Creativity

I have been holding off on publishing this most recent post for several reasons, one being that I have been stuck: unable to write a paragraph without slipping into a coma after the opening sentence.   I've started several, each one ending with a fizzle, and I find myself in the same predicament with this current attempt.  Well, let us think this through: this is a paragraph that is talking about writing paragraphs, or about attempting to write paragraphs, and about the failure to grab hold of an idea that might put into motion a train of thought; the train of thought resulting in more words, more sentences, and potentially an entire paragraph.  In conclusion, a paragraph should contain a sentence or more, and perhaps wind up with some concluding idea to bring it to an end, opening the way for another paragraph.


Paragraph 2:
Once having composed a first paragraph, one may follow by writing another, perhaps expanding on previous ideas, or setting out into an entirely new direction.   Either way, one ends up with two paragraphs.


In the third paragraph, you had better be saying something compelling enough to reward the reader for having stayed with you for so long.  Thank you for reaching this sentence.


Artist's block, writer's block, or any sort of creativity block is a troublesome phenomenon.  It is an issue that creative people have to deal with from time to time.  But I believe it is a problem that can also affect those who don't think of themselves as artistic types.  We all feel stuck from time to time, don't we?   What is my purpose?   How did I end up here?   What am I doing in this job?   Is there something missing?  Has anyone seen the remote? 


Might these basic existential questions be symptoms of a block of the creative spirit?


I would suggest that we all have an inner artist, a creative core within us.  Not everyone may consciously choose to act upon it, or define themselves as artistic.  But creativity is a human drive that is as innate as the drive to make babies, or simulate making babies, whether with oneself or with another.   The drive will be stronger in some, buried in others (due to childhood trauma?: "Oh honey, what a scary drawing - is it some kind of deformed monster?   "No, Mom, it's...a self-portrait...").   


Somehow, we can become consciously or unconsciously blocked from putting to paper, stone, canvas, film, music, words, that something in us that yearns to be let outside.  The non-artsy type will say, "there's nothing yearning in me!" - UNTIL - he/she accidentally spews out a poem, or tells a funny story, or takes a beautiful photo of geese in flight over a corn-stubbled field, or rambles on in a blog like this.   Then he or she feels that lightness of being, the release, the exhalation, the strange joy that issues forth from the creative act.  Maybe.


So there.  I have managed more than three paragraphs.  And this demonstrates one remedy for artist or writer's block.  Just do.  For example, write nonsense until your creative brain gets bored or offended by the stupidity of it and begins to speak out, if only to defend whatever reputation it thinks it has.  (Your brain has dignity too.)


But what is my brain trying to say?  Am I to develop the idea that we all have an inner-artist?  Maybe argue for more funding for the arts in education?  Or does my brain want to offer some self-help advice to stuck artists?  Or is it moving toward a tell-all confession of its innate drives?   I'm feeling I had better take the wheel now and decide what direction to go from here.  And I feel inclined to take the easy road and simply talk about myself.   After all, what could be more interesting?  

I am an artist.  Though certainly not an expert on art.   I can't say I  really understand art.  I just do it.  I can only speak of my experience and my observations.   I wouldn't say that I have been blocked lately.  I've had plenty of things to work on.  But I have learned a thing or two recently.  About the value of communing with others.   I think it is easy to become insulated in one's own artistic world, and this can be limiting, if not blocking.   
I wrote previously ("More on Being an Artist" - June 1, 2011) about having just been to visit an artist's open studio and how the visit and a suggestion that I join a local artist's league had led to my thinking about the value of connecting with other artists.  I, by nature, tend to act the lone wolf, staying in my cave, only to come out on occasion to stealthily present my work to the public before running back for cover.  And the idea of communing with other artists was as foreign to my nature as behaving gregariously with "the public".


But I joined the artist's league, and so far have collected strong evidence to support my brand-new hypothesis which suggests that meeting with other artists and actually talking to them won't kill me.
It might even be beneficial.


I have been inspired by the number of people to whom creativity is an important enough part of their beings that they would join an artist's league and actually meet with each other.   I have met artists who make a living at art.  I met a retired chemistry professor who teaches drawing.  I have learned about some resources, (i.e. a reliable local place to have giclee reproductions made, a place to order bulk canvas).   I have had my thinking stimulated (i.e. "draw more, Dave," meaning put in practice time beyond the work on my specific projects ).   I met a landscape artist who works "en plein air" and completes large masterfully done paintings in the time frame of a few hours.   This caught my attention as I have been thinking about varying the ways I approach my work, such that I might produce some finished pieces in less than the usual several months that it usually takes.  


 In my previous post, I had talked about this and included a sample of a quick, loose sketch I had made of my daughter.   I have since made a painting from it as well one from another sketch of my other daughter.  Here they are:

  

 After a long stretch of working almost exclusively with pen & ink and a little watercolor (you can see many examples of these at my online gallery), I am really enjoying delving into oil painting. 
In painting, I expect I'll bounce back and forth between the longer, more detailed projects, and this new (to me) approach of working quickly and letting go of some of the detail.
  
Here's an example of a recent painting where I stick with my usual penchant for great detail and fidelity to every pixel of reality.

