My Essence of Tree

The house I live in was built in the very late thirties after the orginal one burned. And that fire gutted a pear apple tree at the south end of the house. The blackness of the burn has slowly been disappearing over the years, but you can see how the injured tree healed itself into two trunks in the left image. On the right is the other side of the trunk.

And I apologize for image of the full tree below, but the tree is closed in by dense growth on the side away from my studio, and the studio is too close to get a distance shot.)
When I wanted a tree that was mine I laid out some dots of color in a tight line and took them up with a brush and drew a trunk. When I looked at it, I realized where it had come from. I am finding out that if you are driven to do something without reason, the source may well be inside you, so ingrained, that its existence is separate from conscious thought.

A Network Morning--with Abbott & Hunter

I have a tiny "art network", but it's a damn good one!

This morning, while waiting for paint to dry, I called Susan Abbott and we talked about painting for about 20 minutes--a prep for meeting on Charlie's Art Train #1 this Saturday.

Then I checked out the VAC website and stumbled onto a video of Charlie talking about art and his art. It's a couple of years old, but a real gem. A capsule version, of Charlie's version, of 20th century art and his own. It's only about 10 minutes long and well worth those minutes. (Tech note: the quality is better if you make the video smaller.)

Another Step Taken

I've been making little sketches in small sketchbooks because small is all I can afford in the quantity I'm using. But, I expressed consternation to my friend Meta Strick last week over re-making them again but larger. She said, it will come and that after a while it won't be an issue. Since then I've thought, "yeah, but I have to do the first one first!"

Well, I had a puzzle piece from the Art Fits Vermont VAC 2009 project and decided that would be a good trial piece. The sketch is 4" x 6" and the puzzle piece much larger.

SPARK - acrylic

OMG - New Word (and new mag)

Excitement this morning here in Buck Hollow!

I stumbled across a new word. I mean really new! No faint bells mumbling in the back forty of my mind, no "yeah, I used to know what that meant", nothing. Just a brand, spanking new word! At my age it is a very rare experience to discover a new word that is not jargon, slang, or technical/scientific. Flashes a chill up the spine it does.

haptic

Of or relating to the sense of touch; tactile.
Greek haptikos, from haptesthai, to grasp, touch.

And, of course, to look it up I had to dig out my Random House Unabridged--this word just ain't in your run-of-the-mill, sit-on-your-desk-for-spelling-lookups dictionary.

Curiously enough, its entry there is in the plural. . .

haptics: the branch of psychology that investigates cutaneous sense data.

I was also interested to find that its etymology is Greek. I've studied both Latin and Greek and my experience has been that though we are accustomed to giving the nod to Latin for many word derivations, our language also has a very large number of very important words that have come to us from the Greek language--a language that is both beautiful to look at and to hear. (telegraph, anthropology, and hippopotamus spring to mind immediately.)

But I'm still amazed that I have never come across haptic.

And, full credit to the man who brought it to me: Jeffrey T. Baker, an alt-photographer living in Portland, Oregon. He used it in a interview (a very interesting interview) with Diffusion, a new magazine whose subtitle is Unconventional Photography. The first (and so far, only) issue came a couple of days ago and I just got around to reading it this morning. As far as I've gotten in it, it seems to be quite good. Well illustrated with a good mix of articles. My only complaint is that the typography of the text could use some help. It is sans-serif, justified, and widely letter-spaced so it looks a bit like a second-grade reader done small. For thoughtful reading, it is much better to have a serifed typeface which helps to hold the letters together into their meaningful word units and aids the eye in sliding easily through the lines.

But, if you have interest in any kind of experimental photography/art, you might well want to get a copy of this. Unlike many photo-centered publications, it has as much or more about art and creation as it does about techniques. This is a real plus for me. The mag is edited/started by Blue Mitchell, curator of the Plates to Pixels web site and copies of Diffusion can be obtained from the magazine's site
diffusionmag.com for $10 (which includes mailing). I'm dirt poor and I think this precious $10 was very well spent.

Hard Edges Again

It seems no matter what I muck about with, I end up working with opposites. (Scorpios are prone to black and white and other opposites I guess.)

Decades ago, when I left the art department, after putting a nice dent in the top of one of their flat files with my fist, I threw away everything from my work there EXCEPT anything to do with intaglio work. I saved everything--plates, powdered pigments, paper, feathers, scribes, all of it--planning on acquiring an etching press so that I could continue the work in my retirement.

Well, I've never been able to afford the etching press, but I started digging around in what I had saved. One piece fit in with what I'm doing now. This may be an evolving piece; if so, this is its current state!

I Think I Know What I'm Doing . . .

Sketch - Rocks and Grass

The sketch above is just that, a sketch of practicing rocks with watercolors. I work on such things regularly, almost on a daily basis. And sometimes I make a forward leap as in this one when I was working on washes:

THE LIGHTED HILLS

And then there are ones like this:

EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN

These come along as they do. And what "these" are, I have begun to figure out. They are all to do with the natural world: the earth, sun, moon, and stars as it were. And the moods/ideas behind them are all quite dark. Yet, they come out in bright colors. For me, it seems to be a process of working out a language with nouns and verbs but the adjectives are always colors. If there's an underlying theme, I guess I'd have to say "global warming" as trite as that phrase has become, or maybe "atmospherics", as there seems to be some meteorology in most of them.

I'm still doing this as well, but right now, the color business is such an over-riding passion, that the photography has subsided to second place--not by choice but by demand--my involuntary demand. Though yesterday I got this shot. So, things in my black and white world are still churning, and I do keep thinking about getting around to some other Vermont towns for additions to my "Urban Rural" portfolio which is showing signs of healthy growth. Wish there were six of me.

 

 

 

Assigning Blame

I began my "official" visual life as a graphic designer. Graphic designers, in the days of triangles, drafting tables, wax, and Letraset were obnoxiously neat. I've never belonged to a work space like this one.

Those people whom I know personally and who are responsible for this state of affairs are, in chronological order, as follows:

Susan Abbott
Meta Strick
David E. Kearns
Karen Day-Vath

One person, not personally known to me, is Philip Ball, author of Bright Earth.

Together, these individuals are responsible for what is turning out to be a major upheaval in my life. I alternately curse them and thank them.

SUNRISE FOR A BUG

Interesting Times for Me

Things conspire against (or with) me and my obsession with color grows. To the point that I now want to make things with it. So, here are sketches from, dare I say, an incipient painter. Things are screaming at me from inside and outside: the hounds of hell are indeed after me.

THE LAST SUN IS BLACK
first sketch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE LAST SUN IS BLACK
second sketch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SHIFT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WIND

Iron Oxide Yellow and a New Project

It's been a long time since my last post. I've been coming back from putting Kittikins to sleep, working on Phil's web site, and learning about watercolors. It now seems that every minute I'm not working on some web site, I'm mucking about with paint, paper, and brushes. Unfortunately for my wallet but fortunately for my soul, I don't have much work right now.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a used copy of Hilary Page's Guide to Watercolor Paints. (Fuller description/review. is here.)

It is a masterpiece of effort and information. And, while it covers many of the manufacturers of watercolor paints, it does not cover those made by Utrecht. I figure they are perhaps in the same league as Winsor & Newton's Cotman line, and likely some are better. I decided to investigate them because I fell in love with their Iron Oxide Yellow.

So, using Page's methods, I am going to try to imitate what she did with the few Utrecht colors I have. But, it will take me a fair amount of time as I have to really perfect my ability to make graded washes that will show the paints as they are, and not as I have botched them up!