If it wasn’t pouring rain today (again) and far too chilly for June I would be down at The Commander’s Mansion taking snapshots to post of the gorgeous terrace on which The Saturday Morning Ladies Drawing Club and I sat to draw this past weekend. Photos will follow soon but suffice it to say our last class for the season was held outdoors and we attempted to draw the landscape around us.

The Arts Center where the Club usually meets is on an old army arsenal surrounded by sumptuous park land in the back and a beautifully restored mansion where once The Commander of Something lived. You can now rent it for various functions. The ladies met me at the front door to the arts center and one or two were indisposed to outdoor activity this Saturday morning, one a tad tired, the other with a twisted knee. We explored the idea of cancelling our outdoor mission but all the rooms in the center had been taken over by another group of ladies and their quilts which now hung from every conceivable wall. So there was nothing for it but to carry on—so often the case in art.

I put the top down on my wee Miata. Dear A found it for me when my ancient Mercedes had to be sold for a pittance when it failed a few exhaust tests. I specified that I wanted my next car to be cheap, small, fuel-efficient and not black or grey—’something sporty.’ That last phrase went too far. I said nothing about topless but the chaps do like a cheap vintage red sports car. I’ve grown rather fond of it myself and with the top down the ladies were able to pile their portfolio bags into the passenger seat and I was able to drive our ’supplies’ over to the Mansion while the ladies proceeded on foot unencumbered by luggage which made them very happy.

I’d not scoped things out first. I tend to just wing it on such matters as this (and most others too). What a usprise then when I pulled up in the Miata and was met by a circle of black ladies executing some sort of loud cheering routine by the front door. So early in the morning with the grass still wet with dew. I immediately swung around the back to discover another surprise—a grand field complete with two huge and wondrous grape arbors. (Photos to follow in a day or two.) I decided to walk through one, a magical experience, and when I exited the other side the ladies were just arriving on the edge of the field. I shouted out that we were in England because it so had that feel.

Still, the thorny problem of where to sit now raised its head due to the dewy grass situation and only two portable chairs. With the cheering squad out front, my plan to use the front veranda was now squelched. But, again, note bene, artists do not give up and our party most gallantly walked around the back grounds before discovering, much to our collective delight, a side terrace complete with fabulous scrolled metal chairs and tables. By now the cheering squad had disappeared, presumably inside the Mansion. I collected the bags from the car and our small party began to settle into various chairs. Almost instantly a woman emerged from the Mansion to inquire who we were. We explained that our art class couldn’t meet in the Arts Center as it had been overtaken by quilters and that we’d hoped to sketch some of the surroundings here on the terrace. The woman said the Mansion had been rented for the day at great expense by a local college for a faculty retreat and that she’d have to ask if they minded a small party of artists on the terrace. They didn’t.

I expected the cheering had been inflicted on them by one of those retreat leader types because later in the morning several very nice women emerged onto the terrace for a few moments of fresh air and we thanked them for their kindness in allowing us to sit there and sketch. They said they were happy to have us—they were artists and writers too, teachers at the college. They understood.
So, there we all were. And I suspect that our party had the better deal. As their leader, I did not ask them to cheer but, I have to say, they are a wondrous and cheery group. Even after a bit of a prickly political discussion (we are naturally all very liberal and desperate for change) and the challenge of drawing the bigger landscape, which we all found difficult after so many weeks of focusing on smaller things. Still, our work grows stronger each time we meet. But, really, what I love is the way a bit of fun makes our souls shine brighter.

On that happy note, The Saturday Morning Ladies Drawing Club retires into other summer pursuits until September.

My friend Emily, who is a gifted and esteemed classical musician, joined us at the Saturday morning drawing class this past weekend. She loves art but had never drawn before. Both this week and the one before we’ve been working from simple forms—oranges, limes, mangoes, eggplants, an orange pepper, a lemon. So it was a good class for Emily to come to because drawing simple things is easy in some ways.

But making the drawing compelling is not so simple. We explored negative space this time, the space around the object. In Japanese art there’s a conscious emphasis on making the negative space dynamic and finding balance between negative and positive. When we find that balance the work starts to take on resonance and we want to keep looking at it. Without it, we feel the image is overly familiar or dull and turn away. At least, I do!
Emily did wondrous work, full of imagination. Being an artist in one realm carries into other realms, not to mention life. The whole class sprinted forward, liberated by the simplicity of what we were putting our attention to and by the challenge too. Of course, next week we will shake all of that up when we step outside to draw. It will be interesting to see if we can find the simplicity in the great wide open space around us.

Next week is our last class and I will take the summer off from teaching this wonderful group of artists. I am in the midst of another writing project that I want to finish in July. And I’m also doing some new graphic art work in story form. I see possibiliities for that work to manifest on a higher level than some of the hard labor graphic work I did in the past to pay the bills. I’m truly excited about the way my work is unfolding even in the midst of small discouragements. Like the Buddha said—everything is perfect. My job is to keep responding to what calls me and trusting it is for a good reason. I do trust that.