And now it is time to wind this post down.   The dog needs walking, although he doesn't know it yet.

I'll sum all of this up with one of the many paragraphs I started and then abandoned when my eyes glazed over and my internal screen went blank.  


When you decide to be an artist, to recognize and act upon the innate drive to create, you willingly take on a burden.  I think that, in general, it is a pleasant burden, and it provides you with a deep sense of purpose.   It it is a burden because the fruits of creation are not gotten freely, but result from dedicated pursuit.   You work at it.  You may get blocked for awhile, find yourself at sea without wind, but you continue.  You find a way to move yourself forward.   And, to tie the earlier discussion in, you may find direction or inspiration from others on the same path.


OK.  One more...


Here is creativity in one last, short paragraph:  As the artist, you start by imagining some kind of outcome, a painting? a story? a building?, a song?, a poem?, a dramatic character?   Then you begin the work of bringing it to life.  You continue until you feel satisfied enough, and then you let it go.  And you move on the the next adventure.  Part of the magic of it all is that the end product so often surprises even the creator.  

Travel as art - Part II

Travel as art, art as travel.  That's the underlying theme I am sticking with for this post, since I called my last one "Travel As Art Part I".  So, here is Part II. 
 
By the way, while traveling this summer, I embarked on a more aggressive approach to drawing.  While still using practiced observation skills (see my earlier posts on drawing technique), I decided to loosen up a bit and step on the gas, so to speak.  I plan to stay on this same road for a while now that I'm back home, with some quick sketchy figure paintings in oil as well.  My usual modus operandi is to immerse myself in a long voyage of fine detail when I begin a piece (whether it be in pen & ink or oil, or other media).  You can see this by taking a gander at some of my ink drawings at goodrichink.com or simply check out the example below: 

The Girls Are Not Amused
(click on title to see larger version)

And here is one the oil paintings:

Dad 
(click on title to see larger version)

Perhaps you will see samples of these "sketchier" paintings on a future post.  Here's one of the quick sketches from which a painting is in progress:

girl on couch with laptop

But back to my subject - Travel. As art.  I am going to get more sketchy here, because I fear that this literary vehicle might get bogged down into mud if I drive in too much detail.

Did you notice the many cleverly inserted, and very subtle, travel metaphors in that last bit about drawing?   (I count seven)
 Art is travel.
Travel is art.


As in the previous post, the artistic subjects here are primarily landscape and portraiture.  Off we go.....


After the Badlands of South Dakota, our little Prius with four passengers continued west and hit Rapid City.  And here the Black Hills rise out of the prairie.  Anyone who has studied Native American history knows the significance of these hills to the people who lived in this region before the new Americans of European descent flocked here (to search for gold and break treaties to do so).


So, with some mixed feelings, I have to say how impressive Mount Rushmore is, looking up from below it.   I had visited it as a child, but my memory of it may come more from the many images seen of it since.  I have stood before real Van Gogh paintings in Amsterdam, and, like Rushmore, a photo reproduction does not match the experience of seeing the work in person.  Down the road from there is the Crazy Horse Monument.  Having committed to no government funding (it relies on visitor fees, private donations and revenues from sales at the gift shop), the progress on the mountain is slow going.  In fact, one might conclude that it hasn't changed in appearance over several years.   Nonetheless, it is worth seeing, especially in combination with the museum and other facilities at the site.  When complete, it will depict Crazy Horse on horseback pointing to his lands.  As for its scale, the four figures on Mount Rushmore will fit into the head of Crazy Horse.
 
These giant stone portraits make me think of other living portraits seen along the way:  


Dekalb, Illinois.  We rest from long ride at a farm house oasis - there, my uncle and aunt, cousins and their children (and a couple of their childrens' boyfriends), barbecued chicken in the back yard, dog under the tree.  Family.


Several days later in north Yellowstone National Park.  My brother-in-law Joe waits for us at Mammoth Springs.  We are late to the rendezvous because Old Faithful wasn't faithful to the ranger's calculation, and it made us wait longer than expected.   If Joe is annoyed by the delay, he keeps it to himself.  Family. 
He has reserved a site for us at Pebble Creek, a river valley feeding into the spectacular Lamar Valley, home of thousands of bison, elk, bears, wolves.   He has a large pole tent that we set up, cots for sleeping.   Then we go to watch wildlife.  He is our guide.   He is passionate about wilderness and the wildlife in it.   He introduces us to bear spray.  We see and spend time in a part of Yellowstone that we wouldn't have considered visiting.   Expansive meadows meeting mountains, gravely river running through it.  Thank you, Joe.  After two nights tenting, we caravan to Helena, Montana.


East Helena, Montana.  Another family portrait.  Lisa's Cousin Lucy has organized a gathering, a potluck family reunion in the hall of the local fire department.   Here, we converge with many members of Lisa's family, some living locally, others having traveled from Washington State, Oregon, and Arizona just to be with us Easterners.   Great food, company and music.  One distant cousin was a professional accordion player who was home from the road. We enjoyed and danced to a variety of music.  Yours truly pretends to polka with cousin Lucy.


