A quote from Paul Klee

"In my productive activity, every time a type grows beyond the stage of its genesis, and I have about reached the goal, the intensity gets lost very quickly, and I have to look for new ways. It is precisely the way which is productive -- this is the essential thing; becoming is more important than being.

Graphic work as the expressive movement of the hand holding the recording pencil -- which is essentially how I practice it -- is so fundamentally different from dealing with tone and colour that one can use this technique quite well in the dark, even in the blackest night. On the other hand, tone (movement from light to dark) presupposes some light, and color presupposes a great deal of light."

[1914]

Paul Klee, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1964

Screen print, a failed attempt

My first attempt to make a screen print has failed.

The image, a detailed drawing of a tree, was ideal for a photo stencil, so yesterday I prepared the screen with photo emulsion and left it in the dark to dry. Today I set up the light -- a 150-watt flood lamp attached to a piece of 3 x 1" board -- and gave the screen an exposure of 24 minutes.


Sad to say, the unexposed parts of the screen (the drawing) failed to "open" properly afterwards and in the end I had to abandon it and wash out the whole screen, which was pretty difficult to do. It took over an hour of scrubbing and washing with chemicals.

I think the exposure time was too long. I will try again with a shorter exposure and possibly raise the lamp a couple of inches.

I can't complain, having skipped the step in the reference book* which recommends doing a series of timed test exposures.

*Screen Printing, Contemporary Methods and Materials by Frances and Norman Lassiter, 1978, Hunt Manufacturing, Philadelphia

David Hockney's landscapes

[The links are to images]

Hockney's big Yorkshire landscapes done in 2006-2007 came as a surprise. Last I knew, he was doing large double portraits on four full sheets of watercolour paper with the subjects sitting on swivel chairs. It was a long series and they're already looking better as time goes by, though it's getting more difficult to find good examples on the internet, as the poor quality of the National Portrait Gallery image shows.

Then there were the dog paintings which brought him widespread scorn. These were and are considered trivial and sentimental, a view I do not share. At the very least, the length of the series shows Hockney's commitment to hard work.

Before that he did a series of landscapes in California, of Mulholland Drive and Nicholl's Canyon. These were large and colourful with the landscape spread out as if seen from a high viewpoint or even from the air. A few years ago I thought they might have been a little forced but now they're growing in stature, so to speak, and are fascinating images, visual extravaganzas. A later painting of the Grand Canyon is on sixty canvases.

In the 1980s, Hockney did his cubist-inspired photo-collages, with multiple shots taken from different angles and then cut up and pasted together, as in the iconic Pearblossom Highway (1986, photographic collage, 198 x 282 cm.) These too did not receive much critical acclaim but once again they are looking better with the passage of time. Furthermore, one can see how these cut-up and juxtaposed images could have led to his subsequent work -- the double portraits on four sheets of paper, the Grand Canyon paintings made up of dozens of smaller canvases put together; and now the monumental landscapes of East Yorkshire, each on 10 or 12 canvases. The biggest one is on fifty canvases and was painted for the Royal Academy's 2007 summer show.

Astonishingly, the Yorkshire landscapes were done outdoors, from life. Thus, Hockney achieves the spontaneity of painting outdoors at a scale never attempted before, to my knowledge, underscoring how innovative and exciting these pieces are.

Hockney's process involved transporting all his gear in a pick-up truck and setting up several easels together; and then working furiously for several days in succession. He might have had a tent as well, and helpers to lift and carry and set the equipment up, but I'm just guessing. This link tells how he used digital technology to help him see the painting's overall progress as if he was standing back from it. It also has a photo of Hockney outdoors, at work on an array of easels.

However he did it, I have the greatest admiration for the work. His strength has always been his gift for drawing which for the last fifty years has been a liability. Hockney plodded along on his own path, disregarding fashion and doing what he did best. Just turned 70 and with a huge body of work behind him, he didn't stagnate, he's still breaking new ground, and you have to admire that.

