CRB relaunched

All good wishes to the Caribbean Review of Books which has been relaunched online recently under editor Nicholas Laughlin.

A three-colour linocut

Savannah with Tents, three-colour linocut, image size 8 x 12 inches.

(Click image to enlarge)

I cut three lino blocks for this image, blue, yellow and black. By printing the yellow over the blue I was able to get a fourth colour, green (and strictly speaking it's five colours if you count the white). The inking and printing are not of the best because I used water-based inks and printed it by hand. The water-based inks enabled me to do the print run over two days (not counting the cutting of the blocks). Oil-based ink would be smoother but it takes longer to dry and the clean-up is messy so I opted for water-based. Also, I printed it manually with a baren plus hand pressure which don't achieve anything like the pressure of a press. Under the circumstances I'm happy with it, especially that my simple little home-made registration method worked quite well. 

The main problem was the inking. I mixed the ink colours and they came out slightly different each time the block was re-inked. The consistency of the ink changes from minute to minute as well, but I'm getting a feel for what is about right. I'm pleased with this outcome, I have eight or nine presentable prints from two runs, and I have the blocks safely in a box where they will be one of the first to be printed if ever I get a small printing press which at present is not remotely likely. However, Google has helpfully been putting ads for printing presses in the margins of my emails, just in case. 

Another Obama video

AFTER reading the Abstract chapter

(Previous post: BEFORE reading the Abstract chapter)

The chapter on abstract art in Frameworks for Modern Art began with an overview of abstract art in general -- Pollock, Rothko, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, etc. Then came a section called "Arguments for abstract art", in which a passage leapt to my attention:

"The evidence is that painting has had progressively to relinquish the task of first-hand depiction in order to survive as an art. The making of pictures does continue, but principally as a kind of craft or as an adjunct to other critical purposes -- usually by some recourse to photographic techniques. As such, picture-making is a useful means of conserving certain skills and a widespread source of pleasure to its producers and consumers alike." (1)

This is a very big put-down of painting. Time will tell if Harrison's claim is right or wrong, but in the meantime I'll go with wrong. First, whether something is an art or a craft is not a useful distinction. Second, there's some spectacular painting being done today, for example by Peter Doig, Chris Ofili, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Neo Rauch, and hosts of others, including the up-and-coming Trinidadian Che Lovelace. These are the names that spring to mind when I think of contemporary art, rather than installation or video artists (but of course this could be because I'm a painter myself).

Third, as far as Harrison's claim goes, he's brave to make it. There's some evidence that an urge to draw and paint (to make marks) is innate in human beings and if that is true then painting (like the novel) will always be with us.

Harrison goes on to describe Newman's Eve in detail. Everything is significant -- the size of the canvas, the fact that the red paint goes a few centimetres over the edge onto the sides, the fact that minute bits of white ground show through at the join between lighter and darker reds. Some of the analysis relies on writings by Newman himself who was a prolific writer on art with exalted ideas.

I tried hard to understand and to be sympathetic but in the end I was not convinced. Abstract art is fine but I don't think Newman's Eve is representative of abstract art in general.  Maybe some of his other paintings are, I don't know. I was reminded of a saying of Josef Albers: "In musical compositions, so long as we hear merely single tones, we do not hear music."(2). For me, something like that applies to visual art as well.

1. Charles Harrison, in Frameworks for Modern Art, ed. Jason Gaiger, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, in association with the Open University, 2003, page 115.
2. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, Revised and Expanded Edition, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006, p. 5

[Edited 28 May 2010]

Related: BEFORE reading the Abstract chapter

BEFORE reading the Abstract chapter

A page from the book

I'm  reading a book called Frameworks for Modern Art, edited by Jason Gaiger, published by Yale University Press and the Open University. It's an academic text and it's not easy reading, but I hope to learn from it. I'm about to start Chapter 3 which is called "Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman's Eve." I've never studied Barnett Newman's work before so this could be a good introduction. Eve is a huge flat red painting with a narrow strip of darker red down one side. I confess I'm on the sceptical side, not about abstract art in general, which needs no defense, but rather about Newman's paintings, which seem to me rather featureless. Will reading the chapter change my mind? I should have some idea in about a week, watch this space.

