On Saturday we once again drew on big paper taped to the wall.  We used photographs to spark ideas and, once again, everyone did work that was bold.  My own piece was not successful.  I mucked up a figure I was drawing by trying to ‘capture’ the actual features a little too closely.  What works better for me is to try to internalize the image and then just draw from my mind.  But the point is not to get a great finished piece but to explore—to just see where we are.  So it was good information.

But the others all did brilliant stuff and amazed themselves, I think.  Something about working big has liberated everyone from excessive care and fiddly obsessiveness, especially when we are working with time constraints.  This time we spent a couple of hours just drawing on our usual pads before attacking our larger piece so that left just an hour to spend on that.  There was no time to worry.  Besides we’d already immersed ourselves in the flow by loosening up on the smaller paper.  It’s always a question of getting out of the way of the mind and just relaxing into whatever is happening without judgment of the work or self.

One of our members said—”This is art yoga.”  It is!  We’re drawing but not forcing, not pushing beyond our limits.  We’re just going as close to our edge as possible, each week nudging ourselves just a little further.  We’re accepting ourselves just where we are.  It’s all perfect, all fine.  And we’re smiling.  Amazing things happen when we get out of our way.

Next Saturday is the last class then we break for the summer.  I hope the class will continue to work on their own until we meet again in September.  To me it’s not about producing art but actually practicing.  The practice is just as great as any object we make.  If we’re doing this in a yogic way we develop presence, being totally in the moment.  We develop non-judgment, total acceptance of what is— the messes we make and ourselves where we are.  And if we make messes we get to see where our edge is and  discern where we might go next time.  Plus, and I think this might be the best of all, we develop a little humor, which really is delight just being who and where we are.  All this from drawing!  These are pretty cool things to be able to take with you into whatever your world is.

I’ll report next week on the last class.  I’m in the final, final leg of my writing project which I hope to finish by mid-June.  Then it’s onto something new and I’ll report on that as the summer goes on.  Meanwhile the wee garden I envisioned is now being planted in pots.  With luck I’ll get the tomatoes in today then sit back and wait for the harvest!

It’s a rainy Saturday here in Boston and there were only four of us drawing today. Our goal was to work on getting a little more abstract. Realism is always interpretive anyway and we’re all interested in breaking free of its constraints. I’m really always interested in exploring. I think that’s what a class is for and, with luck, we get ideas and experience to further our art in whatever way we want to continue. The thing that grabs one artist is not necessarily what grabs another so it’s good to try things out, to really experience them as a way of coming to know who you are as an artist and even as a person.

So we folded our paper in half and drew from a photograph of flowers on the top half with the intention of simplifying. In other words, we tried to leave some of the detail out, to leave some of our lines open, to keep shading to a minimum. The object is clear but the rendering is light. That done, I asked the class to then open the paper and complete the picture using something from the first image but not all. I think the results were really interesting.

Sometimes it’s a question of coming in closer, or reversing dark and light, or just doing lines. In every case, what emerged was more interesting because it allowed the viewer to engage with the image by trying to find meaning in it though not literal meaning. I think that art in a pure form like this is energy. Depending what we do we can create a field of energy in our work—a field of lightness, or tranquility or excitement, all kinds of things. It’s the viewer’s job to watch themselves and their response to the piece at the same time as viewing the art itself.

Art can take us out of our small minds and into our big, expansive ones. So even if it is just a practice it is a fine, fine thing to do. We confront ourselves even when we are focused on something outside of ourselves. We see the ways we inhibit ourselves and the ways we begin to free ourselves. And, very often, we see the ways in which we judge ourselves and our work. I think this is why it’s so hard to break free in art—we’re groomed from our first day in school to perform the ‘right’ way, to get ‘good’ grades, to ’succeed.’

I called this class ‘The Mistakes Class’ because I really want us to make mistakes, to go that far out. Luckily I made one myself today. I tried something and just couldn’t find anywhere to go with it. So, it was on to something else. I can’t even say it was a mistake I learned from—it was just something that didn’t work. But the next piece I did really did work and I couldn’t have done it without going way too far in a fruitless direction first.

