Found a pen and picked it up…
All day long I had good…
drawings! 
A thanks goes out to whoever left it behind…but, as another saying goes:
Finders, keepers…Losers, gotta-buy-anothers!
If you see a pen lying around (that does not have an obvious owner!), pick it up! It just might be your new favorite! This one is a Uni-ball Jetstream…lovely to draw with.
Wolf Kahn says in his book, Wolf Kahn Pastels, “I believe that every artist has one medium that determines the way he uses every other one. In Turner’s case, for example, the artist’s oil paintings aspire to the quality of watercolor. Daumier’s use of line and tone in every medium recalls the marks that a lithographic crayon makes on a stone. Van Gogh’s brush marks and palette-knife slashes are the colored equivalents of the lines a quill pen makes on paper. In my work, the determining medium is pastel.” (pg. 15)
If this is true, (and it seems to bear out in these cases and many others), then MY determining medium must be watercolor. I am not an artist on par with any of those Kahn cites here, nor do I think that I use all other mediums (pastel, acrylic, and charcoal are my other favorites) in exactly the same manner as I do watercolor. The critical point is that though I make forays into these other mediums…watercolor is what I always come back to and I always have something I’m working on in watercolor while I’m working with the others.
One of the things I adore about watercolor is just how many ways it can be used! Everything from it’s defining oozles and wazzles, all the way to quite opaque paintings that hint at acrylic or oil. Watercolor can be layered, spattered, splashed, washed, glopped, palette-knifed, textured, smoothed, bold or delicate. I’m hard-pressed to say exactly which way is my favorite way to use it…that all depends on the day. I enjoy it for the big shape paintings with bold, opaque color, AND I love the oozling and unpredictableness of liquid colors. Greg Betza, one of the artists who contributes to a favorite drawing site, says he likes to spell it “watercoloUr” for the latter reason…its luscious passages from one color wazzling into another. Here! Here! My sentiments exactly. Bob Lysiak and Skip Lawrence taught me the more opaque approach with watercolor and all its benefits: ease of re-working a section, gorgeous color combinations, layers of color that are still seen “through” other layers (unlike acrylic), and the shimmer of light bouncing through the paint to the white paper and back again. To see more of my work in this vein, click here.
To say that watercolor is “my favorite” somehow waters down the truth. It is not merely my favorite, like chocolate (and oh boy, do I love chocolate!!), but rather it is essential, anchoring, foundational. Kahn goes on in the next paragraph to say about pastel, “Pastel was the thread that tied me to my past commitments. And it was with pastels that I reestablished a solid continuity once I had regained my confidence…” (pg. 15) I would say this is true with watercolor for me…a thread…a solid continuity. It once even inspired me to write an Ode to it here, should you wish to read.
Couldn’t……..stop……..drawing……..and…..painting……them!
Just flowers…just spring…just sayin’.
I sit here on my tiny little turf in blogdom and expound my thoughts on this or that. They are my two cents. Just that. And if you take issue with me on any point, I would gladly hear it, consider it, and then probably just allow for us to “see” things differently…to be ok with not “seeing” eye 2 eye on a particular point. This might be one of them.
I have become more and more convinced, that when it comes to “seeing” the world (artistic, pictorial seeing), there are two fundamentally different ways that folks naturally tend to see what’s around them. This thought began as my mom and I voraciously launched into painting and drawing over ten years ago, observing her sketchbooks and artwork, observing my own, and listening to her frustrations and comments on what it felt like trying to draw and “keep” a sketchbook. Drawing felt fun & freeing to me. It was a struggle for her. Lines, sketches, pen and pencil seemed to sit naturally in my hand and give me “fair” results, whereas the same objects (for her) felt like work and wrestling to get something anywhere close to what she envisioned. But put a paintbrush in her hands, and let her put down masses and shapes…well, then she was a happy camper! When I look at my world around me, in general, I SEE lines! Really I do. They are everywhere! Glorious wonderful lines dancing around my field of vision. Only on days when shadows are crisp and long do I think first about the masses and shapes I’m seeing. When my mom looks at the world around her, she naturally SEES masses and shapes, NOT lines! A sketchbook does not come so easily for her. I noticed this and began to look for it in others.
I have taught several classes for adults on drawing. I love introducing a smorgasbord of approaches for folks to try, and then see what they naturally fall into. In every class, some enjoy drawing lines, some enjoy masses. The “line” folks struggle to see the masses, the “mass” folks struggle to put down lines.