The only problem with Hockney now, and it's a disappointing one, is the lockdown on images. Unfortunately good examples of his work are becoming harder to find on the internet because of strict enforcement of copyright. Artists get known through their work being seen and it's risky to prevent people from seeing it. Hockney may be sufficiently well regarded now that he can afford to do this, joining the ranks of only the most illustrious of painters such as Picasso, Klee and Warhol, but it antagonizes many in the Wikipedia and Open Source generation and is potentially counter- productive. For myself, I declined to go further when I met the "STOP" sign on the official Hockney website.

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Watercolour kit part 2

The watercolour kit is now complete. I added a brush in addition to the one that came with the paint box. The new brush is a Rowney series S 34 sable, No. 4, and it has a great point and good spring. It came with a clear plastic guard which fits over the hairs to prevent damage from bending, e.g. against the side of the case.

Here's all the stuff together: a zipper pencil case, a Moleskine sketchbook/notebook about 3 x 5", a Micron 05 black pen with archival ink, a pencil, the sable brush, the paint box and the water bottle.


It all fitted in, really! And there's room for an eraser, a sharpener, and a folded tissue as a rag.


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Whatever happened to manila paper?

The Plein Air group held a well-attended still life studio last Saturday at the Art Society building. Peter Sheppard arranged it and brought props (flowers and fruit, pots and pans) for four set-ups. Tables and chairs were in plentiful supply because of the current children's art camp organized by the art society.

I took along drawing gear as well as acrylics and a canvas, which turned out to be overly optimistic. I arrived late and left early and did only two drawings in the end, on brown paper.

Which brings up the matter of brown paper. It's cheap, which encourages using it freely and doing many drawings. Apart from being cheap, I like it because it gives you a middle tone to work out of. It's ideal for quick compositional studies with charcoal or Conté, either black and white or a range of colours. On Saturday I did one of each, not very good but shown below anyway (about 16 x 20 in. each).

Brown paper takes gouache fairly well too. But for wet media it's nowhere near as good as real manila paper, which disappeared off the market about ten or fifteen years ago, maybe more. Manila paper was cheap, tough, excellent to work on with both wet and dry media, and the plant it was made from (hemp) was easy to grow in large quantities.

I tried to find out what happened to it, and the only explanation I could find is that the plant may have been banned under the international drug laws. I don't know if this is the real reason and haven't researched it recently, that was a few years ago.

The old screen, part 2

It's taken a while but finally, after some unforeseen delays, I got replacement hinges for the old screen. I put them on last night and here are two pictures. The first one shows the newly-installed hinges, and the second shows the screen propped up, as it will be in use, e.g. when changing the paper. Ideally it would have a swing-arm on the right (far) side to prop it up in between prints, but for now there's a clothes peg holding it up.





In the first picture you can just about see the removable pins in the hinges, both facing away from the centre. They're rather stiff, hope they'll get easier to remove and replace over time. Or maybe I should oil them.

It's easy to buy ready-made screens at some art suppliers, so why go to such lengths to reclaim this old one? I don't quite know myself actually. Casting around for reasons I can see that it revives a connection with the past and gives me a means of making different kinds of marks for very little outlay. Or, as an incurable hoarder, is it rather the satisfaction of being able to say that something came in handy after all? (Hoarders live for such moments.)

But I must produce something with it before I can say that.

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Watercolour travel kit

I've been feeling a need to add colour to my sketchbook, so I went looking for a small neat folding watercolour kit. Pastels are fine except for smudging, and I do use them outside, but not in a standard sketchbook with white pages. Gouache would be good too, didn't think of it at the time. Coloured pencils are too slow and need too much pressure. Watercolour pencils aren't bad. Markers -- well, it's no harm to have them but I don't use them much. Watercolour it would be.

I found dozens of watercolour kits in all price ranges, some quite elaborate costing over US$100, but I was looking for something simple and inexpensive. I settled on the little box shown here and am very happy with it, except that the brush is hopeless. The box, along with a much smaller sketchbook than the one shown*, and a tiny water bottle (a reclaimed airline rum sample bottle), fits in a zipper pencil case, good to go.