And now, a quick look at some more landscapes - we'll step back in time to where we found ourselves heading out of the Black Hills of South Dakota.  From there, our trip took us across Wyoming - flat, flat, flat for a long way.  But the skies showed thunderstorms coming from the west, and the three hundred and sixty degree view of cloudscape was magnificent.
We stopped in Dubois, in western Wyoming, where the land becomes rugged with red cliffs, and then continued straight to the Tetons.   
The Teton Mountains which rise up so abruptly do so for good reason  (here comes the geologist in me).  It marks a normal block fault (up and down, rather than sideways).  The block that dropped down is what you drive across as you aim for the mountains,  and the uplifted block is what you see in front of you - a wall of jagged peaks covered in snow.   The mountains are so jagged and picturesque because they are young, and because the uplift rate has far exceeded the rate of erosion.  We can imagine horrific earthquakes during the 14th century CE (or AD) as these blocks made jumps of several feet in a second.  Perusing my John McPhee, Annals of a Former World,  I read that the Jackson Hole valley was sinking in part because underlying magmas were being drawn northward to Yellowstone.   As the valley dropped, it carried five foot-diameter spruce trees down with it, now standing at the bottom of Jenny Lake.  Apparently not enough oxygen down there to return them to the earth over the last 600 years.


We turned right and parallel to that wall of rock to enter Yellowstone Park.  Taking in the volcanic activity along the way, we continued north to our campsite.  In addition to introducing us to the local fauna, Lisa's brother Joe had us drive up Beartooth pass out of the northeast entrance to the park.   11,000 feet in elevation, unimaginable beauty, the mountains on all sides, the plunging valleys, the alpine meadows, and a snowball fight in August.  Sibling tension after Joe hits his sister in the face with a cold one.  Family.

And now it is time to wind this tale down because I am tired of watching myself type.  It was a beautiful drive from Yellowstone to Helena - a geologist's dream.   In Helena, family gatherings, a high school reunion, cousins splashing together in a hotel pool, more visiting, eating at The Parrot and bagging some of their famous chocolate, seeing the city's excellent history museum, staying with relatives, and then the drive home.  This punctuated by a stop outside of Chicago at my cousins' house, and then at my family's cabin and woods western New York.   Where Django our dog seemed to barely recognize us, as he had fallen in love with, and loyalty to, his grandmother.  But time heals all grievances and he is my shadow again, expecting me to rise up early in the morning to feed him.  The long return drive across New York State into Vermont ended with bedtime arrival, and back to work the next morning.


And now, I have a painting to work on.

The artist's voyage is never over.

Travel as Art - Part I

I just came back from a three week road trip with my family, and, since this is a blog primarily about art, I am going to pretend that travel is art and write about it.  You can pretend along with me or return to what you were doing before you mistakenly clicked on this link.


Art
is an experience, public and private.  Public, because, presumably, more than one pair of eyes wired to a brain may look upon it.  And being a shared experience, it becomes culture.   


But art is also a private experience because each individual reacts independently when confronted with it.   It may cause a flatline in one person's brain, while in another, it may excitedly bounce about the cranium, causing joy, discomfort, awe, arousal, laughter, confusion, recognition, inner peace, inner tumult, indigestion, and any number of other private inner thoughts and reactions.


Likewise travel is a public and private enterprise.  You can see me driving past, but you can't be sure I'm wearing pants. 


Now erase that image.

Let's just get back to pretending that travel is art.   While a  painter may begin with a blank canvas, we started out in a Prius - two adults, two children, and for the first and last ten hours, a dog 

detail from "Dog and Hydrant" by D. Goodrich (see full image)

(the dog, Django,  jumped train outside of Buffalo, NY to spend quality time with his grandparents and Uncle Boomer).  


Sixty-five hundred miles would be required before the work was finished - a gallery full of portraits and landscapes, and still-lives with coffee and dashboard.


Among the early portraits viewed along the way was Joseph DeGroat, my Montana born wife's great, great, great grandfather, resting in peace in the town of Champion, NY, his name carved in marble stone.   A letter notes that he was the best ax man in the county.  Some twenty miles away from this cemetery was a mystery.  Joseph's father Samuel disappears from all records at some point, last seen plowing roads in Boston, MA.   But here was a grave in LaFargeville marked, "Rachel, Wife of Samuel DeGroat".  Could this have been the wife of same?   And, then, where is her husband resting?   We might never have the answer, but these folks led to several Montana generations which eventually produced my wife Lisa.  We would travel to the land of her childhood before turning back east toward our home in Vermont.


Our road took us through the wide open spaces of the midwest, the pre-mountain assortment of flat expanse and rolling hills of corn and scattered farms.  Early on, a confused detour presented us with a panoramic view of the Chicago cityscape - and some bumper-to-bumper traffic to remind us of the public nature of art.  But soon we were back under uninterrupted sky and legally driving 70-75 miles per hour.   Corn, corn, soybeans and corn.   Early August and this part of the country is endlessly green.  