Same thing has happened in teaching drawing to children. I taught 3-8th graders a series of drawing lessons this spring, majoring on seeing in line and mass. There were kids who drew with lines like they were an extension of their fingers. Other kids soared the day we concentrated on seeing the masses, the shapes. Indeed, the latter kids kept saying…I didn’t know I could draw like this! They were so pleased to be set free from the typical way of drawing with line only. They thought they “couldn’t draw” before this class. They discovered differently.
In December of 2008, I took an 8-week drawing class from Scott Burdick and Sue Lyon. On the first day of class, they each described their approach to drawing. I smiled, thinking of my mom, as Sue described how frustrating keeping a sketchbook had been for her…her natural approach to rendering something on paper or canvas is to mass in the shapes. This is how she sees. Scott’s eye leans toward line, and he has filled his sketchbooks with one wonderful drawing after another, but he has also trained his eye to see in masses. This is evident in his drawings. Sue has trained her eye to see and use line where she wants/needs to.
The overall thing that must be remembered here is that we each NATURALLY see the world one way or the other. And we can enjoy our particular way of seeing, growing and learning more and more about it. But we must also realize that we NEED to train our eyes to see from the other perspective! I truly believe my line drawings are enhanced by training my eye to see masses and shapes!! I will draw the contours of shadow shapes and connected shapes…not just the contours of individual objects. The reverse is true as well. My mom continues to play with line drawings in a sketchbook. It is good practice and it enhances her paintings. There isn’t just ONE way to see, ONE way to draw…BOTH line and mass are necessary to improve the other and create expressive drawings.
Just my two cents.
P.S. The first image is a charcoal portrait commission I completed in the fall of 2009. The second and third image is from our 2009 summer beach trip. We went to the NC aquarium…such a fun place! These are all examples of seeing and rendering masses (shapes) rather than lines.
These are my lost men…not “lost” in the cosmic sense, but “lost” in a TV show called “Lost”. My husband, son, and oldest daughter (who isn’t drawn here) are Lost addicts. Every Tuesday night the living room is cleared for viewing the week’s episode. They started watching Lost last summer…from the very first episode all the way through in order to be caught up when the final season began. My husband’s expression shows you just how “lost” in concentration they get watching this show. My son seems like he’s much younger than almost-13…the perspective of the couch moving away, and his size also diminishing does not translate here. I had to draw fast in order to catch the moment before the groans and “come-on mom” began. I’m not a fan of the show…but I have to “get lost” when the three of them descend on the living room every Tuesday night! Good grief!
A pencil was my first tool when I began to draw in earnest years ago. I wanted to be able to erase, to make my drawings just “right”, and then put watercolor over top of it, working within the lines carefully. What has evolved in my switch to pen is difficult to describe or explain, but somewhere along the way, I fell in love with pens. Typically it is a ballpoint pen, but I also enjoy felt tip, roller ball, permanent and non-permanent inks. The major “advantage” I now enjoy is the fact that you CANNOT undo mistakes. They are left on the page as a record of where my hand has been, how I was “seeing” in the moment (whether correctly or no), and then the restatements and re-do’s (if I choose). I tell my students that drawing with a pen is actually freeing! You are taking off the table the whole issue of “having to make it right”, and just letting the lines fall where they may. You’re even able to say to any viewer to whom you might show your drawings: “I couldn’t erase…I was using a pen.” Most of the time, your viewers do not see “mistakes” as you see them! Drawing in pen gives you a great excuse to go ahead and make mistakes.
When I draw in pencil and then add watercolor, I miss my lines terribly. I used to be so sad that a drawing “disappeared” when the watercolor was laid in. Drawing in pen solves this problem for me, since I can still see the lines even after watercoloring. I love the linework as a foundation on which to hang the color, and I want to still be able to see the foundation after the color has been added!
No two pens are alike. Some are gloppy and thick, some are smooth and thin. Some smudge, some don’t. Some bleed, run, and oozle when water is added. Just within the world of pens, there is so much to explore. You can use a water brush to “paint” after drawing with non-permanent pens just by touching a line and pulling the ink out into the areas you want. You can use your thumb to smudge the glopped ink. You can vary the value of your pen by pressing down harder for darker values and lightening up for the paler values. Pen is wonderful for cross-hatching, for crisp lines as well as choppy. Of course, my favorite, is the smooth flow of pen in continuous line drawings.