I’m still a bit pooped from our time in San Francisco, have to say. But so many wondrous things seem to be happening that are leading in good directions. I’m still very inspired by the Art in the City symposium at Harvard a couple of weeks ago. It makes me think how much of art and literature in the last part of the twentieth century was invested in form in an intellectual way for its own refinement and sake. How little art and literature in the recent past has looked out beyond the small ego self. This is just a thought but it seemed we had our heads in the sand as our planet slid into dilemmas we ignored—overpopulation, the burning of fossil fuels and their effects, extreme poverty, pollution and illness. Making another drawing is not going to solve these problems but I think it can lead us to our brave, creative selves where we are able to look both inwards and outwards and take good action in the world. Maybe it’s all perfect as the Buddha said but I hope artists are going to be part of the solutions we need now to create. More on this soon and I’d love to hear your thoughts too. But now I’m going to cook dinner and try to get back on east coast time!

Every week in our art class we sit around a table for a chat before we start working. Usually we talk about what we’re going to be working with that week and today we worked on abstraction. But before we began one of our group said she sometimes wondered why she was doing art. She has a very good job and doesn’t sell her art, at least not at the moment. So, is it worth the time and effort? We all agreed that we have a good time on Saturday mornings but is that all that’s happening and is it enough?

In my last post I was (curiously) asking much the same question. If we are not making a splash is it worth swimming? We went around the table and everyone spoke about what doing art is about for them. One of our artists said that she does art for mental health. It’s a lot like meditation. It takes us to the place of peace so that’s a good thing right there.

This same person said that the creativity we consciously nurture in making art becomes much more present in other aspects of her life. When I think about creativity I think about abandoning preconceptions, of diving into the unknown, of learning to trust, of failing and succeeding, of playing and having the courage to go where we haven’t gone before. It does alter our lives when we internalize these qualities.

All very cool. Still, I think of a memoir I read, Final Edition, by the British writer E. F. Benson who wrote the wonderful Mapp and Lucia stories. In the book he told of a friend who had decamped to the island of Capri and for twenty-five years labored on the definitive poetic translation of a selection of ancient Greek epigrams. “He read me some of them, his voice, charged with emotion, trumpeting out the emotion of the triumphant lover or falling to a whisper as it mourned for the untimely death of a beloved youth.” And then, “my heart sank at his elation.” The result was wooden. “Happily the gods in their mercy had withheld from him the perception of his own incompetence.” The man died without publishing his long labors. They were left to E. F. Benson in the will in the hope that Benson, an established writer, might take on the task of getting it published and promoted. But he could not.

I really love that story. I love the man’s devotion. He got to where he got to and enjoyed some of the fruits of a romantic life on Capri. A consolation.

In the same book, E. F. Benson wrestled with the question himself. His first novel, Dodo, a book no one ever reads now, launched his career and made him famous and rich. Curious no one reads it now, isn’t it? Then he wrote several more books and they were soundly trounced in the press. He thought his career might be over and went into a period of deep questioning. It was writing he loved and he couldn’t turn away from it. He decided to carry on and to ignore the public, to write only what he cared about. From that came Mapp and Lucia. Those stories are not widely read now but they were for a good while, are brilliant fun and may come back again, who knows.

Who knows the permutations between these two realities? But, to me, it all looks rather fabulous, one story really no better than the other. Each person was on his own journey and neither gave up. So moving, really. Writing took one man to Capri, the other to fame and fortune. You can’t lose.

Saturday was the first class of the spring session of the ladies drawing club. I was thinking what the heck to do that would keep us all alert and paddling upstream when I picked up my new book on Dada which I’d plucked from a bargain table. And there was the most wondrous revelation—Sophie Taeuber. First, Dada, as you probably know was an art movement that lasted only from 1916-1920 before it morphed into Surrealism which sort of morphed into Pop art and Fluxus—if art can be called linear at all. Dada, in the midst of the horrors of the first world war, insidted that the thinking that produced that war must be rejected. For the Dadaists that meant rejecting all prior culture and the restrictions of art movements while attempting spontaneity and free expression. Curiously, it too became an art movement. It was pretty interesting though and I think it got half-way there in beginning to reject thinking as the real basis for art. But—I digress!

There in this book is Sophie Taeuber of Zurich, the companion of Hans Arp whose name we actually know. Sophie had begun already in 1915 to think of art outside the established bounds of painting and did embroideries and sculptures and puppets. She wanted to make the art in the ordinary apparent. Her work is fantastic, beautifully executed, evocative and arresting. And, in the official history of art, so few women make an appearance. It’s great to discover a female artist who was not painting endless pictures, however beautiful, of mothers and babies. (Sorry, Mary Cassatt.)
For our intrepid group who meet every Saturday, some who’ve worked at art for a long while, others who are just embarking on their artistic journey, it was great to be able to look at this woman’s art. I’m flying the flag here! Yay, Sophie! Here was an independent woman who dared to follow her own path and she’d begun her explorations before the assertions of the Dadaists were made. It takes courage to abandon a conventional path and strike out on your own. We need to know this woman. The image here is part of a tryptich—I couldn’t get it all into the scanner but it’s rich and balanced and full of surprises too—absolutely stunning.