Speaking of "green", we saw the harvest of wind in full swing.  The white towers and graceful blades, slowly turning, first appeared on the horizon, then drifted past us in neat rows.  Wind power is controversial.  Many say the windmills make noise, kill birds, destroy the natural beauty of the landscape.  I don't know about the noise, but these peculiar farms seemed distant from any dwellings or public libraries.  As for birds, our living room window has killed a few, and there are more windows than windmills, so which should be banned first?  
As for beauty.....ahhh....beauty.....art...hmm...art....beauty.   
That is a subject for another post.   Let me just say, I found them pleasing to the eye and mind.   Tall, slender, curvaceous, pristine, sprouting from the midst of cornrows, providing occasional adornments to the otherwise miles and miles of green.  Steadily gathering energy for our use.


Somewhere in Iowa, we came across an extra wide load truck carrying a massive white cylinder, much wider than the flatbed - a tank? a silo? a missile part?   A few miles down the road, and the mystery was solved.    Lying prostrate on a truck headed in the opposite direction, slightly longer than the full length of the flat bed was a long slender blade for a windmill.   Much larger and longer than I imagined.  When I saw the scale of that thing, I realized that the cylinder was but a short section of the tall windmill's tower.


On the western end of Iowa, you run into the Missouri River.   We turned right and headed north, to avoid getting wet.   Flooding was evident and low portions of our road were sandwiched by giant plastic sandbags.  To the west we saw islands with sheds and silos, streets signs and traffic signal poles poking out of the water.  Northward to South Dakota, and then we turned left to continue west.



Parts of South Dakota make you feel lost in the prairie lands.   Less agricultured or, maybe, more cattled, the flats and rolling hills are more grass than cornfield, and the greens begin to brown a bit. 
The Badlands are desolate in appearance, but were given their name by French trappers who found them troublesome and didn't understand the Native Americans' appreciation of them as prime hunting grounds.  At the site of those cliffs and canyons, my inner geologist drooled.  In fact, I'm having to wipe off the keyboard as I type these thoughts.  I would continue to drool through Wyoming, Yellowstone and the many parts of Montana we passed through.  The landforms out here lack the puritanical modesty of the Green Mountains of Vermont, which keep all their nether parts covered with forest.  


The adolescent geologist from the East could only dream of the centerfold that opens up as you leave the plains of the central United States.


And you will have to wait until the next installment before I paint the Rockies in all their lovely nakedness.

The Artist's Muse

So what does an artist do when feeling void of all inspiration?  Like, for example, what can I do to update a blog on art, when all I can think of is nothing?
Take a day off, eat some ice cream, take up smoking cigarettes, quit smoking cigarettes...?     Or, 

Just do.  

Write, write, write. 
Then write something else.


How about...
the concept of the artist's MUSE?  


I have some first-hand experience with this.


First of all, most people know that this idea goes back to classical Greece and earlier.  Goddesses of the arts and literature.   Nowadays, we use it to refer to just about any source of inspiration. Some artists and writers have been inspired by another person - someone perhaps that he/she is in love with, who fuels his/her creative drive.


But often, the term is used to refer to a more ethereal source of inspiration.  One's muse might be that quiet (or roaring) inner voice that seems to come from nowhere, or perhaps from the subconscious.  At any rate, the sense is that the person of the artist is not necessarily at the wheel, but rather is a passenger being carried through the act of creation.

I"ll describe my own personal experience with this notion of artistic inspiration as a way illustrating it.  But how richer this would be, if, YOU, the reader, contributed your own ideas or experiences with your Muse in the "Comments" area below!



A few years ago I began writing music for children.   I remember the day it began.  A day like any other.  I was doodling on my guitar, trying to fit in a little practice time, when my daughters began competing with the guitar for my attention.  All musicians with children will recognize this phenomenon -  my beloved girls were behaving like mosquitoes or blackflies, buzzing around me and insisting on either strumming to contribute to my music or damping the strings to silence my guitar.  

Desperate to discover some sort of repellent, I abruptly hit upon a progression of three chords (Am,  G,  F,  G  repeated endlessly) and, without premeditation, began to growl out a fearful melody/chant: "Big, bad wolf, big bad wolf, everybody 'fraid of the big, bad wolf!"   The girls were instantly dancing a circle around my chair, howling at the moon, and I was able to play my guitar.   

So this came from nowhere, but I didn't think much about it, other than feeling thrilled that the pests were occupied for awhile.  But I did think it was catchy and wondered if it could be developed into  a song.   The wolf led me to a fairy tale, which could have been one of many, though I finally settled on Little Red Riding Hood.  "Once upon a time" seemed an apt opening line, and from that point on, the songwriting became, to my pleasant surprise, a process of what seemed like taking dictation from the air, followed by some conscious artistic effort at polishing the results.    If you want, you can hear the recorded version of "Big Bad Wolf" by clicking here....

To expand upon the "dictation from the air" thing, I could rephrase it to say it was as if I were receiving radio signals consisting of fully-formed lines, one after the other and frantically writing them down before they dissipated.  I was in a receptive state of mind, somehow.   I had to keep running over to the piece of scrap paper to jot down the next line.  Eventually, I had the entire story, and most important, a way to bring it to a close.   Here is what the Muse fed me for the wrap up:


"Well, that's about it, we've come to the end,
'though Grandma's party went-on 'til 4 am,
I really want to end this story with a rhyme, 
So I'll ask you all to sing with me one last time:
Big Bad Wolf, Big Bad Wolf......"

