Artwala Road

This shows the piece a few days ago. The finished piece has a portrait of Gandhi in the middle.

I’ve just about finished my small series of paintings, The Mahatma Gandhi Hat Company, just in time for the show to be hung on Tuesday.  I apologize for the photos;they’re a bit fuzzy and I really will read that camera manual one day soon.  The actual piece will not have the four little paintings in the center but a portrait of Gandhi instead.  On the whole I’m quite pleased with it and will post better photos once I get them.  You can see the portrait of Gandhi lying on the table not far from my thermos of coffee.

I have to say that deadlines are helpful in forcing the hand—the work does get done.  But they’re also a little stressful because I work more intensely than I like to.  So today, Saturday, I’m a bit pooped.  We had a good, relaxing drawing class this morning and drew faces from photographs.  What I love about the drawings of less experienced artists is that they’re so full of individuality and charm.  The trick is to keep that essence as we build skills, no easy feat.  It makes me wonder just how much we need in the way of drawing skill, just enough, I think, so that the drawing convinces and doesn’t look entirely accidental.

Today I loved all of my students drawings.  Every person got to that place of authenticity and total uniqueness.  It’s just so interesting to see how everyone has something different to express.  I loved their drawings more today than I loved my own.  Sometimes I feel a little too practiced—it can be a challenge to be fully and totally present in the drawing.  But then I’m pooped from painting solidly and at a great pace for the last two weeks.

One thing that came out of this work is the strong desire to create work that can be turned into multiples one way or another.  I really am not very interested in the gallery system as I go forward.  This is a new chapter for me as an artist and I’m very aware of the brave new world of internet art marketing.  I love the fact that people are selling wonderful things online for small amounts of money.  These are genuine, honest pieces and I’m feeling my way forward in this direction.  These paintings took far too much time to make to sell for low money but perhaps giclée prints might work.  Even those cost a certain amount to produce so I continue to think and explore options.  I do want to do more with The Mahatma Gandhi Hat Company.  “Keeping Peace on the Mind.”  I probably need to get myself one of those hats!

That’s it from here this week.  With luck, I’ll get to take photos of the new show as it goes up on Tuesday.  Should be fun.

February 21st, 2009 | Category: Dear Reader | Comments (4)

I’ve spent most of my working life meeting deadlines.  That’s the life of the freelance graphic artist and there’s some sense of satisfaction in being able to come up with creative solutions to situations in short time.  It’s good training.  Creativity is a curious thing—it doesn’t come from thinking or trying but from the meeting of experience and inspiration.  It’s hard to open to inspiration when a deadline looms.

In two weeks I’ll be in the Faculty Show at the Arsenal Center for the Arts and that’s not much time considering that a week ago I’d not begun.  But I did have some inspiration.  I want to continue to work on my word paintings but to increase the scale.  So far everything has been small because I’ve worked so much as an illustrator.  So I began with a canvas 32 inches square.

I wasn’t in the least concerned which is rather typical but perhaps I should have been.  On a larger scale my skills are still a little shaky.  I got muddled half way through the first painting and the more I worked the worse it became.  I know this one.  Sometimes we just have to let go.

So, on I went to the next piece, equally large.  Big things take more time, of course, and I was a bit anxious about the deadline.  With small scale work I know exactly how long I need because I’ve done so much of it and am confident of what will emerge. I was not confident with this.  I saw I needed to experiment more.

This morning I went to the studio and sat for a half hour with a cup of tea scribbling a few notes in my journal, just as I do most mornings before beginning to clear the head and focus on what I want to do that day.  Then I meditated for few minutes so I felt very peaceful.  The day before had been quite stressful for all kinds of silly reasons and that is not a good place from which to make art.  I then opened my sketchbook and suddenly knew just what to do.  Abandon ship!  A new idea came at once—something smaller and more manageable.  Luckily I had the art boards on hand in just the size I needed.  I’ll post these works in a few days when I’m done.  They’re very, very simple and I love them.  Each one is a painting of a small white cap sitting in a field of color—Mahatma Ghandi’s white cap.  They’re like fake ads, as much of my word art is, in this case ads for hats that will raise your consciousness in one way or another.  Ads for The Mahatma Ghandhi Hat Company.  I will post photos in a few days when the paintings are done.

Meanwhile I see that letting go allows for letting in.  Letting go is not giving up.  It’s surrendering to the light of the day, whatever it is.  That’s all.  And what a sweet day it was today.  I can’t wait to get back to the studio tomorrow.