Like Mikey (from a commercial popular in my childhood) used to say, “Try it, you’ll like it!”
I’m always curious, when I see artist’s drawings or paintings as to WHY they choose to draw that particular way or paint in that manner. I wonder if they draw a certain way because it’s what’s most natural to them? Or is it because it gives them “the look” they want? Or is it simply because that’s how they were taught to draw? Or is it because they think or have found that “it sells”? Have they sought after “perfection” in drawing? Or have they sought to express their personality or likes/dislikes in the way they draw? Are these two necessarily separate from each other? Have they arrived at how they currently draw due to an evolution of sorts? Do they even think about it?
It is fascinating to me, looking at famous artists’ books, to look at the drawings. To me, drawings say much more than the finished pieces. I see more of the artist’s personality, their first-blush thoughts on what captivated them, the raw, un-touched flourishes of creativity shooting out their fingers. One of my favorite artists is Milton Avery. In one of my books of his artwork, there’s a drawing he did in art school: a beautifully rendered figure drawing containing all the shadows and proportions “just right”. Yet, his sketches and fabulous paintings do not reflect his ability to draw in this manner. WHY? Did he need to learn how to draw technically well in order to create the wonderfully simple lines and shapes of his paintings? Did he merely jump through the hoops of academic art rigors in order to get on with how he wanted to draw and paint?
Van Gogh is another artist whose books often contain the drawings he grappled to achieve in the brief amount of time he spent in art school. They are quite good. Yet he eschewed the strictures of academia and the box they tried to squash him into. We are all so glad he drew and painted the way he did, because of the wonderful legacy of his art we enjoy.
Yet it isn’t a matter of rebelling against technically astute, classically realistic drawing. For Sue Lyon, an amazing artist from whom I have taken a drawing class, her passion lies in rendering the human face and figure in a highly classical manner. This is BOTH how she was trained AND what she loves! Listening to her talk about the beauty of the curve of a cheekbone or the shadow that eyelashes cast just under the eye…you can see why she draws the way she draws. I ought to interview her for a blog post some day.
Anyway, my point is, that each and every artist does have a unique “handwriting” in the way he/she draws. My own “handwriting” seems to change a lot. Looking at how I was drawing just one year ago (above drawing), I see I was taken with values. Line was there, but subservient to the value structure of a scene or a face.
When I’ve got charcoal in my hands, I enjoy a more realistic attempt to capture a likeness of a face or a place (above drawing). Lately, I’m into continuous line drawing…caught up in the process more-so than the final result. Here are just a few of the reasons I love that particular approach to drawing:
1. Continuous line drawing allows me to become thoroughly absorbed in observing the contours of what’s around me. I have needed, for many years, to feel a connection between being an artist and the life I live as wife, mom, friend, resident of small town USA. Somehow, line drawings do that for me. Not only drawing the subject matter of my everyday life, but the actual process of continuous line drawing provides this connection…a way to see, to celebrate, to recognize the beauty of my little life. Other ways of drawing, where you’re picking up your pen or pencil a gazillion times in one drawing, do not give me a feeling of continuity. I’m desperate for continuity.
2. Continuous line drawings reveal to me the connections BETWEEN the things/objects/people I’m observing. As I’m drawing a particular contour, let’s say of the window pane, my eye then sees where my child’s hair is and I begin drawing the hair. They are connected shapes, not separate entities. Without continuous line drawing, I tend to chop up everything in my view without connecting them, resulting in a confusing mishmash of isolated elements.
3. Continuous line drawings teach me to slow down and compare relationships. As I’m drawing the roofline, I pause to observe (and possibly even sight measure with my pen) the length of the pier in relationship to the length of the roofline. I’m not after exact proportions at all, just an observation of the relationship in size and shape to each other.
4. Continuous line drawings result in a heightened sense of abstraction. This, for me, makes for the most exciting drawings! Line is by its own virtue, a highly abstracted way of rendering the world around us. Line is not real. If I draw a line to denote the outer edge of the tractor tire, and you go up to the tire to look for that line, it will not be there! Lines do not exist in nature…where everything is three dimensional. Yet lines can be used to show us depth and space, and can even be used to render shadow shapes, and value passages. But in continuous line drawings, with all the connections and lines left UNdrawn, you get something wonky and slightly off-kilter…which I LOVE!