The kit performs well in actual use (apart from the brush) -- the pans have body and moisture and you can work up a good thick brush-load of colour. Actually, the brush isn't hopeless, it has good spring, it's just very small and thin. One of the things I like about this particular kit is that the colours are mostly permanent except for Viridian and Alizarin. Not that permanence is an issue in a sketchbook, but even so.

As for the brush -- I'll get a thicker one as well and cut the handle down to fit in the pencil case.

A selection of travel kits:
http://www.dickblick.com/categories/watercolorsets/watercolortravelkits/details/

This kit is by Winsor & Newton and is called the Cotman mini watercolour set -- US$23.59, item No. 00325-1039 at Dick Blick, http://www.dickblick.com/items/00325-1039/

The kit closed. The silvery thing is the brush slotting neatly into the cover.

*The sketchbook in the picture is hardcover, 8.5 x 11".

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Picasso's way of working

Picasso, The Family of Saltimbanques, 1905

In The Family of Saltimbanques Picasso achieved a universal quality, mysterious and poignant, that lifts it out of the realm of ordinary genre. His studies for the painting show how he worked, with numerous studies of variations of the group and of the individual figures. Many of them are available at the click of a mouse in the Online Picasso Project (list of links below).

[Edited 17 June 2013: Unfortunately the Online Picasso Project has since been closed to the public.]

It could have been a sketchbook drawing at the races that inspired the picture. The first compositional study shows the main grouping, without the woman at lower right, with horse-racing in the background. In the final painting the background is plain and featureless; just barren earth and sky, similar to the "Boy with a Horse".

Seeing Picasso's approach is nothing short of inspiring. It's an encouragement to stop labouring over a study that's going nowhere and instead to do another, and another and another.

And too, as an OCA student, it validates the OCA's teaching methods. You have to do "studies" from the first project in the first painting course. At the beginning I found it irritating -- why do yet another charcoal drawing when I already have a perfectly good one? But over time it has become second nature and, although I'll never be another Picasso (sad to say), I'm attempting things I would never have done before and I can see the value of all the drill.

Links to the Online Picasso Project: Click on the picture to see a bigger version. Also, you will surely find more sketches and studies by looking through the catalogue for 1905.
Boy Leading a Horse
http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksInfo?CatID=OPP.06:012

1905

Acrobat and Young Harlequin
http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksInfo?CatID=OPP.05:004

Boy with Dog
http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksInfo?CatID=OPP.05:016
Two Acrobats with Dog
http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksInfo?CatID=OPP.05:017
Bouffon with Young Acrobat
http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksInfo?CatID=OPP.05:010
Study for Saltimbanques
http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksInfo?CatID=OPP.05:014
A sketchbook study for the Saltimbanques
http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksInfo?CatID=OPP.05:110

Gros Buffon Assis
http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksInfo?CatID=OPP.05:034
Young Girl with Dog
http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksInfo?CatID=OPP.05:272
Mallorquine
http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksInfo?CatID=OPP.05:005

The Family of Saltimbanques
http://picasso.csdl.tamu.edu/picasso/WorksInfo?CatID=OPP.05:002

John Cheever, from the Journals

By John Cheever, from The Journals of John Cheever

"I open Nabokov and am charmed by this spectrum of
ambiguities, the marvellous atmosphere of untruth; and I am interested in his methods and find them very sympathetic, but his imagery -- the shadow of a magician against a shimmery curtain, and all those sugared violets -- is not mine. The house I was raised in had its charms, but my father hung his underwear from a nail he had driven into the back of the bathroom door, and while I know something about the Riviera I am not a Russian aristocrat polished in Paris. My prose style will always be to a degree matter-of-fact."

[1963]

Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1991, ISBN 0-394-57274-1 (this is the first edition and represents a fraction of Cheever's journals. A new edition was published last year.)

