Everything changes, ideas, light, bodies, landscape.

weather. oil on canvas. 120x120cm.

oil on board. 30x30cm.

oil on board. 30x20cm.

charcoal and chalk on paper. 70x30cm.

Every time I go into work something has changed and during the time spent working something changes again. The moving target which is the thing addressed is like a chimera ( a chimera in my brain troubles me in my prayer. Donne) and getting hold of a sense of focus is really difficult. Whether it be the light, or the energy one has for the task, or the sense of slippage, the gap between the thought and the hand touching the surface is full of questions. I am talking to myself, remonstrating with myself, urging myself to do it over again. We all know this. 

The last two days have been spent drawing and making these two paintings: each drawing has been different, they are part of the  process as are the paintings, neither of which will survive long. It is still cold here and the stove needs fuel.

The landscape has been a long time in the making and it feels like the weather here which is a kind of progress. 

Drawing thinking not necessarily seeing.

drawing and thinking in progress.

Drawings we make of things we see are not just what we perceive with our senses, but something more and also something less. They are conceptions of what we perceive, not the perceptions themselves. When we draw, we extract from our perceptions what we think are the important parts. We may, for example, ignore the foreground and draw only the tree, or leave out the background and draw only the figure. We might ignore a data point on a graph so the line through all the other points is smoother, or draw repeating sequences to imply motion.

The choices we make in creating such drawings, both of what we see and what we imagine, are a record of visual thinking using line, shape, and degrees of light and dark. The drawings represent both inner and outer parts of our world. The choices we make in the drawing process are important parts of a conversation we have with ourselves, as hand and mind unite in cognition and creation. As we draw, what appears on the paper or screen is a critical part of the conversation, an external representation of what was, in the moments before its creation, in our minds. Once an image gains a life of its own, we can look at it, think about it, and revise it. The revised drawing is an expression of new thought.

Without drawing or visualizing an idea, problem-solving and other creative tasks can be difficult. We often need to make a sketch or diagram to see clearly what we are working on. It is in this process of drawing and redrawing where revision inspires continuing and creative change as we “talk” to ourselves in order discover what we know.

I came across this, by Michael Strauss, and am indebted to the artist Sharon Knettell for pointing me to Cultural Weekly in which the full piece can be found.

I would like to add that the drawing conversation can define what we think we know, what we think we see. Where does this line go and what does it describe and are we drawing what we know to be there rather than the way it appears, haptically,  tactualy or otherwise. I am reminded of the confusion that arises when someone becomes able to see, or of times when the brain takes a while to register ocular information - what is that we ask ourselves?

The way in which the drawing material is used, the variation in pressure of the mark, the deliberate feathering or impressing of a line, the erasures marks left, lines redrawn and showing reappraisal:this continuous working of the dialogue between hand brain and  material to further an end. Drawing engages us as practitioners, as observers. It is a conduit for feeling.

Still trying to make sense out of this and passing through.

oil on wood panel. 30x30 cm.

Man with the ghost of a hat. chalk on paper.

40x40cm.

Who am I this time?

oil on paper. 40x40cm.

I am passing through and like all those before me and those who will come after, I am temporary. I could attempt to paint this fading but while I can I will at least make a record, acknowledge a debt and say that at this time I was here, saw this, tried to set it down.

The greening of trees and mowing.

                                         Greening of trees. No.2. oil on board 126x126cm.    


One of the interesting things about painting is the changes that occur and that they can occur without one realizing. It can be a conscious decision of course but what interests me are those which happen and refer to things which one has thought about but found impossible to put into practice previously.
Then, unbidden, there they are.

This morning I painted: this afternoon I mowed. In the former I added and in the latter I took away. In each case something new was made. Paths were cut shorter between areas of longer grass whilst in the painting I added layers and scraped away sections and was in the landscape in both cases.

I sat on my mower and thought about painting. It didn't seem surprising that the one thing could be like the other. I thought about how mown grass that is so often uniformly flat becomes richer for being cut at different heights and how light and movement affects it. It is so like making a painting: enriching a surface building it up, scraping away, making use of chance, letting the accidental suggest a new direction.

Interface.

Interface. oil on paper on board. 100x68cm.

The capacity of some paintings to connect with our physical memory of spaces and objects allows us to respond to something out there: something which is also inside us; what a friend of mine calls wholeness. It is the immediacy of the visual world which allows this so poignantly, that resonates enough to register a start of recognition. There in our memory is that place, that moment , one we may have long forgotten or if not forgotten, recognized as lying fallow, distant, hidden beneath layers of our daily concerns and conflicts but waiting, waiting to reconnect.
Merleau-Ponty, writing of Cezanne, says that the artist is the one who arrests the spectacle in which most of us take part without really seeing it and it was he, Cezanne, who wanted to make visible how the world touches us.


Francis Ponge , writing in 1947 of La Cruche.

The singularity of the jug is thus to be at once ordinary and delicate: so in some way precious. And the difficulty, involved in its very being, is that one must -for that is also its character- make use of it every day. We have to grasp the ordinary object (a simple intermediary, of little value) place it in daylight, handle it, set it in motion, clean, fill, empty.


Memory and the everyday, an interface between where we are and where we and others have been. It seems a fit a subject for painting, something to address, something which can be overlooked and yet which has infinite richness.

Between times.

                                                  oil on board. 26x20cm.


Between working out ideas for other things I return again to trying to deal with painting myself. Each time it is different, so much changes over the days weeks or months and years that it can take. Lucien Freud is reported to have said that working over a long time on a portrait is like trying to hit a moving target.

New painting in Spring.

                                           Exquisite greening of trees. oil on wood panel. 120x120cm.


It seems so surprising when an image gels as if from nowhere. I made this painting after standing looking at the garden and then leafing through photographs and collages that I had made earlier. Nothing stood out and in fact I was working on a self portrait when I knew, all of a sudden what to do.
So, Hildergard of Bingen, if you are out there I can only say thank you.