Related post: AFTER reading the Abstract chapter

A welcome sight

Dream on

Pink Poui, acrylic and oil pastel, 9 x 12", March 2010

Last night I dreamt that I had a show at a restaurant which I had never been in before. I can't identify the place though I might be able to draw it, it was L-shaped with a side room. Neither can I remember ever meeting the gallery owner who was in her forties and blonde. At the end, as everyone was leaving, I asked her how we did and she said everything sold out!!! And then I woke up.

Emerson on landscape

"The charming landscape I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of all these men's farms, yet to this their land-deeds give them no title."

Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature, 1836, quoted in Landscape and Western Art by Malcolm Andrews, Oxford University Press, 1999, page 158.

New supplies

As promised: the new supplies arrived yesterday via Caribbean Express. On the left is a Strathmore "Dry Media" spiral-bound sketchbook, 14 x 11"; centre, same thing 12 x 9"; right, Strathmore Windpower Drawing sketchbook made of recycled paper, 12 x 9", spiral bound. The back covers are made of strong cardboard which I was wondering about because they were not expensive and it's a risk buying things online without handling them. Plus, the extra inch on the 12 x 9's gives a lot of extra room, surprisingly. 

In front is an open 12 x 9" sketchbook, a set of Caran d"Ache oil pastels in a tin box with a hinged lid which snaps shut, and in the middle two graphite sticks. 

One of the 12 x 9" sketchbooks is already well under way because I had a pile of stuff waiting to stick into it. I'm happy with these things, they are as described on the Dick Blick website, in fact they're even better, because the "Dry Media" sketchbook takes wet media quite well, not too badly anyway (but I'm not fussy about sketchbooks, someone else might disagree).

Gone shopping

It's been a while since I've been to the art shop but yesterday I bust out and went shopping at Dick Blick. Normally I'd go down the road to Deltex, the greatest art shop ever, but my car is down at the moment. Besides, I was mainly looking for sketchbooks and it's difficult for any art shop in Trinidad to stock a wide enough range of papers, bindings and sizes. This is where online is so brilliant. They have every size of sketchbook known to man, 3.5 x 5 up to 18 x 24 ins and everything in between. Moleskines for ever with neat features like pockets and rubber bands. Another variable is the number of pages, and this time I didn't want anything too big. Then there's the bindings. Hardcover, paperback, spiral bound, wire bound. Bound on the long side ("SIDE"), bound on the short side ("TOP"). Ah. This is what I was after, a wire-bound sketchbook with the binding on the long side. Strangely I've not seen these in Deltex or maybe I was too late. Dick Blick had so many it was hard to choose, so I decided to try a few, various permutations of number of pages and overall size (A3 and A4), all of them wire-bound on the long side. Also added a pack of oil pastels to the cart and a couple of graphite sticks. I am so looking forward to these things arriving and will post a photo when they come.

Single figures

Page 204 of A4 sketchbook

Into single figures now with the 220-page sketchbook, just a few to go. Am I at the end of the course as I thought would be the case? Unfortunately no. It's over a year now and I've made no progress at all. Many days I fear that the day I finish the sketchbook will be the day I formally pack it in, and for this reason I'm thinking to leave the last couple of pages blank (superstition).

[Countdown: empty pages in main sketchbook = 7]

A question in waiting

New window, graphite in A4 sketchbook

Some day soon the question will demand an answer: why not post more of my sketchbook drawings in here? On  checking it turns out I've been posting only about one per month when in fact I do about twenty times that. It could be many reasons, but reflecting on the question could turn out to be a learning experience in itself.

[Countdown: empty pages in main sketchbook = 24]

Lettuce

Nothing else to post so here's half of an iceberg lettuce.