This blog will likely go down to once a week or less, after next week’s class. There will be, with luck, a report of sitting ocean side on a sunny summer day doing nothing at all but feeling grateful for being here. Cheers!

It was hot and sunny on Saturday and I decided that with summer in the air, at last, that we ought to draw tropical fruits—oranges and lemons and limes. The great thing about drawing such simple shapes is that anyone can do it with a fair amount of accuracy and we can then focus on the bigger issues of drawing—line and color and composition. Do we do line first or shape? How do we introduce color—as a block or just in hints? There’s no right or wrong. What’s important is that we become conscious of what we’re doing and stick to that consciousness throughout. When we start stabbing away in a mindless way things can get pretty muddy.
Three hours of drawing the same things can get boring unless we’re really finding that consciousness. David Hockney says there are infinite ways to approach the way we represent things with line and color. Once we hook into that infinite possibility and find an angle to explore, we can draw all day. Everyone in class got to the place of deep fascination and experimentation—very exciting.
Art is great practice for focus. It’s a yogic practice—one-pointed attention. It clears all the other dross from our minds and helps us get to that pure space where inspiration creeps in the back door. I think that’s as beautiful as any picture we make.

We did monoprints again in our Saturday morning art class. It’s a drawing class but I want us to draw in a lot of different ways so we get to know what way speaks to us. We’ve done a lot in charcoal so making monoprints is an opportunity to create an image that is more graphic and abstract.

This time we carved images into rubber. It cuts like butter so you can get a nice smooth line if you want to. We ended up with a bunch of rubber stamps and went from there, partly because I forgot to bring the retarder and when we rolled out ink on plexiglass plates it dred too quickly to draw into it. Still, some fabulous work was done by our intrepid group who are not daunted by less than perfect circumstances, as true artists are not.

Some of us struggle with our imagery and what we want to do. I am struggling myself at the moment. My own true preference is to draw more in the style of cartoons, to create an alternate universe of dancing crocodiles and things like that. But it’s fun to explore and discover other aspects of ourselves. Developing a visual language takes time and even though discourageent sometimes raises its naughty head we just have to carry on. We have to keep doing things over and over in art. And over and over we have to let go of expectation and flow with what emerges. There’s always something great in it.
I occasionally think I ought to be ‘teaching’ more, telling them how to do things. But I resist doing that as much as possible. We’ve all jumped into the deep end of the pool. Sometimes but we flail around a bit, but that’s okay. It’s a faster way to learn and far less inhibiting than having someone stand over you and tell you you’ve got it all wrong—although some people do prefer that way. In our class, we look for what we like in things and try to build on that. And I’ve seen every artist grow, which is a credit to their brave experimentation.

More important than the art is the deep pleasure of sitting with a group of super people all immersed, deeply immersed, in the process of making something fabulous. Sharing a few laughs, dropping a word or two here and there but mostly just working, working. We have the music on and outside the sun shines. Afterwards we lay our work out and look to see the wonders within it.

And next Saturday I will actually bring the retarder and a new kind of paper.

Wonderful news this week. Sally, one of the esteemed members of our Saturday morning drawing class particpated in a group show this weekend. She blew up some small watercolors of eccentric teapots and made giclee prints that were full of great energy. She has a light, playful and energetic style and it was great to see how beautifully a small piece can be enlarged with digital technology. There’s a whole new world of possibility now for making art affordable and available to all.

I asked the class to bring in something they wanted to draw—a photograph or object. This meant we were all working on different things. I wanted everyone to begin to think about what imagery speaks to them most directly, whether its people or plants, landscape or pattern, objects or abstraction even.

For me, it turned out to be a frustrating exercise. I discover, again, that I work best from my mind. Perhaps it was frustrating for others too but that’s part of art—we have to explore and get out of our comfort zones to find ourselves.

But other good news—Maureen was back from Paris. And then, with the class nearly over, Connie arrived from a month away in Columbia. So great to have almost the whole class together again. It’s the people that make it. What I love about this class is that a group of ‘mature’ women are gathering together in both seriousness and fun to march forward as artists. They’re big spirits, up for the challenge, willing to go out on limbs, even willing to drop off a limb from time to time! It’s the supportive energy of the whole that is making our progress so amazing.

And Connie brought back a beautiful series of small paintings she did while away, work that is full of new directions for her. For me, the goal of the class is that each artist sees and gets a chance to develop their own true gift and direction. That’s why we play around with so many things—that direction is going to be different for each of us and will also change for each of us over time.

And, whatever obstacles we encounter—of difficulty, of frustration—are overcome by that greatest of all arts—laughter. I’m giving thanks!

The art class all did very strong work this weekend and to me it’s interesting to see how artists can leap forward. I do mean leap. In this class, we’re not walking a straight line but darting off the path at odd junctures to see what’s there and bring back a souvenir. It would be nothing without the devotion these artists are bringing to the work. Not to mention their sense of joy and fun.