The night before class I’d overly salted our dinner by mistake and lay awake the whole night. I suppose too much salt can do you in and, well, there I was—not a wink of sleep the whole night and still a class to teach. Luckily a couple of the group also missed a few winks so we forged on in good cheer, especially after looking at Sophie’s art for a bit.

I decided we’d work on portraits this week and chose an image from the Dada book—Marcel Duchamp in drag photographed by Man Ray. I attribute the choice to lack of sleep! The picture’s pretty weird and funny but very arresting. It was also an image I thought would free us up, like the Dadaists. The tendency in doing this sort of thing is to try to get it right but I wanted our goal to take this crazy image and go wild with it—play around with the elements of art to make a picture that said something.

Everyone did amazing stuff and one of our members is now recording the efforts so, with luck, we’ll get some of them up here before long. We went from this to use mirrors to observe ourselves and do self-portraits. Next week we’ll work with gouache again using photographs of ourselves to paint self-portraits. With luck we’ll have time to do more than one and experiment, as the Dadaists did, with expression without feeling tied to getting it ‘right.’

Here’s my drawing. What we all discovered was that it took several tries to break free of the idea that we must draw something in a realistic way. I did three quite ordinary drawings before I suddenly woke up to this one in which I left all the details out and went for the drama using the deepest black and yards of wide open white space. I kind of like it though it feels, curiously, very early twentieth century the way the person hides behind hat, feathers, jewelry and hair. But I slept like a baby last night.

It was the last class of the winter session of our drawing club on Saturday and another cold, rainy day. Sally brought in a roll of brown paper so that we could draw bigger than we have in a long while. We’d been working quite small the previous two or three weeks, sitting around a table, chatting, painting with gouache. It was a companionable, wintry and very pleasurable way to explore making art. I wondered sometimes if I wasn’t allowing the class to be a bit too relaxed. Aren’t teachers supposed to crack the whip? Must be the renegade in me that says when things feel good let them be.

I know a drawing class is supposed to be about learning to draw but there’s a part of me that believes we already know how to do that. Children draw without any self-consciousness, freely and with imagination. It seems so hard for a lot of us to do that—when we first begin again anyway. I often think our class, in which so many wondrous things happen, is really just a place where we get comfortable so that what we already know and who we already are can come to the surface. On this Saturday we spent longer than usual in the downstairs room sitting around a table, showing pieces of art we’d completed, chatting, the raining pelting the windows.

Almost an hour had passed when we decamped to the third floor where we took over a rehearsal room for the theater because we needed wall space to tack up the big sheets of brown paper. We didn’t hurry. Everyone chose an image of something botannical from a file of photographs. We set the boxes of pastels out. I put the music on—The Be Good Tanyas, a Vancouver girl band who we’ve come to love, and we began.

It was a sneaky thing. I, at least, didn’t expect it. Maybe because we’d worked small for a while and experimented with scribbling, then painting. Maybe because we’ve become so companionable and supportive of each other on Saturday mornings or maybe because it was raining and we were warm and dry. Maybe because we were working large and right out of our comfort zones, somehow, by some grace, none of us cared and something magical happened. Every single person did something fantastic. Every single person took a big leap up. The thing is with art, once you take a big step forward, you don’t go back.

I can’t explain it really, but there it is. I was knocked out by what people did, by how willing everyone was to step up and give it a whirl and to not care and care at the same time. Afterwards we sat and looked at what we’d done. We tried to see what could still be done, where we still might go. It was the last class for the winter session. In two weeks, when we begin again, it will be spring. And that is truly the time of rebirth and growth. Practice, of course, makes more possible and we’ll soon practice again. Stay tuned!

Last night the wind howled and kept us awake off and on as it shook our old house. It bucketed rain all weekend but almost everyone showed up for art class on Saturday and we painted in gouache again. There were ten of us and we arrived with wet feet and damp jackets. I arrived with stringy hair. Some had to battle traffic and slippery roads. I had to battle fatigue. I’d been up too late the night before and was a little out of sorts. We sat down around four long tables pushed together and painted again with gouache while the rain pelted the big windows.