This continued to happen over the next months until I had written 8 songs.   Sometimes, I would choose a folktale, start humming a melody and spit out an opening line.   Then, again, it would happen.
The structure of the song would appear (I might write some rudimentary note symbols to remind me what happens in the melody), and lines would come spilling out.  Sometimes I thought them, and then worked them a little to fit better or not repeat words, or to make a rhyme, but so often, they thought themselves, and I simply recorded them with the pen on paper.   As the song assembled itself, I would eventually have to call on my education, my exposure to literature/writing techniques, the artist in me, to fine-tune the lines.  Stepping back, I could see places for improvement or see how the structure made sense in one part and not another, and go in and fix it up right.   So, I can take credit for helping write these songs.   But I must give some to my anonymous ghost-writer.


That has been my surprising experience with my Muse.   We can call it anything we like.   The subconscious creative self, free from inhibition and thought distraction breaking through the surface into the conscious mind.   We could call it an invisible naked Greek woman whispering into my ear.   We could call it a dip into the universal mind ocean, we could call it, "you are hallucinating, Dave."


Anyway, it's been a pleasure, and after putting these first eight songs on a CD (See myspace.com/davidgoodrichstories for other samples from the CD),  I have written a few more, yet to be recorded.


As for my artwork, the notion of the Muse behind it all isn't quite as tangible or present-feeling as it has been with the music.   Although, there is that sense of  Zen-ness that comes when I am so focused and lost in drawing - time disappears, the drawing takes shape.   I have skills that I employ, but I don't know exactly what the end product will be.  I have certain ideas, but the long process determines the final result.
I think the Muse takes the form of a deep confidence I have that I will get there, though I don't exactly know how.   A faith beyond any ability or control I may feel that I have.

On the other hand, maybe the Muse behind the art I am currently doing is simply the source of inspiration.   The beauty I see around me, the endless subject matter that the Vermont landscape presents.
Because I have decided that I am an artist (see my first post, On Being An Artist), I can use my abilities to practice a true appreciation of it all.

That is one of the great benefits of practicing art: you honor your subject with the greatest attention.   And not unlike a Buddha, you are attending the moment, not trying to dwell in the past or worry over the future.

Muse over that one for a while.

 

Art and Practice

I write about art, but according to the title of my blog, I'm allowed to write about other topics.  I put that in there just in case I ran out of things to say about art.   But I'm trying to stay on the subject of art for the time being.
I was driving from Vermont down toward New York City with my wife, and it suddenly came to me what I would write about next.  When we arrived at our destination, I remembered with pleasure that I had stumbled on a writing topic, but, then, I couldn't remember what it was.


Which reminds me of a joke told to me by my good friend Andrew. 


- As I get older, I find I'm thinking more and more about the hereafter.   I walk into a room and ask myself, "What am I here after?"........   


So I'll just babble until it what it was comes to me.  
Here are some thoughts about the learning process.   These ideas arrived in my brain in the context of learning to play a musical instrument.  They might even apply to drawing and other arts as well, but today's subject targets music.


But first, let's talk about sports. 


Sports are a big part of our culture.  Both in adulthood and in growing up.  I was an artsy kind of child, but I did participate in some sports while in school.   So I can confidently say I am an authority in anything having to do with art and sports.  For example, I know how many halves a football game has and can name the three primary colors.


What I do remember about sports practice was the constant repetition in drills.  In lacrosse, it was:    pick up the ball, pick up the ball, pick up the ball,  or:   pass the ball, pass the ball, pass the ball.  These kinds of drills are key in developing the skills needed to play well in the game.   It is the potentially monotonous repetition of specific movements that develops the ability to be consistent (and not to rely on dumb luck - "oh, good, when I threw the ball, it actually went in the right direction this time!").


In addition to finding the right approach, by making adjustments, etc., it is the fixing of those successful combinations of muscle movements through repetition that occurs.  This is referred to as developing muscle memory. 


What is happening, according to what I've read on recent neuroscience and brain research (my bedtime reading), is that
new neuro-pathways in the brain are being grown and strengthened through use.  These strengthened networks of nerves, used repeatedly to make an accurate foul shot in basketball, are what constitute muscle memory.  


 It used to be thought that the brain develops up to a certain age and then is fixed in all its functions, with specific regions assigned specific roles.   However, it has been found that there is more plasticity in brain development than had been previously understood.  Yes, there are regions of the brain that govern specific tasks, but, the brain can grow new neurons and rewire old ones based on use.


An interesting illustration of this is the finding that, in many stroke victims, when irreversible damage occurs to a part of the brain that, for example, controls movement in the right arm,  the slow rehabilitation process of physical therapy results in the "colonizing" of an adjacent area of healthy neurons by new networks that can begin to direct movement in the paralyzed arm.   Same thing can happen when sight is lost through damage to the eyes - if the vision area of the brain is undamaged, it might be colonized by a network of nerves that work for the hearing function - which can explain why blind folks often have a more acute sense of  hearing than others.


