Well, not so new to those of you following along at home. I took the drawing of asters out to the front yard this afternoon and shot a photo in real light. The easel stationing itself easily in nearly 2′ of snow was just a bonus.
Asters in a Blue Jar, 20″ x 16″, pastel on board.
There’s a lovely local saying that goes; “Stick a fork in’er, she’s done!”.
Tomorrow – assuming it stops snowing – I’ll take a proper photo of the drawing in natural light and that will be the final post in this series. My thanks to everyone who has come along for the ride for the encouragement and interesting comments. Onward!
Three days ago I thought this drawing would be finished in one more session, and I don’t know what I smoked to come to that conclusion but I’d love to have some more?
My formula for adding “noise” is complex, but regular. Regular hasn’t translated to easy yet, and it’s a struggle to keep the ratio of marks consistent and too easy to fall into a pattern of “outlines vs. squiggles”. I imagine, as I’m working through every square half inch, that I will be more facile after (another) few decades of constant practice.
The surface is complete. Everything is in place according to my sketches, notes, photos and color swatches from last August. (It is minus 2.2 F right now, and August seems a long time gone.) This drawing is an experiment, and the next step is to add Stochiastic noise – elements of “bad data” that cloud how I see things, but that I’ve never managed to put into a drawing. I’ve found a formula that may help me draw it in, though – make my drawings that much closer to my vision. One more post, I think, before it’s done.
This is the stage of a drawing when the positive fights the negative, being and non-being begin to jump back and forth for attention – and which area identifies as which is entirely up to you. One just has to trust that everything will find its place in the end. An end that is coming right up – I don’t go back.
I had planned to paint tonight, but a series of mishaps with equipment and a low hum of anticipation (my family has been away for a week and returns tonight) has interfered with my concentration. After several decades experience I know that no good will come of forcing the work under these circumstances. Fortunately I have a long list of tasks for just this sort of occasion and went downstairs to clean the cellar.
Cleaning went well, and now I have a large bag for “Coats for Kids”, a fat stack of collapsed boxes destined for the Strawberry Hill transfer station, and a Rubbermaid box of Irish crochet materials which I immediately brought upstairs and spread out on the table. The tiny balls of thin, strong cotton and silk in pastel colors, old books and reproductions of magnificent bodices and stoles, the delicate silver hooks: I have a weakness, what can I say?
Back in the day, when my son took two hours of violin lessons three times a week, I did quite a bit of crochet. I’ve been thinking lately I would take it up again and make the motifs at a much larger gauge in brighter colors – black and green, red and lavender. I’ll take some better pictures of the older work tomorrow in sunlight, but meanwhile here is an unfinished evening purse in the chrysanthemum pattern. It is, as Julia and Leon used to say, “an art of work”.
Sometimes, you have to stop right in the middle of something because the front door blows open (lots of snow in the living room!) and the lights flicker. I have the woodstove cranked up and a flashlight in my pocket, and I’ll just have to redraw some of what I did tonight in tomorrow’s episode. Now, a break for shoveling.
Back to work on Asters in a Blue Mason Jar tonight, and making decisions about yellow.
Third in a series of work in progress photos of asters in a blue Mason jar. Tonight’s surprise was the amount of green in the rudebekia, to have it be orange next to all that mauve. I’m hoping it stays “orangey” even after the blue glass jar goes in, because I’m still not one hundred percent in the kind of chess champion mentality it takes to figure that out.
This is the second installment in a series of photos of a drawing of St. John’s Day asters in a blue Mason jar. This record of work-in-progress is more interesting than I had anticipated, well, to me anyway. I’m conscious each night as I go to work on the drawing that there will be a particular geography to what I can get done – it’s very odd to see those boundaries recorded permanently in these photos.
Session Two:
