Mid-term Self-Assessment

My drawings are boring.  I've chosen to try to learn a difficult task, that of expressing spatial relationships, and while I can't help but think that every effort I've made so far in that regard constitutes a major triumph, I also can't help but see that my drawings are also boring.  I need to think more about mark making and value, and some color wouldn't hurt either.  Plus I just haven't been putting enough time in.  I don't know why exactly. My husband's operation and stay in the hospital was why I didn't work last week, but it doesn't account for previous weeks.  I think maybe it's because I have to take two steps backward in order to go forward. The drawings I made when I was looking at vases and bottles set up in Morandi-like compositions are much more accomplished that what I have made so far this Fall.  They are modest accomplishments, but  better.  I look at collections of contemporary drawings and see the wide range of possibilities for mark making.  I see the drawing that I started by rubbing over a collograph plate.  They seem much more interesting to pursue than the task I have chosen for myself.  But I'm not ready to give up.  

Throughout this floundering, reading Rackstraw Downes has been a comfort.  After finishing his series of razor wire paintings he wrote, "Why do I always flunk sky painting?"  Then he went  on to name contemporaries who are skillful at the task.  Downes wrote the introduction to Art in Its Own Terms, a collection of Fairfield Porter's art criticism.  Here is Downes on Porter's early struggles:
   "Porter had to work hard for his eventual accomplishments. Rudy Burckhardt recalls seeing in his studio a painting with an awkwardly cropped composition; when he pointed this out, Porter replied that first he had to learn just to paint: composition he would worry about later.  But he was certainly not bothered by self-delusions on this issue: he once wrote to a friend, "It is interesting about your reaction to my early paintings. It was not so different from my own: I, too, thought them atrocious."    

On the other hand, I've really enjoyed the reading about and by artists and the looking at art on the internet. In A Printmaker's Document, Jim Dine tells how he made a series of self portraits not by using a mirror, but, instead, nailing copper plates  to a wall and using the reflection of his face in the shiny copper surface to guide his had as he drew.  If I were more interested in my face, if I had a beard or interesting tufts of nasal hair, I'd be interested in doing that myself.

What I'd Like to Make

I'd like to make a series of autobiographical artist books in small editions of only eight or ten.  I made one in Ursula Minivini's Artist Book class.  It was a series of maps of places I went to when I was a child living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I'd make ones titled Jobs I've Held,  Places I've Ice Skated, Places I've Lived, Favorite Forms of Procrastination, Brief Biographies of the Family Cats.  Nothing profound and revealing: the books would be for my grandchildren. 

My work in another medium

If my work were in another medium, it would be an installation like those of Red Grooms, except it wouldn't quite work:  the bridge wouldn't quite span the river and doors would remain ajar, but not functional.

Or it would be an elaborate device like a Rube Goldberg construction which would take the marbles it was supposed to convey and allow them to escape prematurely.

That's my present work.  I have high hopes for my future work.

Rackstraw Downes and Me

Here's some of what I've been reading lately: Rackstraw Downes'  "Turning the Head in Empirical Space" an essay in Rackstraw Downes, Sanford Sanchez, et al.  and  Under the Gowanus and Razor-wire Journal, the journal Downes kept while making these paintings.  Part of the pleasure of reading the journal comes from the fact that the paintings he made under the Gowanus expressway are of an intersection that I passed through on my way to and from work for fourteen years.  The major part of the pleasure is of learning of the hours and hours he put into the making of these paintings during some of the hottest days of the year in a place so packed with traffic that on some days he wore a mask to limit the amount of fumes he was inhaling.  He would often feel discouraged, uncertain whether he was persisting in a task that might end up not satisfying him at all.

Why would that please me?  Well, I feel the same way with a lot less at stake.  The simple drawings I make seem to me neither accomplished or even particularly interesting, and yet they also represent a triumph and I feel that if I persist, I will do better.  And some parts may even possibly  become easier.  Although when I think about it,  it's hard work right from the beginning of every painting for Downes. 

Other pleasures of this reading come from looking at works he mentions in passing:  Turner's Lord Egremont Greeting His Dogs, and Hobbema's  Middleharnis, among others. 
And from learning that Yvonne Jacquette said of  recognizing converging vertical lines, "I see it but I refuse to do it."

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Lucien Freud

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These drawings have nothing to do with expression of the  perspective of a space that their subjects occupy. Or nothing I can perceive that way. I include them because I'm so impressed with the concentrated effort it took to make them, every line so carefully considered and placed. All those little stippled marks, all the effort of the wickerwork.   They are a reminder to me  that if I want to improve, I must put in time and effort.  Not every work of art needs to look labored over, but it takes time and effort to look as casual as Dufy.

Raoul Dufy 1877-1953

john singer sargent 1856-1925

 
 
 
 

John Singer Sargent was staggeringly productive.  Here's a fine example of setting the laundry out into a comprehensible space.  It looks like a fine spring day with forsythias in bloom. 

I think there's a subgenre of laundry images--a lot of Degas women scrubbing, but I'm thinking of laundry drying on a line- and if I'm in trouble trying to draw windows and doors --and I am-- I could get into even deeper trouble devoting myself to images of sunlight cast on laundry drying outside on a sunny day.