Artwala Road

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)

In class this Saturday we spent some time drawing plants again. After we had four or five drawings I suggested that we rip one up. It’s easy to fuss over our work and to attach to what we’ve done, we all do it, so everyone hesitated. It was optional but soon we were all ripping and tossing tiny fragments of drawings in the air like confetti. It was very liberating.

I once spent a few years writing a novel. It was not the only thing I was working on but I put plenty of time and energy into it. I really wanted to get it right, whatever right was and I believed if I kept working at it I would get it right. But it wasn’t right and in the end I had to let it go.

Why wasn’t it right? Was I not talented enough? I believe we all have everything we need to do what we feel called to do, just as I believe that anyone who shows up at class with the intention of drawing and making art and exploring their own creativity has everything they need to succeed. My novel was challenged because I was still in the learning process. But, instead of letting it go when it became clear it was not hanging together in an easeful way, I held on tight. I didn’t yet know that there was an infinite supply of other things to write and that it’s far more effcetive to just start something new.

I held on because I had thoughts like—I don’t want this time to be wasted, if this isn’t working then maybe I’m not good enough (horror + renewed effort), and then, I’m good enough so I will make this work. But we can’t force art and most of the time it works because we get out of our way. We get out of the place of thinking and into the place of receiving and flowing. The time is never wasted because every minute we spend on our art hones our skill and our ability to see what we’re doing. That’s when the mind comes back in to reflect and sharpen.

One of the students said she’s afraid when she does something good that it will be the best she ever does. But once we get to a certain level, we never go back. We all have an infinite supply of creativity that flows through us. It’s not ours, we are just opening up to it. And we’re always practicing opening up and letting go of the mind and its judgments as we also practice honing our skills.

So, as in life, letting go is what enables us to move forward. It’s very empowering to rip a few things up from time to time.

On another note, I turned a charcoal drawing over and laid it on my pad to demonstrate what I wanted the class to draw next. I discovered after drawing on the back side of my paper that the old drawing had made the most beautiful ghostly image on the fresh sheet of paper underneath, so I drew on that, then did a series of drawings using that technique. A happy accident. So it’s good not to rip everything up!

March 5th, 2007 | Category: Drawing Life | Comments (5)

In drawing class this week I had everyone work from photographs of flowers again. The class is most comfortable drawing nature and this gives us the chance to work on skills and to think about how we might like to use color in a strong expressive way. We looked at art in a book of prints and studied how other artists approached using both color and line. We experimented with making our drawing in a pale line then going back into it with color and deepening the lines if we wanted to do that.

At the end of the morning one woman said the class had changed her life. She’s a brilliant colorist but had never drawn before. The distance she’s come in a few months is amazing but more amazing is the way we are all coming forward together. It’s not just mutual support for what we’re doing but joining together to play and explore in the spirit that everyone has something brilliant to bring forward.

I’m taking that brilliance seriously. I’m intending we grow our art to the point that we can bring forward whatever we want to express. We’re studying boldness. There are so many ways we’ve all been shut down, so many ways our spirits have been tamed, especially we women. We’re all about being wild again. We’re moving beyond any need for approval or permisssion and letting it rip. We’re giving weight to nothing but the spirit that moves us. Hooray.
The image here was made first in pastel in class, then scanned and posterized in Photoshop. Just to make it bolder and brighter. We’ll explore digital printing as we go on.

February 26th, 2007 | Category: Drawing Life | Comments (2)