Things I like to draw

Drawing demands attention. I like to draw because it teaches me how to see. I know I’ve said that before, but I can’t emphasize enough how important that is to me.

I want art to be, not about making pretty things, but about vision. How to see, actively, creatively. I look for what most people wouldn’t see, and if they did, see without attention. Seeing–without opening the heart to wonder, without catching what we see in the webs of memory. Here are some of the things I like to draw. (I encourage you to click and zoom in on these for detail.)

Asphalt pavement & peeling billboard

Tree root.

Utility poles.

Texture and pattern on the Street

I set up a table outside A-Space Anarchist Community Center. People ask, ‘how much is this?’ I say–if you like it, I’d appreciate a contribution so I can keep making art… it’s what you can afford. The value of art can’t be measured in money–only in love and appreciation. Make me an offer… and it’s yours.

At first people don’t take me seriously. Have to educate people to think outside Capitalism. Photo below, a section of weather-and-wear broken concrete near by. These textures are my inspiration. Some paint landscapes from a hill top. I find my art in a few square inches at my feet. Won’t this make a fine Silverpoint!

View GALLERY HERE.

My Nemesis

Working at my easel I heard a thump and a rustle of papers somewhere behind me.

Cat.

Murphy had finally clawed his way through a box holding drafts–some 700 pages worth–of my great but destined to forever go unread first novel…. The Magic Slate… cardboard shredded, fell apart, pages sliding down the side and between other boxes to the floor. ‘Nemesis’ was its first working title.

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I wish the photo of #499 were better–I was pretty happy with it. I think I’m finding my way with metal point, my own signature.

A couple of painting I’d pulled out and set aside to paint over were rescued by Sire for his room. When I like–or dislike– one of my pieces, it probably hasn’t much to do with it’s actual merit–if such a thing is measurable. What I like isn’t so much the painting, as it is its power to suggest what I want to do next. The pieces I paint over are like closed doors to rooms I’m no longer interested in visiting. Metalpoint seems endlessly fresh, because I’m finding new ways to use it.

I’ve got the ground now where I like it. I can get beautifully modulated tones, and almost hear the grit of the silver as it slides over the surface–I detested the plastic-like feel of the unadulterated Golden Silverpoint ground. I use about 1/4 cup of high quality gesso, a heaping TBS of fine marble dust, maybe a teaspoon of water soluble brown ink (with soft Golden Titanium white if the ink makes it darker than slightly off-white–and the rest, Golden ground. Two cups.

‘Nemesis.’ The muse as fatal temptress… that an artist, writer, poet… can achieve the best of their ability only by pressing themselves beyond that… pressing on to an ultimate, and fatal failure.

I look at that dusty heap of papers… Fail… fail better.

(My second novel, Ari Figue’s Cat, was published in May, 2015. Check out the reviews on Amazon!)

John Cage…& the Queering of my Master’s Impulse

Listing to this…

I’ve been listening to a lot of John Cage. I think it’s cause my art has become so centered on the tension between intention and accident.

You think of Cage, you think accident, random patterns–but it’s never just that. There is always the constraint within which the random is allowed to happen, and in much of his work, where there are performers, you hear in the performance, exactly that kind of tension emerging again and again… in little snatches of melody, in coy references to known melodic lines: it’s delicious!

I’ve been doing this since I started making art again–I mean, exploring that tension between control and accident… but never so aware of it as I’ve been since I started playing with silverpoint, where even the reference to the medium calls up associations with great Renaissance draftsmen, da Vinci, Durer… at least, if you are familiar with European art history.

There’s something so satisfying in turning their obsession with control inside out, in the one medium most demanding of that control… you can’t erase a mark in metalpoint. You can’t even cover it over… as it will eventually show through as the metal oxidizes.

… which makes covering over one of the techniques I’m working on… layering. Accident… but also… intention. Structure. I hold those great artists in extraordinary reverence…(too much so… in that this accounts in a major way to my 40 years abandonment of visual art) and admire those contemporary artists who emulate them, mastering their technical facility. But technical facility, without invention?