Pencil in 8-5 x 11" sketchbook

[Countdown: Empty pages remaining in main sketchbook = 29]

I'm going to miss this sketchbook when it's full. I've been drawing in it regularly for a year and it's jam-packed with both sides of the pages filled. I'll be moving on to an A3 sketchbook by Utrecht, hardcover with recycled paper of a lovely oatmeal colour and about half-full. This has a whole mish-mash of stuff in it, some research-type stuff and some real sketches. But the real sketches are mostly stuck in. I just don't seem able to manage the A3 book outdoors, it's really unwieldy. So what I've done a few times is to cut out the pages and stick them back in afterwards. What I've learnt from this is that A3 sketchbooks are fine for working outdoors as long as they're spiral bound.

Picasso's landscapes

Picasso isn't well known for his landscapes so I was surprised recently to find them a treasure trove for the art student. A striking feature (to me, anyway) is that, despite his reputation as an "abstract" artist, his landscapes have a definite sense of place, more so than many photorealist-type landscape paintings. If you're a Picasso fan this isn't surprising because as we know he aimed to intensify experience by distortion, emphasis, even caricature. So the Mediterranean landscape above is vintage Picasso and also intensely Mediterranean, from the rooftops shimmering in the sun and the deep blue sea down to the triangles of terraced garden and the potted plant on the wall. Another one is of a village called Mougins where he lived for the last fifteen years of his life. It shows a mountain landscape with lakes and tilled fields, with the muted colour conveying a sense of awe at the majesty of nature.

This is something I'd like to be better at, expressing a sense of place in landscape painting.

It's interesting too that these pictures show Picasso's mastery of and interest in depth, debunking the received wisdom that he was a flat painter (Greenberg I think, and others, can find a ref. if anyone wants it).

[Countdown: Empty pages remaining in main sketchbook = 37]

Long Sight in Age

. . . the title of a Philip Larkin poem.

Feeling like I don't know anything any more and Philip Larkin comes to mind, for instance Ignorance, one of the very few poems which I've half memorized. A couple of pages before it there's Long Sight in Age (1955) ending in these five lines which suit my mood:

The long soft tides of grass

Wrinkling away the gold

Wind-ridden waves -- all these,

They say, come back to focus

As we grow old.

In Philip Larkin's Collected Poems

More figures (stats)

In A4 sketchbook, yesterday. Ballpoint, ink, gouache, graphite.

Happy New Year to all.

Some figures are easier than others to be sure of. For instance I can be sure of the number of sketchbook pages I've done for the OCA's Painting 3 Advanced, but I can't be sure of the time I've spent. Weeks or months don't count, it depends on hours, and hours can only be guessed at unless records are kept.

These are some figures I can be sure of, I only have to count:

A4 Sketchbook pages = 221

A3 Sketchbook pages = 47

----------

Total sketchbook pages so far for this course = 268

I started the course properly in mid-February 2009, 11 months or 45 weeks ago, so that works out at 5.9 pages per week.

Logbook pages so far = approx 168 ( = 3.7 pages per week)

My logbook is handwritten and illustrated, about half and half words and images. If about half is words that would be 84 pages, and at c. 250 words per page that would be 250 x 84 = 21,000 words, give or take a few thousand.

I'm about halfway through the course but feel that these figures represent more than half of what I will end up with. Just a guess.

Since there is nothing to compare the figures with they don't mean much. They're just isolated facts for now. At some time they might be placed alongside other comparative figures and then they'd be more interesting.

Some figures

Subscribers to Drawing etc (email and RSS combined) = 60 (accurate figure), up from about 30 at the beginning of the year (a guess).

Blogs that I subscribe to = 24 (not counting the sidebar list and blogs I follow).

Total page views since Drawing etc started in August 2006 -- 30,969.

Due for a spring-clean = the OCA Bloggers list in the sidebar. Many of the photography blogs have not been updated in months.

Spring-clean already done = my studio. Hundreds of old drawings and paintings thrown out. No regrets.