Back to Art.  And Music, in particular.   When I have shown both young people and adults how to form various chords on the guitar, their struggle and awkwardness at getting the fingers in the right positions reminds me of when I first started playing.  It seems impossible to believe that you will ever be able to almost instantly form one chord, then rapidly switch to another chord, and then another, fast enough to actually play a complete 3 minute song in less than a hour.   It feels clumsy.  It feels impossible. 


But it is possible, and the analogy to sports practice is something many people can grasp.  Just about everyone, child and grownup, have played some form of catch and gotten more accurate with repetition.  Many have participated in organized sports and know well the role of repetition in practice drills.  There is something mesmerizing, almost meditative about tossing a baseball back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.  In other words, it isn't necessarily boring, even though it is repetitive.   And you get better.


So, with the guitar, you keep at it, and just like your hand/eye coordination gets better with catching all those pop flies, gradually, your fingers begin to know where to go, without mental and physical struggle.  You strengthen new neuronal networks that guide the hand muscles in guitar chord formation.  You develop muscle memory.  And soon you can play a 3 minute song in 4 minutes, and then in 3 minutes.


For the young, music practice seems to be just another one of those demands that adults are always making, whether it be your parents or your teachers.    For adult learners, the assigned task  may seem futile.  Can you really teach an old dog new tricks?  (Yes, of course.) 
 
So, I think that explaining the value of repetition and practice by relating it to the more familiar territory of sports experience can help the beginner visualize the end result, to imagine that it is possible to achieve.   This can make the notion of "practicing"
more attractive and even enjoyable!  Gosh darn it!

Now...    Does any of this apply to drawing?  Or other arts?

I have some thoughts on this, but I'll leave it hanging in the air for the time being.   My dog is calling, says he wants to water the lawn.


For those interested in brain science reading material,  I recommend this book:
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain,  by Sharon Begley

The title and cover makes it look like one of the many self-help books out there (I suspect a deliberate marketing decision).  It is one, I guess.  But I view it more as a fascinating look at modern neuroscience with interesting parallels to elements of Tibetan Buddhist practice as well - written by Sharon Begley, science columnist for the Wall St. Journal.  Highly recommended.

Silkscreen Printing for Pen and Ink Artists

In the past couple of posts, I have been describing how I make my drawings.   Here, I will describe how I make my prints.


The artwork that I sell is in the form of hand-printed limited-edition prints which can be seen in shows (tba), at Frog Hollow in Burlington, and through my website (the site is not currently set up for orders, but contact information is available there).  I hand-print each image using a silkscreen, in editions of 200.   This means that only 200 prints are available of each image, and once sold, the edition is closed.  This increases the value of the individual print without requiring me, the artist, to die first.  
I find that this works in my favor, and it also allows more than one person to own a print of a particular drawing.  The piece will have the distinction of being drawn by the artist, printed by the artist, and signed and numbered by the artist.


I am going to describe the process here.  I am often asked how the prints are made and how I can get so much detail using silkscreens to make them.   This post should should answer this question for those interested, and perhaps be an introduction to other artists who might consider silkscreen printing.  It is less a tutorial than a description, and more detailed information and  guidelines can certainly be found elsewhere.


First a brief primer for those who are unfamiliar with silkscreen printing.  A fine mesh screen (imagine a window screen with the mesh so fine you need a magnifying glass to see the openings) is stretched onto a frame.   To make an image, any areas not part of the image (not to be printed) are sealed off.  For example, to print a donut shape, we would seal off all but a large circle, then seal off a smaller circle inside the first one.   This would leave a porous, unsealed portion of the screen in the shape of an O.

The ink used in silkscreen printing is fairly thick, somewhat gelatinous.  When the screen is laid upon a sheet of heavy paper, and ink is scooped out onto the screen’s surface, it doesn’t seep through (as would India Ink or another very fluid ink).   

To produce a print, the thick ink is pressed through the screen onto the paper below by drawing a  a squeegee across the surface of the screen. (The squeegee consists of a long blade of somewhat flexible material (e.g. hard rubber) mounted along the length of a wooden board-like handle).  Once the ink is pressed through the screen, the frame is lifted off the paper, leaving the image.

And now to answer the question, "how do you get a highly detailed ink drawing to a silkscreen?"

Screens may be sealed in a number of ways, including preparing a stencil and attaching it to the screen, or hand-painting on a liquid sealant.   But in our case, we are talking about a photo-emulsion process.

To transfer a detailed pen & ink drawing to a screen,  a light-sensitive gel, or photo-emulsion, is applied (painted on) the screen to seal the entire surface.  It has a much slower exposure rate than traditional photo film or paper so preparation can be done under low light (a yellow bug light will work).  The dried coating is water-soluble (it can be rinsed right off) until exposed to bright light for several minutes.

So the next step is to put your drawing flat against the coated screen, between it and a light source.  If using a light table, you will place your drawing down on the table and place the screen over it.  The light will pass through the paper and expose the screen, but it will be sufficiently blocked by any black lines on the paper.   After the appropiate exposure time (see the instructions on the bottle of photo-emulsion), the screen is rinsed thoroughly with water.     Every tiny line of your drawing will rinse out, leaving the rest of the the screen well-sealed.  Et voila, a detailed print!