The artists of Renaissance were in love with science; they explored their understanding of the physical world through their art. Cage releases my imagination to explore my fascination with the layering of perceptions… how we comprehend the world through layers of the received, the given, and the accidental: revelations into what we might never otherwise have imagined.

Mediating Vision: a class in drawing meditation?

Walking this morning in the bright spring sunlight, I happened on a pine cone, a weathered piece of wood, a twisted twig with peeling bark: the kind of objects I like to have before me when I want to draw, slowly–in a state of concentrated attention. While few of my finished pieces are representational–it’s in drawing that I learn to see. Drawing mediates between what my eyes encounter, and the corresponding inner vision that is the source of my art.

The photos below are examples of what I think of as drawing-meditation.

It occurred to me on my walk, that I would enjoy teaching this kind of drawing–for anyone, but primarily for people who don’t think of themselves as artists, who believe that art is for special people with ‘talent,’ who have convinced themselves that they “can’t draw a straight line with a ruler”

The goal would not be to learn to draw–in the usual sense of what that means: making drawings that “look like” what you see, but rather, to learn to see through the mediating act of making marks on paper. Drawing as meditation, as the key to opening the third eye–to seeing what is there, and what is not.

There can be no right or wrong, no good or bad to the drawings we would make–because the marks and patterns we would be creating/dis-covering, wouldn’t be on the paper, but in the mind, where no one else can see to judge them.

We could begin, for those with no background, with some ideas about how to make different kinds of marks with a pencil, how to use a fine pen nip with ink. This too, is about learning to see: acquiring a simple vocabulary to use when we begin to translate the vision of the eye to the vision of … but why give that a name? …as there is no label that would be common to all.

We would need three pencils: a 2H, an HB, and a 3B. (later, you might want to add an even softer/darker pencil: a 4 or 6B.

A pencil sharpener (or single edge razor and piece of fine sandpaper)

A #102 crow quill pen nib and holder.

A bottle of India ink.

And paper.

If I had space to do this (I was thinking that a picnic table in a park would be perfect–where we could always find objects nearby to draw), and people who would like to do this with me, I might ask for $15 a session… but no one turned down for lack of funds.

Would you like to try something like this?

#489 Basement Stairs: additional work

14″ x 17″ Charcoal, pastel, acrylic on Bristol paper. View from my easel: my dungeon studio. Thinking about Joan Eardley, whose work I wasn’t aware of till someone posted some of her paintings on Facebook… just blown away by her paintings. The write ups on web pages–the kind of dismissive praise I guess you have to expect when male critics write about a woman artist. She’s so much more than a painter of ‘Scottish identity,’ and her paintings aren’t ‘expressionistic’ –just doesn’t capture the tension she creates between her sometimes minimally suggested subjects and the powerful abstract structures that govern and contain them. They never lapse into a mere expressionist mess. There’s no need to hold their representative subjects in mind to feel the power, the pure visual power or her re-imagining them. So much of what I aspire to do.

Photo with additional work with pastel. What do you think?

Patterns/texture–revolutionary chaos

“Bio Filters,” posted on DeviantArt, speaks to my fascination with organic textures, which I’m coming to understand as a fascination with pattern: after all, texture in nature is but the sensuous expression of pattern, and discovering patterns–and combining them, combining them in antithetical (or should I say, incommensurate) combinations, plays an increasingly important role in my art. I think this is visible in 3 of my recent works:

#480

#481

and #482

…as well as my Pavement Series of last year, and all of my trash assemblages (we too, are ‘Nature,’ and all things we do and make, we do and make by Nature’s rules). I’ve only begun to see how this works with my acrylic paintings and larger larger pieces.