Empty pages remaining in main sketchbook = 59, out of a total of 220. It's a thick hardcover 8.5 x 11" sketchbook, both sides of each page used. Photos of the filled pages are in private sets on Flickr. Not sure what this measures, perhaps how close I am to the end of my current course, though I'm less sure lately of being able to finish it at all.

Pianist continued

I was trying to develop the pianist drawing today. I aimed to make the legs longer and develop the head and arm, but the original drawing was done in the dark and was incomplete with wrong proportions so I don't have enough information. Not sure I will take it any further, it's a digression at the moment and I'm trying to focus my energy on my current course. It was interesting to get away from course work for a while. These took about an hour each.

Acrylic and marker in A4 sketchbook

Charcoal and pastel, 11 x 14"

[Countdown: Empty pages in main sketchbook = 62]

The solution

The event was The Marionettes Chorale Christmas show at Queen's Hall, a popular annual event, which I went to on Sunday December 6th, with pocket-size sketchbook.

The audience was in darkness while the performers on stage were well lit.

The pianist: Justin Salloum; the pannist: Johann Chuckaree. They played a lovely piece together, would it be called a duet? -- and they looked at each other often, nodding or making signs, and I thought it was a really nice and touching performance, the highlight of the show.

A Google search on "Christmas concert Trinidad" (without the quotes) brought up this link on the second page. Of the three concerts mentioned the only one with a pianist and a pannist was the Marionettes. Since I knew what I was looking for, you could cry foul!

Then I tried a search on "Christmas concert Trinidad pianist pannist" and got nothing.

Then tried again with "Christmas concert Trinidad pianist" and the Newsday link above came up first in the list!

A review of the concert

An old video of the Marionettes Chorale

Thanks to Duncan, Mark, Bri and Finchley land girl for taking part, and have a great Christmas everyone!

Companion drawing

This was drawn at the same time as the piano player, in the dark. It's even more fragmentary, that's why I didn't post it before. I'm pretty sure only a Trini could guess what it aims to represent. The complete solution would be the names of the two people and the event. Together with the drawn-in-the-dark clue and the time of year, there's just a chance someone might get it. If not I'll post the solution here in a few days.

Mystery drawing

This was drawn in the dark, literally. I wonder if anyone in Trinidad can deduce what it is, or rather, what it was supposed to be. A hint would be the time of year.

Savannah railing at the Boissiere House

The Boissiere House from the Savannah, March 21, 2009

The Boissiere House from the Savannah, December 5, 2009

The Savannah is changing all the time. Last time I was working in this spot there was a magnificent umbrella-shaped tree with deep shade just to the east of the area in the photo (which is the Boissiere House). That tree is now gone and instead there are piles of soil and a man-made hole. Although the missing tree was behind me and doesn't affect the picture, I became disoriented and got the angle wrong.

Also, in the previous pair of photos, careful examination reveals that the nearest tree on the right is gone.

[Countdown: Empty pages in main sketchbook = 65]

Savannah railing

Pitch Walk, April 2009

Pitch Walk, 21 November 2009

Just a few weeks ago a new railing began appearing around the Savannah. There was always a railing on the north side, but most of the rest was railing-free. Now this new railing is being installed all the way around. It's not clear what the purpose is. Gaps have been left for some of the benches, and there are other small gaps for walking through and big ones to accommodate trucks.

The photos show a section of the Pitch Walk before the railing and after. Personally I prefer it before. I sat down to paint today only to find a black bar blocking my view at eye level. It's surprisingly annoying. I wonder who decided this and why.

[Countdown: Empty pages in main sketchbook = 71]

Mark-making

They had a set of children's markers in the grocery yesterday, "ultra washable". The colours looked more subtle than the usual markers so I bought a set and did a page of marks to see what they could do. Somehow the marks came out whimsical and -- silly? -- was it the markers or was it me?

17.11.09 -- photo replaced.

Drawing with the left or non-dominant hand

Chili peppers, right hand above, left hand below.