Watercolour brushes

1. Da Vinci Maestro, dry

2. Da Vinci, wet, showing spring

3. Da Vinci, wet, showing point

4. Talens, wet, with worn tip

These are two great watercolour brushes that I've had for many years. The bigger one (1, 2 and 3) is a Da Vinci Maestro No. 12 Series 10, Kolinsky sable, which I use only for transparent watercolour (e.g. Ballinspittle, below). The smaller one (4) is a Talens No. 10 Series 110 pure red sable which I use mostly for gouache (e.g. the Dog study for an OCA course, below).

In fact I use the Talens brush a good deal more than the Da Vinci because I use gouache very often, and pure watercolour quite rarely. I bought the Talens at Deltex in Trinidad at least ten years ago for about US$20 and use it so much that the point has become somewhat worn. I bought the Da Vinci in London in 2002 for about US $100. They were both expensive but they've both earned their keep.

I did the testing routine with water in both cases when I was buying them. That is, I asked the assistant in the store for water to test the spring and the point. To test the point, wet the brush in the water, then take it out and give it a quick shake with a flick of the wrist. A first-rate brush will come to an extremely fine point, as in photo 3. To test the spring, draw the wet brush across the back of the hand to bend the hairs (photo 2). When you remove it the body of the brush should spring back in line with the handle. The photo shows that the spring in this brush is not perfect, but it's pretty good and has performed well.

These are the only brushes I need for watercolour and gouache. I wouldn't ever use either of them for acrylic which is very hard on brushes.

Near Ballinspittle, watercolour, 9 x 12", 2002

Dog study No. 6, gouache, 2007, about 12 x 16" (A3)

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Essays by art critics and art historians

Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader, edited by Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood.

From the blurb on the back cover:

"Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader is a collection of writings by critics and art historians on the major themes and debates that have animated the practice and interpretation of art over the last hundred years. [. . . ] Key themes and topics include: canonical modernism and the questioning of the principles of modernism; the role of the avant-garde; photography in art; the pivotal moment of the late 1960s; the shift from modernism to postmodernism; gender and the performance of identity; and the globalisation of art. Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader is a free-standing volume that will be of interest to the general reader and student alike. It is also a companion volume to the Open University art-history course of the same name. Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood are both lecturers in art history at the Open University."

I've only read a couple of the essays so far, so this is a first impression rather than a review, but it seems like a worthwhile purchase. A point in its favour is that the essays are directly about visual art topics, and the topics covered would not generally be found in art history textbooks, or at least not in as much depth. This makes the book more relevant to the visual artist than "cultural studies" texts which tend to be more about philosophy, aesthetics and political theory.

Even so, I have a level of caution about writings by critics and art historians, who are often not themselves artists and who may or may not have a sufficient grasp of the practical issues that affect the making of art. But I'll be keeping an open mind and am looking forward to reading Clive Bell and Roger Fry, who I've been hearing about for years; also John Szarkowski's extract from his renowned book, The Photographer's Eye, and Jeff Wall's essay, Marks of Indifference. Some of the essays I've read before (e.g. Greenberg's The Pasted Paper Revolution, and Meyer Schapiro's The Nature of Abstract Art). Others such as Craig Owens are new to me, surprises in store, I hope. Only time will tell.

I couldn't wait, however, to read Paul Smith's long essay, called "How a Cubist Painting Holds Together", commissioned specially for this book and written in 2002. Would my own analysis of cubism survive this carefully researched academic paper? I read it with trepidation, more than twenty-five pages consisting partly of detailed analysis of specific cubist paintings and partly of explanations of the science of how we see. On reaching the end I hadn't come across anything, fact or opinion, that flat-out contradicted my findings, which was a major relief. In fact, when Smith notes in the last paragraph the cubist painting's "refusal to solidify into a static image, even though it is otherwise coherent", that "coherence" is consistent with my view.

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An old screen

Over the past few days I've been reclaiming an old screen-printing screen. It's at least twenty years old, maybe twenty-five, a remnant of a course I attended many years ago in Arima. I hate throwing things out and that's why I still have this strange object.

I can't remember the name of the person who taught the course but she did a great job, teaching all the basic methods and processes including photo stencils. The course occupied one whole day each week over six weeks.