I’ll stop there…I could go on and on about this favorite way to draw, as well as why I choose pen over pencil (that will be another post:). But I want to hear from you! I think it would be oh-so-cool for EDM artists and any others who’d like, to blog about WHY they draw the WAY they draw. Make it short and sweet or long and wordy like mine. Describe for us the journey you’ve been on with drawing approaches. Maybe you’re just beginning to draw, and you’re trying to use some of Danny Gregory‘s helpful tips from his books on ways to draw. Maybe you bounce around from style to style to try to discover something from each of them and then incorporate them into a way you really enjoy. Maybe you draw the way you were taught in art school. Maybe you haven’t ever thought about it and don’t want to. Tell us that too and why. WHATEVER it is, I’d love to read about it (and see accompanying drawings:) Your post could be titled the very same as this one, and then we will all recognize the subject and read each others posts. Could be really fun and revealing, don’t ya think?
The one thing I do know about all this business of HOW I draw…is that my approach to drawing WILL change! It certainly has over the 12 years I’ve been pursuing art, and it will continue to change and evolve…just like my handwriting.
If you’re interested in reading others posts of mine on drawing and line, check here…here…here…here…here…here…here…and here. Goodness, I do love this stuff!
Well, not to Bountiful, Texas (as in one of my favorite movies by the same title above), but to Stoneville, NC. My neighbor and friend was born and grew up in Stoneville, and we traveled there for a day to see her hometown and have lunch at a lovely tea room there called the Ruby Rose Tea Room.
Nearly two decades ago, I sat around a lunch table filled with relatives: my dad, his brother, and their uncles and aunts…my great uncles and aunts. Tales of their youth growing up on a farm together were flying around as were the sparkles in their eyes and their laughter. For a suspended moment or two or three, I did not see their gray hair, the wrinkles, the eye-glasses around their necks, nor the hands showing signs of arthritis and age. I saw them as kids, youths, recounting frolics and mischief as if it were yesterday. A few years later, my great aunt Gwen told me that when she looked in the mirror each morning, she did not recognize who the person was staring back at her…inside she still felt like she was 20 something.
I love my friends of mature years. When I’m around them, I feel like I’m with a beautiful oak tree or a grand willow. Their bodies and minds seem to contain rings of history…the years they have lived, thrived, endured…the history they have seen and been a part of…the joys and the disappointments that all make up who they are.
And such is my friend, Joann. She’s one of the loveliest oak trees you’ll find in these parts. Tall, willowy, unbelievably fit, more active than I am, smarter at computers and money matters than I’ll ever be, funny, witty, always learning new things, going new places, living a full life.
I loved seeing her hometown. I loved driving by where her brother lived until his last days. I loved seeing the churches her family attended throughout the years…one in the country, one in “town”. I loved seeing off in the distance the spot where her homeplace once stood…now gone, not even the dirt road leading there exists now. She grew up on a farm, like my great aunts and uncles. She wouldn’t want to return to that way of life…her memories of it are not the idealized visions I have of farm life. No. Her memories are the real ones…of hard work, toil, and labor. Her town once thrived with a furniture factory that is now closed. Yet her town still thrives (unlike Bountiful) and the Ruby Rose Tea Room attests to this.
This beautiful old farm house has been lovingly refurbished to serve folks from Virginia and South Carolina (just a few of the license plates we saw that day) as well as locals and traveling North Carolinians. There was even a table of UNC-Chapel Hill students taking refreshment and socializing while on their spring break. The victorian decor and the delicious food topped off a memorable day for Joann and I.
I treasure this friendship, as I do the memories of my great aunts and uncles and my grandparents. Though many of these relatives are gone, as are their homeplaces and the roads leading to them, the history they have left for me is as bountiful as their youth.
A recent conversation with our diabetic educator (the wonderful Kathie Cooper):
Me: “I don’t get it, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong…but Maddie’s sugar levels are up and down, all over the place it seems, and for reasons we can’t quite figure out.”
Her: “Welcome to Diabetes. This is what I would call classic evidence of a child with Type 1 diabetes coming out of the honeymoon phase. This is what real diabetes looks like.”
As strange as it may seem, this was actually a comfort to me. My shoulders relaxed a bit. Not that I want this kind of roller coaster ride for our 8 yr. old, but to know that there are SO MANY factors other than carb counting and the appropriate level of insulin, is helpful to know. These other factors are impossible to “manage”: stress, exercise, activity levels, growth, etc.