Pattern & structure are present in deterioration & decay. Entropy simplifies, but doesn’t destroy, structure. Political, social and economic structures become rigid, resisting change, stifling freedom. Visualizing decaying patterns becomes a psychological extension of a search for fissures in the borders, locations of breakdowns where new, generative patterns may begin to form. I think of my most abstract work as no less political than pieces with explicit “messages,” … and more truly subversive.

Artists! Wake up!

For how long have I been saying this? The author sees the symptom but refuses to name the disease. Of course he does: he’s a part of the system! “But of course galleries need to make a profit….la la la ” The very structure of capitalism turns art into commodity and erases all other values. The whole damn system is rotten! Artists have to be creative in more than making art; we need turn our creative energy to imagining another reality, another world!

Artists who seek commercial success, without thinking about how this system works, are complicit in their own exploitation.

Artists–become activists, become a revolutionary force!

From ART NEWS, Go Pro: The Hyper-professionalism of the Emerging Artist, by BY Daniel S. Palmer

In today’s art market, objects are created and judged like stocks. Illustration by Victor Juhasz, 2016. ©VICTOR JUHASZ

Drawing Found Things

I’ve posted before on how important drawing is for me (HERE, and HERE). It’s an exercise, what a pianist might do when no one is listening. Sometimes I’ll set a drawing aside, as something worth keeping, but mostly, I put the sketch books on a shelf when they’re full, or in a portfolio in a closet. Seldom look at them again.
It’s not about “representation;” they are exercises in seeing: in double vision–seeing what is there, and seeing, and translating that to what I see within. It’s what I see within that matters. I like to draw things with textures: tree bark, rocks, broken pavement. Here is a photo of some things I found on a walk yesterday, and a drawing I made from them. The scanner did a poor job of catching the detail; pencil doesn’t take as well as ink. When I’m working with crow-quill, or a new Sacura .01 ultrafine pen, … I can spend hours at this… like meditation.
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x

The American Hologram! Playing Everywhere–NOW!

Obama would have been a great president in another America, of another time. An America that never existed and a time that never was. But he believes in that America. He believes in its essential decency, in the fairness of its rules. He believes whatever problems and failures exist are best remedied by following those rules, that in the end, we all really want the same thing, and if you are willing to give and take, give and take, it will all work out for the best. Obama believes with all his heart that he is in a Frank Capra movie.

That if you persist–all those bad Senators will eventually see that Mr. Smith was right all along, and Mr. Potter, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, will carry Tiny Tim on his shoulders and give poor Bob Cratchit the fattest Christmas goose in London…er, America.
Obama lives in an impermeable bubble made of money. Made of people with money. Nothing will ever pop it. But he is a good and honest man. Really, he is.
Ms Clinton, on the other hand–has no illusions about what that bubble that protects her, that has lofted her to power, is made of. Otherwise–she will do pretty much what Obama has done.
Preside over a country ruled by a tiny elite, overseeing the perpetual flow of wealth from the bottom to the top.
Senator Sanders, however, has glasses, with one glass sort-of clear, and the other (the far-seeing glass–the one sees across the wide wide seas that surround us)… with the same movie playing as all the rest of them… the American Exceptionalism movie, with John Wayne saving the world for Democracy…er.. for American investment. The other eye, the Roosevelt eyeglass, understands, that to save Capitalism, you have to be brave, you have shuck off the taunts of “Socialist!” … just like Franklin did.
Oh and there’s a little Eleanor in him too! He has a fierce belief in justice! There are some Bad Things about America, like racism. He did what was right when he was young (and I say this with all due respect… no irony here), but of course, the way to fix it is to put those Bad Bad Bankers in their place! To get the economy turned around and money in the hands of those who actually work for it. That will take care of that Bad Racism for sure! The racists… once they see they have equal access to the American Pie, will become as pure in heart as Young Bernie ever was!

And there we have it… the American Hologram. Which projection do YOU live in? Whose happy delusion make YOU happy, when you think — how wonderful it is to be able to vote for your very own Moviedream!

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