We made our own screens on the first day. I think our tutor must have supplied the materials, they are of such good quality and have held up so well. The frame and baseboard are perfectly sound showing no signs of warping or rotting despite years of neglect. The screen itself appears to be in good shape apart from ghost images. I've washed it and dried it and the mesh is taut and looks intact. The hinges were rusty and a pin was missing, so I removed them and will attach new ones next week. Then, with a squeegee and some ink, all I will need is one or two ideas. I'll post the first presentable results here (note the qualifier -- "presentable").

Out to the Savannah

Flamboyant, acrylic sketch, approx 10 x 12"

On Tuesday this week I went with the Plein Air Picassos to the Savannah to paint a spectacular Flamboyant tree in bloom. It was a fun outing. I arrived first at 8:05 am and did a pencil study in my sketchbook before anyone else arrived, and then another. Caroline Mair was next and she did a lovely drawing in black oil paint on the open spread of a small sketchbook, very graphic and striking. Then the others showed up in a bunch.

It was a scorching hot day and although I'd carefully chosen a tree with deep shade, I still got some sunburn (trying to avoid getting that greasy sunscreen on my hands) -- but it wasn't too bad and is fading.

The two preliminary studies were a help. I went with the second one which had a better composition. Lisa O'Connor says that the tree with the pinkish-mauve flowers on the left is called the Queen of Flowers (Lisa joined the group too). It's a very beautiful tree with flowers growing vigorously upwards. This is the season of flowering trees in Trinidad, first the pink and yellow Pouis a few weeks ago, now the Flamboyants and the Queen of Flowers.

The image above is the acrylic sketch that resulted from the session. The second photo is of me at the scene, taken by Peter Sheppard, showing my outdoor set-up, which is actually quite lightweight though it looks like a lot. I wish people wouldn't do it (take photos of me) but what's done is done and there you have it. And it's rather nice to have this as a reminder of the occasion so I'm not complaining.

The only difference for oil is that I use a French easel. It's a lot heavier, more gear to carry, so recently I've been leaning towards acrylic for outdoor work.

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Acrylic tips

Here are two things about dried acrylic paint I haven't seen elsewhere:

1) When acrylic paint dries it becomes more transparent than it looks when first put on. Most sources say it dries darker, which is probably true, but it's also more transparent and therefore streakier. The reason is that the binder or glue that holds the pigment together is opaque or semi-opaque when wet (whitish), but it dries clear. This is merely my own observation, not a scientifically proven fact.

2) A brush ruined by acrylic paint drying and hardening in the bristles makes a good stick for stirring cans of paint.

Joseph Beuys, Eurasia at MOMA

Joseph Beuys, Eurasia, installation at the Museum of Modern Art
(MOMA), New York, my photo. The text in the lower part has something to do with body temperature. Clicking on the image makes it bigger.

Joseph Beuys

A few weeks ago I watched a video about Joseph Beuys on YouTube, "I Like America and America Likes Me" (link in an earlier post). It consists of extracts of a famous performance, with some commentary and other video clips spliced in, a 16-minute mini-documentary. I had also seen the "Eurasia" installation in MoMA and was drawn to it.

I don't know what it is about Beuys. Maybe it's Benjamin's "aura". I think it has to do with his gentle attitude to animals; he projects a genuine positive attitude towards everyone, live and let live.

It's a sort of political art. I can respect this sort of performance (the coyote) -- the bits shown on the video were quite powerful. It means something, I don't know what, it's just moving in some way. The way the coyote tried to engage him. I can't get my mind around that. It makes me think that solitary confinement must be very cruel. It makes me think of ancient times, before technology.

Paul Klee's Line

Paul Klee, from his diary, 1908:

"831. The line! My lines of 1906/07 were my most personal possession. And yet I had to interrupt them, they are threatened by some kind of cramp, perhaps even by finally becoming ornamental. In short, I was frightened and stopped, although they were deeply embedded in my emotions. The trouble was that I just couldn't make them come out. And I could not see them around me, the accord between inside and outside was so hard to achieve.