What I THOUGHT was meant by “the Honeymoon Phase” was that she and we, were learning how to manage and cope with diabetes and that at some point things would level out. What THEY meant by “the Honeymoon Phase” was a period of time (no one really can predict how long it will be for each child) when their last remaining beta cells are still producing small amounts of insulin, thus helping the insulin you are already giving them to maintain the blood sugar levels where they need to be. Coming OUT of this “honeymoon” means that she no longer has any insulin being produced and we are now operating solely on the insulin we give her and counting carbs and trying to think like a pancreas…WAAAAHHHHHH!!! (picture here a roller coaster of the wildest kind!)
So we are getting very familiar with lows…sugar levels diving under 80…and highs…sugar levels spiking up into the upper 200′s and low 300′s. We are getting familiar with smarties and juice. Two packages of smarties are a fast-acting carb that brings her back up to a healthier level where she isn’t weak, shaky, and about to keel over. Small juice boxes (I found the perfect carb count-15 g- at Walmart!) are great too! It’s just so odd to actually HAVE to give your child sugar, when you’ve tried to foster in her a good sense of taking care of your teeth, your sugar intake, etc. It all goes out the window when you’re experiencing a low. At that point you are giving candy to your child hand-over-fist to get sugar in her.
Sometimes she’s too low to go to sleep at night and we have to give her snacks with carbs right before going to bed. This was NOT a habit of ours prior to diabetes! Now, we say what a lucky kid she is…to be able to eat yogurt, or granola bars, or ice cream right before going to bed!!
Perhaps there ARE some perks for her even if the honeymoon’s over.
As I walk through our neighborhood, the shock of color arrests me. The blooming forsythia, daffodils, tulip trees, weeping cherries, plum and pear trees seem to POP off the visual landscape. This year, it made me ask “why”. As I looked more carefully at the colors jumping out around me, I realized that they do so because of the drab that surrounds them. The vestiges of winter and winter’s ravaging is actually the perfect backdrop for all the yellows, pinks and whites. All that gray, brown, muted green, and rust of earth that my eyes had grown so accustomed to, now plays a very important role in ushering in the beauty of Spring: Neutrals cause pure colors to shine!
Artists know this. At least we are taught this as a kind of “technique” to making our colors “pop” (a terribly over-used term in artist lingo). Yet I can’t help but think this is not some mere technique…but is actually what exists in nature…AND in life. So many times, after having been sick for several days, I have thought that everything tastes better, smells better…everyday stuff just IS better, in the days following sickness. And even hard and painful stretches of life, when they begin to move away…beauty seems to assault us as the blanket of despair and stress sloughs off.
I want so much to embrace this. I want to embrace the winter and its grayed neutrals as being the necessary stage for the riotous colors of Spring. I want to embrace the difficult times as preparation for a heightened awareness and vision of beauty in the future. Yet something in me wants to holler: Can’t we just have the Riot of Color? Can’t we have the POP without the grays? Can’t we have paintings (and lives) that are just pure color alone?
Well, of course, we can paint paintings with just pure color!! It is very difficult for me to paint with neutrals. I once asked an artist whom I admire and from whom I was taking a workshop: “Do you actually LIKE yellow ochre?? Or do you only use it as a foil for the colors you really like?” His response was that he actually LIKED yellow ochre! I could not imagine liking that color…it reminded me too much of what I saw in my babies diapers! That was 10 years ago. Now I have yellow ochre on my palette. Go figure. I must admit I do not use it as often as I use cad yellow, but I have grown to appreciate it’s muted goldenness and how it plays and works with other colors to enhance them. I now also have black and brown on my palette…and I use them all the time. What’s happening to me?
Perhaps as I age, I see the beauty in the grays, browns, ochres, and yes, black. Perhaps I see now that within each of these colors exist many other colors…if I just take time to really SEE them. And perhaps I’m seeing too, that even in the difficult patches of life, color can be seen, beauty does exist. Not JUST as a backdrop or preparation for when the difficulties go away…but for their own sakes. I used to refer to “color” as only the bright ones. Neutrals were relegated to that nasty batch of dull stuff. Now, I think of “color” as including the whole range from grayed blues, greens, and browns, to the bright magentas, oranges and purples. We’ve been given such a gift in the realm of color…taking time to study it and really peer into it’s excellencies is worth every bit of time we can give to it. Spring is a perfect time for this!