I'd forgotten about drawing with the left (or non-dominant) hand, it's an incredibly useful thing to do. My right hand is stronger, but my left hand sees different things. The difference shows up in, say, a set of one-minute gesture drawings. My left hand will start in different places and pick out or emphasize different parts of the figure in action. I don't think it would happen as much if one was self-conscious about it, and the great thing about one-minute drawings is that they don't allow time to think. My left hand nearly always does more interesting things. It's really worth a try when one is desperate and nothing is going right.

The drawings above are ordinary drawings, not restricted to one minute. Right hand above, left hand below. Not sure they prove anything but I prefer the left-handed ones.

Savannah sketch

Pen, watercolour and graphite in sketchbook.

Level best

It might sound silly but one of the things I really like in drawings and paintings is when a level surface looks level. By this I mean, for example, that because of good drawing, a drawn or painted tabletop can be seen to be level. The edges might be slanted because of perspective but we as ordinary viewers know if it's "right". This preference goes against the grain of Modernism which delighted in throwing conventional perspective out the window and which teems with "tipped up" tabletops and other such surfaces. I like these too but don't feel authentic doing it myself and besides Modernism is long gone.

I sometimes use a little test of my own to figure out if something in a drawing is level. For instance, take the chair seat in Vermeer's "Woman Reading a Letter", and try this to check if it's really level: imagine placing a marble in the centre of the seat and then feel it with your body. Will the marble stay put or will it roll off?

The thing about tipped-up tabletops in Modernism is interesting for another reason. The trend developed from a belief that Cézanne's tipped up still life paintings were a manifestation of the use of multiple viewpoints and were therefore a precursor to Cubism. In previous posts I have ventured some evidence against this view. I'm now reading a book about Cézanne's landscapes that tends to question some of the 20th century art theory that was built on the tipped-up assumptions. Very interesting indeed, more in another post.

Marsden Hartley on painting waterfalls

I stumbled on this in a library today:

" . . . for years have had the falls at Lewiston on my mind which are wonderful and formidable indeed at times during the spring freshets, but there is always the damnable iron bridge and how to cover it up or else just go ahead and put the damn thing in for it is there, and up to now I haven't found a view that would give the fall right and yet get rid of the bridge, but the falls themselves are very wonderful and play such a part in my boyish memories."

from a letter by Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)
Bangor, Maine, January 17, 1941

quoted in A Sense of Place, by Alan Gussow

Time taken to do OCA courses

Click on table to enlarge

The table shows how long it took to do the OCA courses that I've been busy with for the last few years. The start date is when I received the course materials and the end date is when I sent the last assignment to my tutor. The time taken to select, mount and pack work for the final assessment in each course is not included, but it took about a month of intensive work for each course.

I did two courses at a time most of the way through and at one point I was doing three (June-August 2006). I can't predict yet how long the current course will take, it will be at least another six to eight months.

The whole BA Honours degree requires seven courses. It's also possible to exit with an ordinary BA after doing one level 3 course. This is where I am now. I've finished and passed Painting 3 YOE and could claim the ordinary BA, and I've seriously considered that. The main reason I've decided to continue is that I'm learning so much with the Advanced course.

Note: there were a couple of errors in the first table, these are corrected in the present version.

 P.S.: See also: Time taken to do the OCA degree 

Sketchbook with pen-holder

(Sept 5: Apologies for that last photo, it was truly awful. I've replaced it, this one is better but I don't rate myself as a photographer.)

I've tried so often to attach a pen or pencil to a sketchbook, usually with masking tape. Masking tape doesn't last for long and it leaves a sticky residue just where one holds the pencil. So I was delighted to stumble on this in the office shop. It's a simple and effective idea. The spiral binder is covered by canvas which is stitched onto the front and back covers, and the pen-holder loop is stitched into the front seam. It works for any pen which has a clip such as Micron pens (can't find one right now for the photo). Really neat and duly snapped up.

E.O. Wilson was right

". . . mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit. Splendor awaits in minute proportions.
" -- Edward O. Wilson

Out of nowhere, a leaf insect on the chair, just like that.