Category: philosophy

Studio Sale

My little house is filled to bursting with hundreds of watercolor paintings and small pastels, charcoal drawings (mostly from life-drawing groups– faces and bodies), and sketchbook drawings (landscapes, trees, dancers, musicians).

Many of you know that I’ve been having a difficult time with my painting for a few years now.  I have started so many paintings.  Beginnings are joyful.   But, again and again, as a painting starts to come alive for me, something happens.  I find it more and more difficult to stay with that painting.  I paint ever more slowly; it’s like swimming in quicksand… until finally, in order to remember the joy of painting, I start another painting.  And the pattern repeats.

Another way to look at it is that I’m trying to do something that I don’t know how to do…yet.  I’m trying to get at something, and I don’t know how to get there…yet.

Either way, the upshot is:  hundreds of beginnings, some carried farther than others, some really only scraps of ideas, some so close to what I envision.

For so long I have thought I must see each of these paintings and drawings through to the point that I could say, “Yes!  All done, it is itself.”  But I’ve decided I need to find a different way forward.  I’ve decided to accept these beginnings as studies, explorations, experiments–  in which many good things have happened, from which I’ve learned plenty– and to let go of them.

I want to find homes for as many of these paintings and drawings as I can.   For me, they are just beginnings, but maybe you’ll find something you like just as it is.   You’ll be helping me a lot; I’ll be grateful.  And they’ll be so much happier on your wall than in my closet!

Please see the page on this site for a selection of these artworks seeking homes: “Studio Sale.”

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.

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.

Drawing and Painting

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