The changeover was complete: in the summer of 1907 . . . "

Joseph Beuys video

A Joseph Beuys video on YouTube, about 16 mins (parts of I Like America, America Likes Me)

The video has since been removed from You Tube.

Still Life Studio

Last Saturday the Plein-Air Picassos held a Still Life Studio at the Art Society headquarters. I was asked to "lead" it, which meant helping to set up the arrangement and being available if anyone asked for help, but it was definitely not a workshop or a teaching session. It went well enough and was a good experience.

An early difficulty was evolving the arrangement, which I tend to do during the preliminary drawing stage. This wasn't very practical with several people working on the same arrangement at once. People didn't appreciate having objects added and removed after they were well into their drawings.

Mine evolved from horizontal to half-horizontal to vertical. At first I wasn't displeased with the end result, and I let Peter take a shot of it. After bringing it home I didn't feel as good about it as before. Everything was a little too small. So, since I had taken the objects with me, and had brought them home again, I set up an arrangement in my studio with the same objects and did it over. The second one came out very different from the first and I'm not sure what to make of it. This is it, acrylic on canvas, approx. 18 x 14".

Reclining foal

Another drawing from that day at Bonanza with the Plein Air Picassos. It shows one of the foals lying down for a rest.
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Bonanza Farm

I didn't produce much during the April 6th trip to Bonanza Farm, organized by the Plein-Air Picassos, a sub-group of members of the Trinidad and Tobago Art Society. But it was a good day all the same. I remembered to put on sun block, for one. The place was beautiful with loads of space for the group to spread out, a working horse farm with paddocks and wide open spaces, bounded by the Caroni River and fringed by bamboo.

In one small paddock there were two mares with foals. I spent maybe two hours drawing there, fascinated especially by the foals. They have a sort of confidence, an insouciance, a certainty of their right to be in the world as independent, individual beings. But they don't stray far from their mothers either. One of them took off all of a sudden and galloped round and round and round the perimeter of the paddock, its delicate long legs at full stretch. It made five or six rounds, maybe more. Was it just an expression of the joy of life and youth and energy? Or was it frustration at being fenced in? And then just as suddenly it swerved towards the centre and came to an abrupt stop beside the mother.

The drawing below is the best of a bad lot. I was striving for the relationship between mare and foal but didn't get enough in before they inevitably moved off somewhere else. But even so, if you look really hard, you can just about see the hindquarters of the foal and its tail and hind legs to the left of the grazing mare.

Drawing horses at Bonanza, photo courtesy Peter Sheppard.

Read Peter Sheppard's account of the day.

In conversation

Pencil in letter-size sketchbook

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Art and Philosophy

This week's library book is Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century.

The book consists of encyclopedia-type articles in alphabetical order, starting with Theodor Adorno and ending with Wilhelm Worringer. Each article describes and explains briefly the person's ideas, thinking and major contributions to the field and is about one to two thousand words long. Each article is written by an expert on the person's life and work and ends with a brief biography and bibliography. There are no illustrations.

I read it all the way through. The "key writers" are art historians, art critics, cultural theorists, and (the largest proportion) philosophers. The list includes Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Roger Fry and Clive Bell, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, John Dewey, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Griselda Pollock, and so on -- all names that ring some bell or press some button; and many more, famous or less well-known, for a total of forty-nine.

The book turned out to be about as far as I want to go with the philosophy of art (and aesthetics, of course, which falls in the field of philosophy). It was a good overview of the field however and I'm glad I read it.

To me, the anthologies of writings by actual practicing artists covering different periods are more valuable to the painter or the art student -- the Renaissance to the 19th century edited by E.G. Holt; the first half of the 20th century edited by Herschel B. Chipp; and Post WW2 to the mid 1990s, edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz ("Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art").

Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century, edited by Chris Murray, published by Routledge, 2003; 314 pages with index.

