Here is my little crow friend...the initial picture wasn't that great, so I played around and made use of it's blurriness to make a more "painterly" or "sketchy" image of a black bird against the winter sky...
Joy! This is one of my most favorite drawings...it's a tiny thing, but it means the world to me...I think of Beethoven's 9th when I look at it...such a big symphony...sometimes it's hard to explain what I do when I make these images, I play around, make a mark, follow it to the next and so on...
This little watercolor the same thing...follow the water, the tide line, emphasis with a pencil to bring out this and that...this is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata...
This photo of the woods out back at sunset reminds me of a Wolf Kahn painting...I love his work...
(Pastel by Wolf Kahn, Horizontal Study for "Vertical", 2007 14 x 17 inches, Thomas Segal Gallery)
I walked around the yard a lot yesterday with my little digital camera (Fuji Finepix A900, just a wee thing, it does what I want), then I dashed outside in my maryjanes at twilight to snag pictures of the sunset...but out of all of them, I love this blurry bit...it reminds me of Mark Rothko...
(Mark Rothko, Untitled,1969, Collection of Kate Rothko Prizel)
I've been writing about my new character Eleanor Dean...she's a painter, and having a bit of a struggle making sense of the attitudes about art...I will admit to some biographical borrowing for Elly's experience at art school...it's just been a fun chapter to write and I keep adding to it everyday...it's been an inspiring week...browsing through old sketchbooks, reading a great deal of art theory and aesthetics, studying Plato's Republic to confirm my memory of his objections about the arts and recalling Rudy Giuliani's over the top gripe with the Chris Ofili painting of the Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum...I've seen worse things...
So much material to work with...here's a brief excerpt (I had posted a rougher version earlier today, and have since updated it):
The recipe for a foreshadow of things to come—a healthy, active imagination, a blank piece of paper, just add crayons, and my destiny to become an artist simmered quietly until the Second-Grade when I was the only kid who made the Easter Brontosaurus while the other good little children copied cute, brown construction paper bunnies with pink noses exactly as the teacher told them how to do it. Oh, yes, it was very perceptible that what I did was very wrong—a grave mistake in judgment. It was bad enough to be scolded by the teacher for not following directions, but to have everyone else laugh at me for being so weird made the day complete. What they really meant to say was Oh, that was so—creative—inventive—ingenious! Oh, how artistic! But no one wanted to apply such positive reinforcement on the Easter Brontosaurus because it was easier to say it was weird and be done with it. Anyway, there’s no such thing as the Easter Bunny either—so there.
No comments:
Post a Comment