drawing and painting

Paint Like a Child

I had a show and studio sale several years ago, took everything, almost, from my studio, installed it in the local library. Probably a thousand pieces of art– drawings, paintings, scraps, beginnings. The walls were covered. Three or four tables were covered with stacks of papers– drawings and paintings. A friend came, spent hours looking through just about everything. He’s an artist too.

At the end of the afternoon, he came to me and said, “I can only afford to buy one; this is it. This one speaks to me. This one really has something. What can you tell me about it?”

I said, “This is ironic. That’s the one piece here that wasn’t painted by me.”

He said, eyes wide, “Who, then?”

Then he saw I was amused, and so he was too.

I said, I don’t know who, but it was some 8-year-old child who painted with me at the county fair last summer. Somehow their painting got mixed with mine….”

Experiments

blue-gray tones painting with horizontal line textures

I pour paint, i scrape it, I wash it, i mix charcoal with it. I try to create the conditions in which certain kinds of things might happen, never knowing exactly what will happen, and then let pigment and water do their thing.

Sometimes I hardly touch the painting; I couldn’t improve on the subtle relationships formed as pigments settle out of slowly evaporating water. Sometimes I throw myself at the thing.

abstract art oil pastel drawing with purple, red-orange, yellow, green, blue “If you are under control

you lose the danger

of glimpsing an unknown realm.”

— Kazuaki Tanahashi

Painting as Dialogue

painting of a face in brown tones

I think of drawing and painting as acts of dialogue, questioning, exploring.

I don’t want to try to make some preconceived thing happen or try to create a beautiful image. (though the temptation is rarely absent). Rather, I want to see what will happen if… if i follow my questions and my instincts where they lead. it is like being on the trail of something.

I often think of the cave painters of Lascaux and Chauvet– 10, 20, 30,000 years ago.

I want my art to be like their art, not “art” at all– like the art that was done before we had the name, like the art children do before they know better. I want to evoke the presence of this living world rather than make a picture of it.

I try to paint people as if they were landscapes, and landscapes as if they were people.

Looking Closely

This is what i want to paint:

What it is that dwells here

I know not

But my heart is filled with awe

And the tears trickle down.

–anonymous 11th century Japanese

I think that if you look closely at anything, and for long enough, this poem is what you find arising in yourself. That is one thing i have learned over these years. And, here is the thing: the more you experience this, and the more deeply, the more…everything is changed.

For me, art is about looking closely at something, and following your response where it leads. Whether that something is a leaf, a mountain, a human face, a memory of your childhood, the love you feel for your child, your joy, your rage– look closely, follow your response. (You have to learn to listen to your response, and to trust it).

Art is a medium. You make something as you follow your response; the thing you make embodies your response, and at the same time it is the means of your response– it helps you to find your response, and gives you tools by which you can listen ever more deeply, to as it were unpeel the layers of your response.

Maybe art is something different to others. Maybe what i am doing is not art. But this is what i want to do.

On Becoming Unstuck

yellow, orange, green, and gray toned paper strips collage Seeing Things with Fresh Eyes
and Using Collage

Have you ever felt stuck in your artwork? Repeating yourself, bored, scared,
unable to start, unable to finish? Me too!

Lately I’ve been making collages from my “failed” paintings and drawings,
tearing them apart and putting them together in new ways.
And suddenly they are no longer failures, but beginnings.

Unexpected juxtapositions create new life. And new ideas.
And give me reinvigorated faith in the process.
I can feel the difference when I work on new paintings and drawings–
I’m more open, they’re more alive.

Following

Imagine you are in the woods following an animal trail. You don’t know where it will lead; you just look for markers, and keep going. But you find yourself noticing more and more. You get to know those woods intimately.

Or imagine you are a blind person exploring the face of a loved one. Your hand moves delicately over nose, eyes, lips– exploring, questioning.

Or you are drawing a flower, or a tree. Your eye wanders all around the petals, the branches. And your pencil moves over the paper.

This is contour drawing. It’s not about making a “successful” drawing. It’s about resting your attention on this thing right in front of you, patiently, quietly. It can be a kind of meditation practice, a means of contemplation. You begin to notice things you never noticed before. You see that flower as if for the first time. The world becomes new again. And, quite often, wonderful, surprising, drawings happen along the way.

“Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world.”

–Frederick Franck

Behind the Surface

The surface of things is beautiful: mist on a meadow, lines on a face. But I find myself wanting to draw and paint the poignant beauty of the life behind the surface.

I like what Martin Buber said in I AND THOU: “All real living is meeting.” I say, “All real painting is meeting.” Drawings and paintings happen along the way to something else. The best things happen when I don’t know what will happen next. Drawing/painting teaches me to trust my intuition

Here, from There

In 1993 I got into a car in Birmingham, Alabama and got out in Skamania County, Washington state. It’s a good story, how that came to happen, but a long story; I’ll say here only that it involves a woman, a dog, and a skunk.

I was 31 years old, imagining myself as a writer. I had been teaching English in Alabama for several years, and was trying to write about my time teaching in China. I had loved that time. But my writing was slow and painful, to read as well as to write, I fear, and I wasn’t at all sure it was any good.

I was struggling with other things, too, having a hard time (“In the middle of that road we call our life/ I found myself in a dark wood, with no clear path through….”).

I had always loved to draw and wanted to learn to paint, but had always thought, “some other day….” In Stevenson that fall I started attending a life-drawing group. It was a revelation. I felt I was discovering something important each time I held a pencil or piece of charcoal in my hand and looked closely at someone’s face. And I felt my life welling up in me again. I knew this was important for me.

Drawing led to painting. I felt I needed to give myself a year to explore what I had glimpsed. One thing led to another. Twenty-five years have passed. I’m still exploring. I know I’ve hardly begun.

Everything is worthy of being drawn; anything can inspire a painting.

I spend as much time as I can walking and sitting and drawing in the woods near my home. Drawing is my way of getting to know the life of a place that is special to me.

Yet I always come back to drawing and painting people– faces and bodies. There is so much to say about why that is, more than I have words for. But the ancient Greeks knew something when they said, “The soul, to know itself, must gaze into a soul.” And Wendell Berry, “The task of healing is to respect oneself as a creature, no more and no less.”

I often ask myself if I can justify spending my time making pictures. There is so much work to be done in the world! But I tell myself that it is important, first, to try to see, clearly and honestly, with humility and patience. Drawing and painting, I hope, are a way for me to learn to see. It’s a beginning.

How difficult I find it to get out of my own way, simply to look and to listen, and then to respond. How difficult, sometimes, to trust my response and to follow it. But moments arise in which I do, and it is so simple, so natural. Everything is different then. Good things happen then.

watercolor painting of a many tree trunks with greenery behind them