February 10th, 2009 | Category: Dear Reader | Comments (8)

It was a little warmer this weekend, the first break in a bitter cold spell in weeks but snow is still piled high outside.  I’m rather grateful actually as I got to have a lazy Sunday and finish Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald.  Dear A has read her entire works and gushed enthusiasm so now I’ve started.  Fitzgerald didn’t start writing until she was sixty which makes her achievement especially sweet.  Her books are wondrous creations, the two I’ve read, at least.  They’re very short, edgy, unsentimental and Offshore, at least, provokes life-enhancing reflection as well as a few laughs.

In the story, a group of people are living on various barges at one end of the Thames River on the edge of London.  The barges are not seaworthy and some are, in fact, rusty artifacts full of holes, just barely afloat.  The inhabitants of these barges have mostly arrived out of necessity—the single mother, the artist, the gay man.  They can’t cope, you see, with the demands of onshore life, with what they’d have to do to live in London proper or anywhere pricey for that matter.  Most don’t expect to stay offshore forever though as time goes by they seem to find something kind and reassuring there.  It’s pinched, for sure, and damp but there is real friendship. One person helps another.  They have their fits and confusions.  One even makes his living in a rather nefarious fashion but there’s no judgment and the bridges between the barges are open.  When one of the inhabitants must leave they all rally around to help sell that person’s barge, full of leaks as it is.

The barge dwellers are free from pretense.  Fitzgerald, once a barge inhabitant herself, is singing the praises the person who is treading his or her own path however indelicately.

It was heartening to read.  All artists are offshore really as is anyone who chooses to take risks of one kind or another. Fitzgerald shows the risk has immeasurable often hidden rewards though not financial ones.

For all of us women who’ve had to juggle so many things to be artists of one kind or another, we can thank Fitzgerald for not sinking, falling overboard or giving up.  If she hadn’t gone offshore she couldn’t have written this book.  The glimpse she gives of onshore life is not attractive but she hints at safety there too.  But there’s liberation in setting up offshore, at least for a while.  So, if you’re offshore, keep your head up and plug the holes in your barge as best you can.  Then read this book.

February 1st, 2009 | Category: Dear Reader | Comments (4)

It snows and snows here in Boston.  I stepped out for a few minutes to shovel but thought better of going down to the studio today.   Instead I’ve stayed cozy at home and read TIBOR KALMAN: Perverse Optimist, a book about the design career of the late Tibor Kalman.  He was married to Maira Kalma who wrote the wondrous The Principles of Uncertainty.

There’s so much I love about this man.  First, he did not go to art school and taught himself which really made it impossible to be anything but quirky and funky though he did it with a lot more panache than most.  Second, he felt like an outsider because he immigrated from Hungary as a boy and kids made fun of him for being a bit plump and not speaking English.  And he kept the outsider vision throughout his career and didn’t try to fit in. Third, he had shrewd political vision.  It seems he not only saw that almost everything in art and design has to do with money but he rebelled against conformity and acceptance. All so courageous.

He had a kind of ‘accidental’ career starting as a clerk in a New York bookstore that eventually became Barnes and Noble and becoming their chief designer before moving on to a thousand other things.  Whatever he did, he made content the subject and refused to submerge it in fancy, boring packaging.  He used his clients’ commissions to say something vital, eventually becoming the designer/editor for a magazine sponsored by Bennetton called Colors, among other things.  He was whimsical and anarchical and I can’t help feeling we need some of that spunk now too.  The tide has changed, hallelujah, but we’re going to have to keep hope alive.  So reading this book on this snowy day is quickening my pulse a little and giving me all sorts of ideas.

I’m just finishing my drawing book which is based on The Saturday Morning Drawing Club, the class I teach at The Arsenal Center for the Arts.  It had way too many words.  I keep cutting and cutting which gets easier as I begin to work on the images.  And then, yesterday, the TIBOR book jumped off my bookshelf and into my hands.  I think books are like that.  They can sit still for a long time but when you really ought to be considering what they say, they just leap into your hands.  My own basic point is that through the practice of drawing and making art we can all be more anarchical, more true to ourselves, braver, wilder, more fun, more empowered, more TIBOR, which I’m now making into an adjective.

BTW, the painting here is the cover of the book—painted in India from a mailed in photo for $40.  Isn’t it fabulous?

And now, out to shovel again.

January 28th, 2009 | Category: Dear Reader | Comments (2)