Crocodile drawing

A crocodile (or alligator or caiman) at the Emperor Valley Zoo, 20th October 2007.
Pencil in 8.5 x 11" sketchbook

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Cheever's Uncle George

A few weeks ago I went looking for a funny quote I remembered from many years ago in The Stories of John Cheever. It was something about nude statues in Italy. I wasn’t sure if it was in the stories or in the journals. Anyway, I tried the Stories first. It’s a fat 819-page book, so I checked the contents for a likely-looking title, and found The Bella Lingua round about the middle of the book. Sure enough this was the right story and I soon had the quote I was looking for. However, on reaching the end of The Bella Lingua, I turned the page and went on to the next story, and then I kept on reading all the way to the end of the book, over many evenings. And after that I went back to the beginning and read the first half. How I enjoyed those stories! Some were tragic or horrifying but there was lots of humour too. I found pleasure on every page with unexpected and vivid descriptions, perceptions that are still fresh, and an absence of clichés. A surprising plus for me was that Cheever’s imagery reminded me very much of painting – not the images per se, but the kinds of details he chooses to reveal some sort of significance. The common ground between writing and painting became more clear.

I felt sad coming to the end of the book, or rather arriving back at the middle where I’d begun. But luckily I have Cheever’s Journal as well, so I’m reading that now.

As for the quote, the context is as follows: Uncle George is an American tourist in Italy. His purpose is to bring his widowed niece and her son back to America and to have his first vacation in over forty years. He’s something of a stereotype, saying loudly to the Italian waiter who brings him his continental breakfast, “You gotta no hamma? ... You gotta no eggsa?” He then goes on a sightseeing tour and gets conned by the guide. The guide lures him into a trap with a promise of seeing a special place:

“Very special,” the guide said. “For men only. Only for strong men. Such pictures. Very old.”

Uncle George takes the bait and gets mugged and robbed of four hundred dollars.

Later on while he’s having dinner with Kate, his niece, the story continues:

“It’s an immoral country,” Uncle George said, sitting down in one of the golden chairs. “First they rob me of four hundred dollars, and then, walking around the streets here, all I see is statues of men without any clothes on. Nothing.”

Kate rang for Assunta, and when the maid came in she ordered whiskey and ice, in very rapid Italian. “It’s just another way of looking at things, Uncle George,” she said.

“No, it isn’t,” Uncle George said. “It isn’t natural. Not even in locker rooms. There’s very few men who’d choose to parade around a locker room stark naked if a towel was handy. It’s not natural. Everywhere you look. Up on the roofs. At the main traffic intersections. When I was coming over here, I passed through a little garden -- playground, I guess you’d say -- and right in the middle of it, right in the middle of all these little children, is one of these men without anything on.”

“Will you have some whiskey?”

By John Cheever, from The Stories of John Cheever, Ballantyne Books, New York.

Steinberg on Rauschenberg

Yesterday I went to one of my favourite places, the Port of Spain Public Library. I hadn't been for over a year, and was surprised at the changes -- for one, the shelves are much better stocked than before. The librarians have been doing a terrific job.

My card had expired and the machine for making new ones was down so they extended my old card for a month. I had only a few minutes to spare so I dashed back up the stairs and grabbed a book about Robert Rauschenberg who I've recently begun to like a lot. Here is a a quote from its author, Leo Steinberg:

"In an interview with Barbara Rose (1987), Rauschenberg said [...] that in his early years he "loved to draw". It now occurs to me -- looking over Rauschenberg's work after 1953 -- that he hardly draws anymore. Even his brushwork, when he spreads paint on a surface, is never an Abstract Expressionist stroke, which usually forms a trajectory. Rauschenberg's laid-back pigments are the cool substance of paint, never describe anything, refuse to transfigure. In a word, no draftsmanship. And even in 1953, he sensed where he was heading -- toward a visual art that had no further use for the genius of drawing."

By Leo Steinberg, from Encounters with Rauschenberg, published jointly by The Menil Collection, Houston, and the University of Chicago Press, in 2000.

The book is not a monograph exactly. It's the text of a lecture Steinberg gave at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1997, and again at the Menil Collection in Houston in 1998, for a Rauschenberg retrospective. It's a pleasant and informative read and is well illustrated.)

