materials and equipment away when I'm done -- and that's fine. The tables and storage units are adaptable -- as you can see below, I'm leaning the easel against a wall to take up less floor space, and using a drawer in the storage unit as a taboret. It works fine. 

I thought ventilation would be a problem in the winter, but I recently bought an air filtration unit which should work very well to filter the fumes of any harmful solvents, and if we have wildfire smoke again this coming summer, it should help with that too. The most important difference now is that it's a room of my own, with a door I can shut (but rarely do); all my artwork and writing and sewing take place here, as well as plenty of "thinking time." I've always believed that spaces take on a sort of energy of their own, over time, depending on how they are used, and this one now feels comfortable and personal in a way that our former, cluttered studio never did.

The pandemic years were especially hard, since we didn't use our big studio much at all and tried to do everything in our small, ground floor, former city apartment, where there was no light. We liked the apartment very much -- as a residence. During the pandemic, though, I basically lived at my desk in the living/dining room, with a lot of street noise all day, and poor J. was at a desk in the bedroom, looking out on an alley. I think that showed both of us, once and for all, what was important to us in a workspace -- privacy, light, adaptable table space, good storage, and a sense of peacefulness and quiet.

I wish I had a photograph of the back room in my parents' and grandparents' house where I used my mother's easel, which my father built for her, to do my first oil paintings, back in the 1960s -- that's the same easel I use here in Montreal now. When I moved back into the upper floor of that house, alone, after graduating from college, the pine-paneled back room became my study and studio; it's where I taught myself to paint in watercolor and do calligraphy at a professional level; it was where I listened to music, and worked hard every evening after coming home from my job; it's the room where I began to think of myself as an artist.

After working in various rooms in our Vermont house over the years, none of which were really suitable, we eventually built a garage that included a small woodworking shop for J. and a small studio for me.

My studio in the garage in Vermont, in 2006, just before we moved to Montreal.

I liked that room a great deal, and it helped me to have a space of my own during some difficult years when I was trying to figure myself out -- I was just starting to write seriously when I was about 40, and had begun painting again after deliberately taking some years off. In this room I had an electric kettle for tea, a space heater for the cold winters, a little desk with my meditation items on top of it, a rocking chair, bookshelves, and my easel. Although the windows were small, they looked out on my garden... I have lots of positive memories of being there.

Painting outside at our home in Vermont, probably shortly after I bought this portable French box easel -- which I still use at the lake today. This must have been in the 1980s or early 1990s.

All creative people need to train themselves to be able to work in less-than-ideal circumstances. I've always managed to work wherever I was, and it's been good for me to take a sketchbook and notebook (or now, tablet or laptop) wherever I go. However, it's clear to me, looking back, that the differences in my day-to-day workspaces made a big difference in my productivity as well as my contentment and sense of self, and they've also influenced the type of work I was able to do. When there's less distraction and more peace, I'm more able to simply buckle down and do the work. The main question for me has always been "can I center myself and concentrate?"

How do you feel about your own workspaces, and how are you doing, creatively, at this time of so much violence and destruction?

*More than 100 cultural sites have been destroyed in Gaza, along with the lives of scores of poets, writers, and artists. Thousands more have lost their homes or been injured, and yet we continue to hear, at times, their poignant words. Many of us, in the privileged west, have been so disheartened that it's been difficult to continue our own work. And yet we must, because the arts are essential in keeping our own spirits alive, and in giving hope that some of what we value most in human culture has a chance of continuing. When I think about "home" this always includes, for me, the place where I work. To lose it would be to lose a part of myself. Continuing to create, and to mindfully stand alongside those who struggle to do so, or have been silenced forever, is to be in solidarity. I hope to do more in the months ahead to contribute in other ways through my work and my ongoing protest. 

 

 

Returning to Oil Painting

When we were in central New York for a short time a few weeks ago, I started an oil painting. It was the first one I'd worked on since 2018 - a pretty big gap in time. The interruption of the pandemic and the fact that we took apart our studio and moved were, of course, a major factors, but except for the three oils I did back in 2018, I had actually done very few since we moved to Montreal almost twenty years ago. Instead, I concentrated on drawing and watercolor, on keeping a sketchbook, and on printmaking. I also did fair amount of bookmaking and binding, and sewing projects. The larger works I did were almost all pastels - dry media, rather than oil or acrylic easel painting. And all of that had to fit into our professional life, because we were working until about six years ago -- perhaps that's why I did those oil paintings in 2018.

