Artwala Road

This is a page from the 1938 WPA calendar. Beautiful. Rushing time a little here to celebrate the fact that the last of the snow disappeared last night.

At breakfast this morning Dear A read out something from The Boston Globe about Carl Jung who said that play is more important to creativity than intellect. Artists know this, of course, and a few writers know it and now everyone who reads The Globe knows. If you read it, that is. I tend to think skimming is the way to go there, especially first thing in the morning. Anyway, thanks to Dear A for reading. He is brilliant.

Our Saturday morning drawing class is all about play. And we do have a good time, so good that this past Saturday someone in the building wandered in and wanted to just chat. Well, we are chatting amongst ourselves but we’re working too. A note will go up on the door next time: Do not disturb—artists at work. Work=Play.

The winter session ended this weekend. Everyone is growing stronger in the skill department, which really is a question of practice and more practice. But I love most that everyone is uncovering new imagery and ways of drawing. It’ll be lovely to see where people go with things.

Sally brought in a wonderful, playful illustrated children’s book she wrote for her wee granddaughter. I tried to write one once but it came out full of adult concerns like love and politics. Sally got it just right. I’m really hoping she’ll try to flog it.

Connie is off to Cartehena, Columbia to spend a month with her daughter and granddaughter but is taking her art supplies and will be working in the sunshine. She’ll be picking up her assignments here and via email.

Next session starts on the 7th. We’ll be working towards a few finished pieces this time. We’ll be using drawing as preparation for other work and making gouache monoprints as well as digital blow-ups of drawings that we run through Photoshop and then do hand drawing on. And, and…we’ll be drawing outside because the sun will be shining again.

March 27th, 2007 | Category: Drawing Life | Leave a comment

Sarah Stockton, in her blog Catalyst at Work asks what her readers keep on their desks as inspiration. I keep a small photo of myself, aged twelve, taken in a photo booth at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto.

Back then I thought fun was around just about every corner.  I want to remember that great energy of my childhood self, that great faith I had in the good in everyone. I think it’s why I do creative work—to try to live in that energy again and send it out in waves.  I agree with Swami Satchidananda—we’re here to have fun.

So I keep that little photo booth picture here beside me because I think that child self is the core of who I am and sometimes I forget and get it wrong.

March 25th, 2007 | Category: Dear Reader | Comments (4)

The art class convened on Saturday despite an unseasonable blizzard. Artists are not wimps.  Even though it was necessary to hack the way out of the driveway with an ice pick, the ladies showed up. Fortunately, Dear A, ever the gentleman, donned his Wellingtons and did the manly thing while I finished my toast and tea.

I showed them Leonard Cohen’s drawings in his book of poetry, The Book of Longing. I’d tried to draw myself one day inspired by Leonard’s drawings of himself. It’s something I never do and I set up a small mirror and drew away. Flattery had to be abandoned; we must face facts. The drawing is a little off…but not that far.

All the ladies love Leonard and we often listen to him when we draw. I wanted to show them the way the arts intersect and feed each other. And also that we can do whatever we feel like doing.

Sally was the only member of our esteemed group who didn’t make it, save for Mimi who was on vacation. Sally left for a business trip to New Orleans last week when it was nearly seventy . Her apparel, a dress, sandals and shawl was doubtless a fine example of her usual fine style. She was wearing the same when she flew back Friday night into the blizzard in Boston. When the plane was just about to run out of gas it was diverted to Bangor, Maine. She and her boss stayed overnight in a hotel; the next morning he rented a car and they began an icy drive to Boston. Sally, whose visual perception has doubtless been improved by years of drawing practice, noticed that said boss’s driving skills were making the drive a perilous and possibly final one. The intrepid Sal, still in sandals and shawl, asked to be let off at the train station and arrived home just as our class ended.
But she called, which means all members of the class were accounted for even in this most inclement weather.

One last thing, when the subject of hacking the car out of ice banks came up, I said. ‘Thank God for the chaps.’

My ladies rolled their eyes. They’d dug their cars out themselves. True warriors, which is what you need to be if you are an artist.

March 18th, 2007 | Category: Drawing Life | Comments (1)

When I was looking at everyone’s work in the drawing class on Saturday I had to think of the great synergy that happens when artists get together to make art and to share their inspirations and journeys. We all did work we wouldn’t have done otherwise because we had the chance to be inspired by each other and to get a boost from the energy in the class.

One of the students, Maureen, is going to Paris next month and lent me the video, Paris Was Yesterday. It’s the story of a group of gay women, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Janet Flanner, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier and others who were catalysts for emerging modernism in the early part of the 2oth century. Stein bought Picasso paintings before anyone else would touch them. Sylvia Beach published James Joyce when he was hounded out of England for his use of obscenity in his writing. (Dear A, Literature Professor and man of taste and insight par excellence, thinks Joyce is not all he was cracked up to be. You only want to read Ulysses once, if at all, for sure. But Joyce did show us, as all the early modernists did, that we can play and break the mold in any way we want. A big thank you to them.)
Change came from this synergy of creative people gathering together not just from those who burst out of the pack like Picasso and Matisse. They were perhaps the most dogged and devoted and gifted of practitioners but their wider group nourished them.

I pulled out a book I’ve had for ages, Kiki’s Paris / Artists and Lovers 1910-1920. Kiki was a model for many of the artists in Paris at that time and there are hundreds of photos in the book. Here is a drawing of Matisse teaching at his Academy and a photo of some of the ladies in his class at a cafe afterward.

Can we bring back cafe society, please? And hats? That’s Kiki above in the fabulous hat. All of this one hundred years ago but it looks like more fun than we’re having now. We haven’t had great fun clothes or a sense of cultural joie de vivre since the sixties. It’s time, n’est-ce pas? (And we won’t get political here but there are correspondences.) Well, change is coming and I suspect it’s going to be grand and amazing. Keep praying.
Well, here’s to the continuation of creative endeavor and to all who practice art in whatever form and all who support it. It’s about changing consciousness in a positive way. Who knows our part in the creation of peace and joy on the planet? But it’s possible. Oh, yes.

March 13th, 2007 | Category: Drawing Life | Comments (2)