Below is a self-portrait of me reading the book, to celebrate going back to Mac.

Robert Rauschenberg

Here are some notes about Rauschenberg I made a few months back:

Robert Rauschenberg, b. 1925

I love these works and have no idea why. What was Rauschenberg’s intention in doing them? I'd like to know more. His composition is unusual and distinctive, and his colour too.

I'd like especially to know more about his process because several of these are quite big, as in 6’ x 4’ or bigger. The titles are mysterious but descriptive and might be helpful. But I’m thinking I’ll need a good monograph.

I like the informality, the way big blocks are slightly off the vertical or horizontal, plus the mix of drips, photo-type images, gestural brushmarks, hard and soft edges, and the subtle but exciting colour. All in all some of them are a formal feast for the eye, with no obvious antecedents that come to mind -- = original work. The juxtapositions don’t seem peculiar in the way that surrealist juxtapositions are peculiar. They’re puzzling but give a sense of some sort of link or logic.

His composition leans towards loosely geometrical division of the canvas, sometimes into thirds horizontally. The colour is usually muted with liberal use of chromatic greys. Some are more successful than others. The overall impression in those I like best is seductive and gorgeous.

(Some pictures at Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rauschenberg)

Naipaul: a creative moment

That afternoon, in the front room of the house, where the furniture was old but cared for, I looked for the first time for weeks at the typescript of the book I had tried to get started on in Victoria, the sequence about freedom and loss. I found it better than I had during the writing. I even saw the sentence where it had come alive – a sentence written out of concentration, from within the mood created by the words. That critical creative moment had been missed by me in Victoria, perhaps because of my anxiety about what was to follow in the writing; and perhaps as well because of my anxiety about what was to follow Victoria.

Now, recognizing the validity of that good sentence, I surrendered to the pictures the words created, the other pictures they trailed. I summoned up again, and sank back into, the mood of Africa, the mood out of which the sentence had been written. I heard – or created – snatches of dialogue from different stages of my story; this particular story in the sequence was full of dialogue. I made brief notes. And it was only when I came back from the mood or came out of the concentration that I understood how far away I had been.

-- V.S. Naipaul, in The Enigma of Arrival, 1987

Water, water

This was an effort to draw ripples on a pool. I see it as a drawing even though it's in paint and in colour, because I was trying to work out the forms and shapes of the ripples (which were in constant movement). I have yet to find a satisfactory definition for drawing that includes this kind of situation, but I most certainly felt I was drawing with the brush while doing this little piece (oil on linen, about 7" x 5").

Drawing movement

Charcoal on paper, approx 20 x 16"

Why not? No harm trying. One needs plenty of cheap paper such as newsprint, and a drawing tool such as charcoal that moves easily over the paper and leaves a good dark mark. The model performed a repetitive movement in one place, such as turning to one side and back, or sweeping (pretending to). After a while I put a sheet of tracing paper over the scribbled figure and continued to draw while the model continued to move.

It might seem daft. It’s hard to draw a thing when it’s still, let alone when it’s moving. But strangely enough, the results weren’t all that bad. Of course the drawings are only scribbles. I wasn’t looking for perfection, just an idea of what the person was doing. On the positive side, the fact that the model was moving made me freer and braver and less finicky about detail. I ended up with quite a few ideas from a series of drawings of this kind.

And it sort of broke a spell. Since this series I’ve been trying many more moving things, such as ripples on water and animals at the zoo. It doesn't matter if they turn out a mess, just one good scribble in a batch is enough to make me happy.

The best I can do

Impatiens, study, black and white Conté on brown paper, about 18 x 9"

How do I know something is the best I can do? This might sound like an excuse, but it’s not – everything can’t be “best”.

But that’s not what I meant to say. What I was thinking is . . . when I start to do something, it has a better chance if my intention is simple and clear. Not a great vague thing like “best I can do” (though that too, in a corner of my mind), but something much less ambitious. In a still life it might be . . . correct observation. The act of correct observation. When the going gets rough if I can remember to run this through my mind it nearly always helps.