After we’ve done some work we hang it up and all take a look. We look for the strength in it and uncover surprises—a beautiful line, the juxtaposition of white space and shadow, a wild distortion, a brilliant exaggeration, a bold composition, a chance taken. I’m most interested in the chance taken. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work—something grand will come of it. That’s the way of art.

I saw some things this week that make me truly excited—brave new worlds unfolding. In this class we’re exploring possibilities so we can get closer to our true expression as well as build skills. That’s the fun of the class and the challenge too. We’re getting out of our comfort zones, into our learning zones then directly into awareness and expression. The leap is that we don’t sit on our learning but make art. It’s awfully good for the soul.

We did monoprinting in class this Saturday. I considered teaching technique but decided to just let everyone play and discover their own way forward. I don’t know that much technique and believe that art is all about exploration anyway. It’s more important to explore than to learn to follow instructions or to get things right. So, I hope I didn’t let the class down but think interesting things emerged.
I didn’t know myself what it was I wanted to get at when we began but just sitting together at a huge table gave me ideas. All any of us had to do was glance over our shoulder at our neighbor’s work and get new visions for our own.

I asked what people’s goals were for the class. One student wants to dive into art so that when she retires she’s in the swim and can live the next chapter of her life as an artist. I love that the next chapter is a vital one. Another wants to overcome the inner critic, a good and necessary goal for us all. Another wants to get more into the abstract.

That got me thinking about what it is that makes the abstract work. For me great abstract work takes me into the realm of meditation like a zen koan or a haiku. It bites off an edge of the mystery and gives us something concrete upon which to reflect. But how to get to the clarity? I don’t have an answer.

I didn’t see much in my monoprints. I had no clear vision of what I wanted to do and I needed one. I just kept playing for the sake of exploration. The image on the left above is one of my monoprints. It said nothing to me but later I found a wee corner of it that held a small gift. I like the intense center in the field of magenta, a color of passion, and the hints of light. I inverted the image in Photoshop and got a brilliant center of light in a field of green, nature’s color, with hints of darkness on the side. This holds possibility for further exploration but I didn’t pick up on them in the moment.

Instead I started painting—pink and yellow stripes, inspired by one of the other students who was doing dots and had spoken of the color pink. I loved the stripes—happy Rothkos. These are small, just nine inches, and I wonder what they’d be like huge. There’s a great group of Rothko images in a room of their own at the Tate Modern and they invoke in me a sense of powerful presence and stillness. I encountered them first when I was about twenty and had a near religious experience. Palpitations and all. Their soberness seems to give strength. It’s stately rather than hopeless.

I wonder what pink and yellow stripes would be like large. What would they invoke? It’s still cold and grey and raining here in Boston and I suspect I’m thinking of tulips. Anyway, I love these little stripes just for being there. Enough for now. More painterly and printerly explorations next week.

New session of drawing class started. We have one new student who attended art school in her youth and is very accomplished so we can simply march forward.

We had a real treat when one of the class brought in a ‘painting’ done in fabric and stitching. I’d given them a poem to interpret and this student ran with it in such a creative way. This is the joy of working together as a group—we can inspire each other.

I’m so happy to be teaching this class and to be a witness to the artistic journey of these young women who’ve all passed the halfway mark in life. Everyone is accomplished and successful in other careers but this is a time when we all have so much to give in terms of experience and energy. The desire to express is huge and there is now time to do this work. I’m really interested in how this time in a woman’s life can be one of manifestation on many levels.

Next week we’ll begin to explore our goals and to reach for what it is we most want to explore as artists. I decided a long time ago that what calls me most strongly is the written word, even though I’ve worked as an artist for thirty years. I feel lucky to have these two loves but I have only one real focus now and that is to grow my writing. The students in the art class are finding their focus too.  I’m being a bit pushy these days but artists have to be strong and brave.  Well, we all do, in whatever it is we choose to focus on, if we want it to go somewhere.

This beautiful poem arrived from Connie, one of the wonderful artists in the Saturday morning drawing class.

Landscape Mode

Overlooking the Cumberland River, Clarksville, Tennessee, Early November 1996

In ancient Chinese paintings we see more sky than
earth, so when clouds hurry by in silver-gray
inkbursts of rolling readiness right along the river,
ripe with rain, rushing the road of time along,
pushing back light, belittling the black and white clarity
of Hollywood in its prime, the eye climbs down to greet
with shining gusto trees along the shore, Opryland
beyond the frame, the blue horizon hidden in a sea
of possibilities. And beyond this there’s jazz: Jimmy Giuffre’s
“Train on a River” stretched out strong like a pet cat
-and that’s that. But not quite. This poem paints
poorly what sketchers and colorists do best. The rest
should come out empty, allowing you to fill in your own
basic emptiness, your openness, your self-portrait
forged and catalogued: on quiet exhibit, on temporary loan.
Descended from clouds immensely more ancient than China,
you never quit becoming the background, the field in a sky
whose subtle earthiness sails over our heads altogether.

Al Young

It is just what we’re trying to accomplish in our work—to bring our whole selves into the work so that we may all see the beauty all around us more clearly. We begin our next session on Saturday.

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.