When I reflect on the reasons behind these choices, I realize that the spaces in which I've worked have always influenced what media I used, along with what was going on in my life at the time -- and I'm going to write more about this in a subsequent post. 

But today, I want to talk about beginning again in what has always been the most important medium to me - oil. Why? I guess I just like it - the materials have a seductive and enticing quality that appeals to all of my senses. There is craft involved long before you pick up a brush - the preparation of your support, whether canvas, board, or wood, has to be done properly or the painting will not last. The materials are pretty expensive so you need to understand them. Then, the process of building a painting takes days, weeks, or longer, and it can be utterly absorbing as well as agonizingly frustrating during the period when you are living with it -- because that's exactly how it feels. Fortunately, oil is a forgiving medium, unlike watercolor -- it stays workable for a long time, you can scrape it away with a palette knife, dissolve layers with a solvent-soaked rag and begin again, and continually revise by painting over dried previous layers without the colors becoming muddy. You can work into wet paint for soft edges and other effects, without having to time your efforts down to the minute, as in watercolor. The colors themselves have a unique beauty, luminosity and depth. And all the while, there is a sense of being part of a lineage of painters who have wrestled with this medium over the centuries, trying to create works that are beautiful and that will last. Yes, modern conservation techniques allow us to preserve works on paper, but they are never as highly prized as oil paintings.

View up the Chenango Valley from North Norwich. Oil on prepared board, 12" x 16", February 2024.

I don't think my oils are better than other things I've done; often the liveliness of a drawing or quick watercolor pleases me more. But there is something about the process of creating an oil painting  -- maybe it's because you're with it for so much longer? -- that I find satisfying. It's always a journey, both artistically and emotionally, and there are always points where you're stuck or things aren't working, and you want to give up in frustration, but don't, and somehow find your way out of the thicket. The final painting may not be your best, but you've learned something that you can take with you into the next one. And the medium itself - the unctuousness of the paint, the spring or stiffness of the brushes, the smell, the joy of mixing exactly the right color and value, the way the paint becomes part of the surface -- all this is deeply satisfying. 

When there's been a big gap in time between when you stopped doing something, and beginning again, you can never pick up where you left off. That's because you aren't the same person anymore. A lot has happened in my life, and in the world, since 2018, as well as the fact that I have aged. All of that is carried in my body and mind whether it's formed into expressed words or not. And even though I've done a lot of artwork in other media during that time , and learned a lot from it, painting in oils is different from anything else. I'm very curious to see how these factors will affect my creative work in the long run.

Making new progress in this medium has been a goal of mine for a while, but I haven't been in the right space or frame of mind to start until recently. I'm not sure where I want to go with it, but I trust the process to show me that -- the way to find out is to paint. I don't know what a realistic goal is for the coming year, nor do I want to stop drawing or making watercolors. I don't think I can do a painting every week, but maybe I can do one every month. I do recognize an underlying sense of, if not urgency, then certainly a ticking clock -- if not now, then when? Because I too want to create a larger body of work that has a chance of lasting, being passed down to the next generations, having meaning to people because the work shows a place or a person or a feeling that resonates or captures some aspect of life that perhaps doesn't, in reality, exist forever. And I also want to challenge myself to do the best work I can and take myself, through it, into new territory. So this is a beginning, and I hope that I can keep at it and not let huge gaps in time occur again.

Starting with a winter landscape made sense, since I was completely absorbed in drawing such scenes all last winter. I feel like I've internalized some truths about them.

In this particular painting, I struggled just to get some technique back, as well as to make decisions about how much detail to include, how to handle the tangles of branches and shrubs and grasses, and the snow upon them. In the end, I simplified a lot, as you can see in the video about 2/3 of the way through. At one point I rubbed out the whole lower left section and repainted it; I also brightened the sky and added more blue, and changed the color of the hills, adding some scumbled color to indicate the trees going back. The conifers were lightened, and I added beige and pinkish violet to the bare-branched trees near them in the background.

When I reached the point shown below, I was pretty happy with the brushwork in the foreground and in the bare trees, and also with the small touches of color that I added. The deep blues gave a lot more depth and interest to the snow, while the touches of pink and lavender enlivened the dry grasses and shrubs and helped to unify the painting, since shades of both are in the background trees and sky.

I'm not sure I'm done with it, in fact probably not, but the work from here on will be fairly minor. It's a start.