For rinsing, I use a shower head on a hose in a utility sink- a bath tub will work as well.


Silkscreening is an economical approach to print-making.  All necessary supplies can be found at your local Art/Craft supply store.


See you at the next posting!

More on Drawing with Pen & Ink

In the previous post, I gave out some drawing tips.  I'll continue along this vein, though this will probably be less of a drawing lesson than an examination of the drawing process, as was the previous post, I think.


I do hope that the description of the drawing process will be of interest to those who own some of my work or have seen it, (i.e. at goodrichink.com) and to those who are working on their own drawing skills.   And also to those who simply share an interest in art.  And lastly, to those who can't find anything interesting to watch on TV.


I wrote in the previous post about drawing from life with pen and ink and how this approach offers a Zen-like experience because of the intense focus required to get it right the first time (no going back to erase mistakes).  This was the approach I used when documenting scenes and people in Togo, West Africa, where I lived for three years as a Peace Corps volunteer.   All the ink drawings you see in the "African Sketches" section of my website gallery were done this way.


Most of the artwork with pen & ink that I have done in the past several years while living in Vermont has had an underlying Vermont theme.  In the beginning, I approached the drawings in the same fashion discussed above, sitting in front of the scene and drawing everything directly in ink.  Some of these early examples include some churches.  The first picture here shows the hazards of drawing direct, without mapping out in pencil first. 


This is the First Universalist Unitarian Meeting House at the north end of Church St. in Burlington, VT.   I started the drawing at the top, working my way down and ran out of paper before I could depict the entire building...



Here are a couple other samples of this direct ink drawing approach:

The Chace Mill, Burlington, VT

The Old Brick Church, Williston, VT

As I progressed in building my portfolio of Vermont images, I wanted to increase the complexity and detail in my drawing.  And to make the best use of my time (which became all the more important as my family gradually grew from two to four humans), I began to outline my drawings first in pencil.   The idea was reduce the inherent risk of messing something up (proportion, composition, etc.) long into a detailed drawing, thus making it a throw away.


In addition, and because the free time one has in the years BC (before children) dwindles to almost nothing AD (after delivery), I took to photographing my subjects and working from the photos.  
Drawing from photographs is similar to drawing direct from life.    


In both cases. the rendering of negative space is very useful. (see previous post "About Drawing with Pen & Ink") 

Intensely focused observation is key.  


Also, seeing shapes in two rather than three dimensions is essential (again, see previous post).  Even though, with a photograph, the scene has been reduced for you to two dimensions, your brain has the tendency to interprete the objects in it as existing in 3 dimensions.  And therefore, you tend to interpret sides of barns (for example) as receding into the distance, rather than an assortment of irregular two dimensional shapes set side by side.   Training your mind to see and draw two dimensional shapes is the goal.

Here are some other techniques I find useful (oooooh.. free how-to-draw tips!).  They work both with traditional quill-type ink pens as well as rapidograph-type pens, but several came about as a result of experimenting with the fixed-width point of the rapidograph pen.


Here is an example of a drawing done using a reference photograph (apologies for the low quality image).  

Church Street   - Burlington, VT

It includes a fuller version of the truncated church shown near the top of this post.   It also shows people that wouldn't have stood still enough for me to draw them.  It shows great detail which would have required several extensive visits to the location.  But after a few photos taken, I worked on this drawing entirely at home, penciling in things first, then inking.


And here are a couple of techniques I use in drawing with ink:
Shading:
In achieving differing values with pen and ink (creating a range from light to dark areas), you increase the density of the ink marks as you get darker.  
I tend to work with close parallel lines, the closer the darker.  To get even darker, I draw more close parallel lines at an angle over the first ones.  This is called crosshatching.


Another common technique (which I don't use much) is  "stipling".   This is the use of dots of ink in varying density.   Crowd them together for a dark area, spread them apart in lighter areas.  
People often ask me if this is my technique, most likely because they remember the term and notice that I frequently make use of dot marks in my drawings.  However, I don't tend to "stiple" much at all - I prefer working with lines.  For the most part, I use dot marks to soften and darken cross-hatched areas, or to add texture, but not to define form or shading through density.   I also use dot marks in drawing lines and in crosshatching - breaking the lines up in order to make them lighter.   With a traditional quill pen, you can vary a line's thickness by pressing down and releasing more ink.  But with a rapidograph pen (my tool of choice), the thickness of line is determined by and limited to the size of the tip.  I work with the same pen for an entire drawing (convenience and laziness), so, instead of thin-lined crosshatching to create a light shading effect, I crosshatch with dotted or broken lines.  

As I said above, I avoid using stipling (personal preference), but here is an exception which shows how effective it can be as a technique.  It worked because the forest background was to be soft, or blurred even, so as not to take the eye's  attention away from the figures of the children and the pile of hay tossed in the air.


Well, then...I tend to ramble, and I am feeling that I must bring this to an end so that you can read it, and I can come up with something else to say on a future post.

