Artwala Road

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!

March 19th, 2008 | Category: Drawing Club | Comments (6)

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!

March 9th, 2008 | Category: Drawing Club | Comments (8)

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.

March 1st, 2008 | Category: Drawing Club | Comments (4)

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!

February 4th, 2008 | Category: Drawing Club | Comments (2)