 

Centering and Simplifying

When I posted this watercolor sketch on Instagram, one of the comments (thank you, Michael) was that it seemed to capture "the essence of carnation". I thought about that quite a lot, wondering what happens when this occurs. What helps the artist get close to the "essence" of a subject, and is it something that can be "explained," let alone taught?

Sitting down one evening to do this particular piece, several things were going on in my mind. I was drawn by a vase of evergreens and carnations remaining from the holidays, while also wanting some respite from a long day and the constellation of anxieties, sorrows, frustrations and anger with which many of us are living. So I wanted to do something absorbing and, hopefully, to capture some of the beauty and peacefulness in front of me. I decided not to work in my studio, but right there on the living room table, so I brought out my watercolor palette, a large jar of water, sketchbook and brush, and adjusted the position of the flowers for the light angle I wanted.

Then there were a few minutes of considering potential problems. I wanted to do a direct watercolor -- with no pencil under-drawing, or pen-and-ink line -- because I felt that a spontaneous watercolor would better capture the delicacy and emotional feeling of the bouquet. Another issue was how to handle the white flowers against a white background, because their edges would be very hard to see. I decided I'd paint the shadows on the petals, and then add some pencil lines afterward, if needed.

The final questions were the placement on the page, and where to start. I began by mentally calculating the proportion of vase height to flower height and width, and estimating where these would need to be placed on the page. I then started painting with a brush line indicating the top edge of the vase (the whole vase appears in the full painting, as you'll see in the video below) and built the picture from there, placing the flowers before doing any of the foliage. I painted far fewer flowers than were actually in the vase; I just chose representative ones at interesting angles. As soon as I began painting, I became very quickly absorbed in it.

The painting itself took about 30-40 minutes. When I'm working on something like this I'm in a state that's somewhere between meditation and extreme but wordless concentration. I'm not talking to myself in my head, and I'm moving pretty fast because I want the strokes to be quick and alive. I don't fuss over things, but try to create an overall impression as rapidly as possible. The color choices and color mixtures are intuitive and come from experience; this just comes with learned technique and practice. As Zen teaches, you have to master your tools and technique first, and practice over and over so that you can let them go, not think about them, but rely on them when you are in a flow of action. During that time, your attention can be concentrated not so much on what you are doing but on becoming one with the subject -- seeing it with fresh, clear eyes and penetrating to what is essential, while leaving aside whatever is not.

Obviously, that is a goal, but not something I usually achieve! Nevertheless, without understanding it as an ideal, and without having put in years of thought, meditation, and technical practice, I don't think I'd ever be able to come close. Oddly enough, children sometimes approach the essence of things better than adults. They have so much less of a filter; they haven't been told what matters by other people or society, and they haven't learned to care what others think of their efforts -- that judging voice we become accustomed to as adults is not in their heads yet, but --sadly -- it will be soon. As adults, we have to un-learn a great deal in order to open up again.

The result of this process is a picture, yes, but it can also be a period of time that is enormously refreshing. We center ourselves, we concentrate, we forget our ego as we work, absorbed in color and form and the wordless communication between eye, hand, and spirit. It's a journey, and a space in time. There is no way to describe this in detail; as with many things, it's easier to say what it's not.

The detailed drawing above was done on the following day. Here I was trying to see the difference between a careful rendering of the flowers and what I had done in the painting. It's the opposite of the extreme simplification of the watercolor. The drawing was a helpful study in understanding "Chrysanthemum:" its frilliness, the skirt-like stiffness of the petals, the whorls of tightly wound petals that form the centers, the way the darker pigment is concentrated in lines on the edges. Although the drawing is still quite loose and spontaneous, it didn't create the sense of time-standing-still and complete absorption of the watercolor painting, because I was thinking about all of those things and how to explain them in words.

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Some of you have been asking for some watercolor videos, so I made this short one, which shows me painting one flower from the previous composition, and talking about simplifying what I was seeing while painting. When I watch it, I notice technical things that I don't think about at all, like where I am holding the brush, how much pressure I'm applying. It's helpful for me to watch too.

(Click at lower right to view full screen.)

 

And here's that little sketch from the video so that you can see it better.

I wish everyone some moments of rest and renewal in the coming days. You don't have to be an artist to experience the kind of time-out-of-time that I'm talking about here. Look around you - something is calling for your attention. You don't need to paint it or write about it, just look... and then look deeper for ten or fifteen minutes, being conscious of your breathing, and see if you don't feel that something has shifted for the better.