About drawing with pen & ink

Here is a drawing that I made when I was living in Togo, West Africa.  There are several others you can see in my online gallery in the African Sketches section (goodrichink.com).  It was a fairly quick sketch and done (I believe) with a rapidograph pen.  This was in the town of Atakpame at restaurant on a hill.  I must have stopped in for a coffee or a beer.  And had my sketch book with me.

I like it because it captures the quiet of an afternoon.  The place was empty except for these two women chatting.

Drawing with ink, rather than pencil, presents its challenges.   But it is also  a great exercise in discipline and focus.  You can not go back to erase and correct.  There is a zen-ness about this.  You become so focused on the object in front of you, that nothing else exists - for a period of time, you are one with the scene that you are drawing.

There are some tricks and techniques, which I will talk about, but highly focused observation is at the core of it.   Your eyes and mind may be shifting between the view and the paper in front of you, but you are constantly carrying the mentally imprinted image with you as you look down to your paper.  So you never quite leave it during the whole process.

Another thing to note is that you are translating something from three dimensions to two.   But in my approach, this comes about as a consequence of the focused observation and not through any mechanism such as using perspective lines - another old technique was to suspend a glass plane between the artist and the scene and "trace" the three dimensional reality seen through the glass onto the two dimensional plane of the glass. 

I suppose I've trained myself to do just that without the glass.  Let me see if I can explain what I mean...  Look at the stonework railing, how it goes from left to right and then turns toward the viewer - a change in the perspective. When drawing this, however, I had no thoughts about perspective.  I simply drew the object as I saw it in two dimensions.  Rather then try to draw something coming toward me, I drew the parts that made up the view - a darkly shaded rectangle that is the end of the railing, then a rhombus sort of shape to its right, with top and bottom sides angling up toward the right. I'm working with pure two dimensional shapes rather than an object that recedes into the page.  The result is the appearance of an object that recedes into the page.

A key concept or technique that is helpful in accurate drawing is negative space.  The trees, the women, the porch make up the positive space - they are the subject of the drawing.  The negative space is everything that is not the subject.  It tends to form abstract shapes and these shapes tend to be easier to draw.  The reason for this is that the brain is not distracted by all the associations that come with to the concrete shapes of people, buildings, etc. 

So instead of drawing the head of the woman on the right (and thinking about head size proportional to body, or thinking about her posture), I am drawing the white shape around her head, between the tree trunks and below the foliage (left).  Her leaning posture, the placement of her arm, her head, and the positions of the tree trunks become defined by this shape.

Likewise, I'll draw the shape that embraces the other woman's head, and is contained by the two tree trunks to her left and right, as well as the horizontal line of the railing at the base of the shape (above on left).   The size and position of the tree trunks and branches as well as the height of the woman's head relative to the other woman  are now established and easy to start filling out with detail.  Using negative space is extremely helpful.

I'll be writing more about drawing technique in future posts, but my dog is wanting something right now and won't shut up.

More thoughts on being an Artist

In the previous post, I was pondering over what it means to be an artist and ended my thoughts with practical steps to take you from being "an artist in your own mind" to becoming an actual artist, a practicing artist.  A day or two after writing that post, it was "open studio" week-end, where, referring to a guide, you can hop from artist studio to artist studio in your local area, and further beyond, if you wish.  I think my writing gave me impetus to get out and visit a couple of real artists....  Then, yesterday, at a track meet,  I ran into a parent who is also a painter.  And now I may be begin to contradict my previous statements.

Actually, the artists I met in their studios were indeed practicing artists, and thus fit into my definition of what it means to be an artist.  Seeing their work and their enthusiasm, I also learned first hand a other bit of advice to give myself and anyone else who is as excited about receiving my advice as I am.


And here it is: interact with other artists.   This goes against my inner hermit nature, but I can tell it's good medicine.  So, in addition to finding subject matter, choosing a medium, getting the necessary supplies, and finding a market or outlet where you can eventually show your work,  I neglected to include seeking human contact with other artists. 


I joke not when I refer to my inner hermit nature.   I am happy when I am alone in my cave.   But a part of my brain knows that getting out in the sun for a little vitamin D and human interaction is also good.  And I have a wife who sometimes gives me a shove.


Here is what I re-learned.  There are artist leagues in my area. Their members meet and have group shows to display their work.   My wife has tried to nudge me toward them in the past.   But I had other things to do, and my cave was too cosy.   So I won't mention this again until I've joined one in September.... But the advantages seem to be many, including additional opportunities to show, motivation and inspiration from others. But I said I wouldn't mention this again, so there.


I met this parent at the track meet.  I didn't know he was an artist until I ran into him at a show we were both in a few years ago. You should see his paintings.   Anyway, he hasn't been painting for awhile.   What with son in baseball, daughter in track and everything else that comes flying at you in life.   He said he likes to think of himself as in a germinating phase.   Here's where I contradict my previous posting.   I consider him an artist.   Who knows if he'll ever return to the canvas.  I think he will.   But
I consider him an artist.  
You should see his paintings.    
I believe there is some truth to what I say, but nothing holds fast.  


There are no rules in Art.  

See David's artwork at goodrichink.com