A lot of the class had not painted in gouache before and like me they love it. It has a dense velvety quality, good for very flat work and more nuanced work too depending on how much water you add to it. I shared techniques. They looked at their pictures and wondered where they ought to go with them.  That really is a question of trying things out, of not being attached to what you have, of being willing to muck it up. I mucked mine up. This is just a small portion of it here. But it doesn’t matter. I can always do another one and build on what I’ve learned if I feel inspired to. They can too. That’s a big lesson right there. If we take a cautious route we’ll never get very far. Big mistakes make you jump higher.
It took all morning but towards the end it looked like we forgot both the rain and ourselves. We forgot whatever it was we came in with or I did anyway. By the end of class the focus on the art meant there was just the art and being there with it. Some of the work done at the very end, loosely like scribbles, was the most interesting and assured.

One of the class members said this is art yoga and it is. We dropped into the present moment and had fun. We let everything else go. Very cool in my book—especially on a miserable day.

Next week will be sunny and we’ll shake things up a bit!

It snowed this morning, the snowflakes like saucers from outer space, but the ladies still showed up for class and we painted with gouache. Last week we doodled—we made spontaneous abstract line drawings; then we noodled and brought some sense of design and intention into our drawings. This week, with snow outside the windows, we took photographs of flowers and attempted to make designs with gouache from them. Flowers are such incredible symbols of spring and renewal as well as being just plain beautiful. I have a feeling they’re emblematic even of our lives, such wonderful images to work with and very forgiving.

The idea was not to concern ourselves with verisimilitude but to do one pattern of color based on the flower and one of line superimposed on top. We ended up spending the entire three hours on one painting and discovered that what looked like a simple idea was not so simple after all. Same old challenge. But there was no frustration. It was good to just be there together in a warm space on this cold damp day, painting. Art is like meditation—we all fell into a space beyond our daily lives.

This piece here is part of a bigger image I did. Curiously it looks better cropped. The bigger image which was busier and lost some presence because of it. So often we can choose just part of a work and have the whole become more coherent and affecting. The less is more principle—it makes the work clean and strong. I think this might make a good painting even on a larger scale but it’s hard to say if it would hold up. I may try it someday.

We’ll do this same exercise again next week and simplifying is something we’ll work on. Meanwhile we all agreed that what we have is, indeed, a ladies drawing club. Whatever it is we’re doing on Saturday it’s a girl thing—we can chat in short hand, we can be ourselves just as we are, we can do our art and it’s a fine, fine thing. Not that certain chaps might not fit right in but they are rare, those sorts. We’re all products of our time and girls were not fully valued in the time we came of age. Women did not have power and many in this world still don’t. It’s good to have a place to have a few laughs—because the great thing is we are still laughing. We need to keep our spirits strong. We all got coffee at the restaurant next door. We sat and painted in a circle. Maureen brought in kd lang and we listened to her do a couple of Leonard Cohen songs including one of my favorites—Hallelujah. Hallelujah, for sure. By the end of class the snow had stopped falling. It’s melting now, running down the street in rivers. Spring is coming.

In the drawing class on Saturday we splashed around with ink and Chinese brushes. The week before we’d worked with dark and light because often our drawings are in the mid-range of tone without real highlights or darkness, like we’re playing it safe—which we all are to some extent, though we keep trying not to. Anyway, with India ink things are much more definite—deep black and all sorts of tone, none of which can be changed once it’s laid down. So, it’s a bit like stepping off a cliff but also knowing the cliff isn’t that high. We’re not going to break our leg, just twist our ankle if we land badly. In other words, it’s all fine—just another exploration.

I got inspired to try this because I walked into my optometrist’s office the other day to return a pair of specs that my daughter had bought. They’re all gay in there and what’s rather wondrous about the place is that not only do they sell specs but they sell art too. The art they had the other day were large black ink drawings, playful black line with the background done in a swirling dry brush mid-tone and then just one spot of red. The piece I’m thinking of was actually of a male pig, I’m assuming he’s male because there was a woman half-prostrate beside him looking like she could use a glass of water or something. All a bit outrageous and not at all aggressive. There was something benign about Mr Pig even if he did need a talking to.

So, much can be accomplished by keeping it very, very simple. The class did some wondrous stuff, especially when we added just one color. It’s always amazing to see the variety of approaches people come up with.

A new student arrived on Saturday—a wonderful woman who actually found the class through this blog and has just arrived from California. Welcome, Lyn! I love that she emailed me Friday and showed up to class on Saturday! Acting immediately on inspiration is one of the keys to art, I think!

Meanwhile I have finished Allan’s new site but see iWeb will limit some of what I can do on my blog here. Unless I’m not fully understanding it, which could be, but it looks like I can only post one picture at a time and that the blog will present as a snippet so that the reader must then click to a new page to read the whole thing. Not that big a deal when you consider all the benefits like being able to just drag pictures into the window and size them right on the page without having to go through another program or upload them and paste in code. Blah. That takes time and is a headache. Like I would like to size the image on this post and make it smaller but no can do at the mo. Also not sure how many blog entries can be archived. Not that it’s meant for the ages but there are still a few things related to the art class that I want to be able to check. Anyhoo, will head over to the Apple store for a consultation in a day or two—once I get over the sniffles. Decisions, decisions. Meanwhile, let’s count the blessings…so cool to be able to do this at all!

Our Saturday morning drawing class has been invited to participate in the The Arsenal Center for the Arts summer theme exhibition— What’s Your Story? As I mentioned last time we are starting with art pieces based on the word shoe and on Saturday we shared stories.

Mine is—When I was nine I had the awful realization that apart from the queen of England everyone important in the world at large was a man—Jesus, the Prime Minister of Canada, Elvis Presley. I had faint hopes that Prince Charles might cast his eye my way but it took a great deal to imagine that as he was in England and I was in Canada and I was already schooled in the rules of monarchy. Then Elvis came out with his song, Blue Suede Shoes, and I convinced my mother to buy me a pair. I really hoped, that with the right shoes, I would be important too.

The other stories were fabulous—a young girl realizing her feet were as big as her mother’s; a grandmother, whose granddaughter is far away, thinking of shoes she bought the little girl and missing her; a young Jewish girl begging her disapproving mother for yellow shoes then being asked by a stranger in front of her mother if they were her Easter shoes. Little snippets of life that say so much.

Now we imagine how we might create visual images to accompany these stories.  The way we create the art piece will say a lot about where we are now in relation to the story. I expect that each artist will create a piece based on things that they like to do.  Some like to paint, others use fabric, others like to make three-dimensional things.  The choice of medium will speak to the story, for sure.

As wondrous as each piece will doubtless be they will be especially evocative when hung together. It’s so liberating to step forward and speak your truth and fun to step forward with our fellow travelers.  No blue suede shoes necessary!

On Saturday we started up again with the drawing class. I think of it as a club because most of the members have been together now for nearly two years. Of course, it was great to see everyone but also a challenge for me, the teacher, to create new experiences that give us all the opportunity to grow and shine. Art is not just about skills, I say, it’s about connection to spirit! We’re trying to get out of our own way.

We’ve been invited to participate in the Arsenal Center for the Arts summer exhibition—”What Is Your Story?” I’m thrilled about this because we are a group of women over the age of forty and we have stories! And every time we tell them we get a little closer to connecting with our spirits, to peeling off a layer of dross and stepping forward just as we are.

Many of our members are coming to art after raising children and in the midst of busy and successful careers. There is such a yearning to create and explore that gets squashed in ‘real’ life, so we gather every Saturday morning and draw. One new member expressed a vague concern that I don’t teach things like perspective or shading. The thing is I don’t know much about them even after making my living at art for twenty-five years. I tell them it’s why I was able to succeed—it was my own hand that was evident, the one I was given, and I didn’t have any sense that I ought to be anything other than I was. I never went to art school so was spared expectations. (There are advantages to going to art school but challenges too.) Even when our own hands are shaky or naive, they have such amazing beauty in them. No one really wants to study perspective—that’s what we have cameras for!

Our first story project will be around the subject of shoes. I felt we had to have somewhere to start. Why not the feet? The ground. Those humble slips of leather that carry us here and there. Those things we hunt for and pay big bucks for, that we sometimes feel pride in sticking one foot forward. Those things that pinch and give us blisters and make our feet ache when we’ve chosen the wrong pair. Everyone has a story about shoes. So next Saturday they’re all to bring in a few sentences about a pair of shoes in their lives in preparation to conceiving an art piece to bring the story into this world like a mother births a baby. Stay tuned.

So, for our first class I decided that what we really needed was to just make a mess, just take some big white paper and make a mess—throw our anger and frustration down on the page or our confusion, scribble, rip, spill, cut. I said now’s our chance to not be polite, to not be good. Let’s be BAD!!! I thought we’d do this for an hour then move on to actually draw something for the next two hours. But everyone became so deeply engrossed in this that we never moved on. Bit by bit the messes became more subdued, more peaceful, as everyone lost themselves in what they were doing. Very, very interesting, Watson.