color studies

goldenrod

asters

Working on a large painting takes much time.  I'm on my feet six or seven hours of the day when I paint. And often I paint on the same large work until I see it start to move--some days out from the start-- or until the tone up-lifts, or until something else starts stirring.

I simply pause sometimes:  a small color study or two at my drawing table can remind me that there is a middle and end to image-making.  Then I return to the large painting and usually the path ahead in it appears clearer, the time ahead less clumped to the past days.

The two small studies above are pastel and gouache on paper.  Each study is stylized, individuated, stilled.  Actually, asters and goldenrod are group-dwellers:  many, many, blooms are on each clump and many clumps abide in broad patches in the fields.

color casting

September field

I did this small painting on September 12th.  I've decided to keep it; I've matted it (so, probably I will not work on it more at a later time).  Already the fields have moved on.

Yellows and golds cast widely in the fields now.  In the treelines yellows and ochres are mixing with the greens.  Cool violets show more: golds can affect the greens that way.  Soon the Autumn Fire Colors will blaze forth.  Til then, this golden field furriness nearly makes my arms shiver.  The furriness moves. Can you see/feel this field/this movement too?

94 on 9.11

This stanza is from 94, a poem by E.E. Cummings.  The poem appears in a book entitled 95 Poems, first published in 1950.  The book is dedicated to marion, his wife.  M found the poem for me:  Sue and Fran gave us a call to let us know that they recited the stanza's words during their marriage vows.  Let us all give the words an airing:

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star

you

rising dove

T and his wife Takako just returned from their home town, where they went to celebrate at their temple the death of T's father.  "My father has been dead for 33 years."  Their priest in Akita, who incidentally is both a Buddhist priest and a medical doctor, talked to T about "you."

In English, in western societies, the word "you" represents you here and now.  In Japanese society "you" represents not only you here and now but also your ancestors.  So, he told T and Takako, you need to appreciate your ancestors.

Today, M's Aunt Betty is passing from the here and now.  Her doctor in Chicago took her off a ventilator and other support this afternoon.  Betty has outlived nearly everyone in her family stories.  Ancestral she will become.  With brothers all around her once again, in the same tense with them again.

away from green

 middle  August  field 

click on sketch to enlarge

Field colors are leaving green. Each day shows more and more spent, drying, browning stalks and flower heads that are going to seed. There are blooms still and even some new blooms. Goldenrod is moving from green to gold.  Joe Pye weed is becoming less carmine, dustier, dustier.  Lemon-yellow blooms of late-year primroses bob, tall in the breezes.  Queen Anne's lace is curling up everywhere, dunn-green, almost brown, almost ashy. But, still in the fields, also, some Queen Anne's lace is startlingly white, lacey, crisp.  Around the blooms the greens are changing, frosting with mildew from humidity of the days and the nights' coolness or simply giving up, no more chlorophyll coming through: too much sun finally and night hours that are advancing.

goldenrod & primrose in the field

In these small paintings, I have the autumn colors underneath and starting to appear above the greens.

curly dock

liatris, goldenrod & curly dock in the field

The curly dock is the dark dry brown "bottlebrush" in the fields in August.  This image is from last year's autumn paintings; this year we are not seeing the goldenrod fully flaming yellow yet.  Maybe we will in another two weeks.

So almost a year later, I am still working in this format:  8x10" or 10x8" views from the fields and treelines.  This image, like the others, is done on a printmaking paper, Stonehenge or Rives BFK.  (For larger pastel painting especially, a favorite paper is 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico, hot-press [smooth, not so much textured] watercolor paper.)  I use several finely sprayed layers of fixative, even on the small works.  I make my own fixative sometimes, and I also like to use Weber Blue Label fixative.  The layering colors are mostly soft pastel, with some charcoal and lead and graphite pencil marks.  The pastels I most often use are the soft, buttery ones from Sennelier and Schminke, and the slightly harder kaolin-based ones from Rembrandt and Winser Newton.  I use other pastels sometimes, but these are my "regulars."

Many years ago I would sometimes use touches of oil pastel, for nubby texture, in combination with the soft pastels, but I have some concern for the non-drying aspect of the mineral oil in oil pastels.  Will there be holes eaten into the paper where the nubby texture marks used to be?  Will the nubby texture marks become darker and darker?  Still, if a painting's surface changes over the years, it is still the same painting, yes?  The same painting with, maybe, more dark curly dock than it had earlier!

autumn fields

queen anne's lace & tickseed in field

liatris & coneflowers in field

sweet peas, spotted knapweed & bee balm in field

We have quite a few colorful characters in the fields nowadays.  They have wonderful names:  Queen Anne's lace, Spotted Knapweed,  Tickseed, Coneflowers, Sweet Peas, Black-eyed Susans, Bee Balm, Goatsbeard, Bladder Campion, Bouncing Bet, Smartweed, Curly Dock.  And of course there are the grasses, turning from green to all kinds of russet reds and siennas.  Dried seedheads that have turned brown and dull brown can yet erupt from their color-stillness whenever a goldfinch or purple finch or hummingbird alights upon them.

The small paintings are mostly pastel, on a printmaking paper.  Each has quite a few marks and so a good amount of layering, which, still, only translates a bit of the multifarious field activities.

spring leaving

Spring field flowers

field sketch

The field has been seeded with wildflowers.  I go there often to sketch; this sketch, done on site, is large, 22x30."  I tried to work quickly, and you can see that some of the pastel marks barely cover the paper.  That day the field was shimmering with the sky, and the horizon wafted between the two.

Jane Blaffer Owen died on the solstice, the longest day of light, the last day of spring, this year.  She befriended me, and so many others, in New Harmony Indiana.  New Harmony will always carry her art, architecture, gardens, restorations, and her spirit.  With grace, she leaves the world.

my summer vacation

Elena's back yard

Two weeks away:  time with my sisters H, N, and twin sister Jt, and with light and ocean, garden flowers and big old cypresses.  We walked a lot, we laughed a lot.  Color all around, carried with us even onto the highways and in the airports.

Coming back in the airplane I watched pools and wafts and points of darkness and lights, moving and changing in and out of patterns.  Fields of night and lights.  A bright crescent moon shone alongside for awhile.

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald I read, travelled with.  There is a passage about memory reaching back, and forth into the present and perhaps beyond, and that memory meanders, foggy, sometimes clear.  I cannot find the passage.  The book is terrific, a dazzlingly rich field of greys and grey-surrounded points of fact/fiction/memory.  Oh here is the passage, from the fourth and final emigrant memoir, "Max Ferber":

     If I think back nowadays to our childhood in Steinbach (Luisa's memoirs continue at another point), it often seems as if it had been open-ended time, in every direction--indeed, as if it were still going on, right into these lines I am now writing.

This passage goes on for awhile, Luisa remembering the path and the kind of memories of her childhood and adulthood, all within the frame of her son Max's memories, as told to the nameless younger narrator of "Max Ferber" who grows older as we travel with him, we readers.   Luisa is remembering even as her world in her present-day Germany becomes narrower and narrower.  (The passage does not include fogginess; I got that wrong, yet fogginess, greyness are abiding motifs throughout the book.)

What a lot of layers and movement--in fields of color, night, or grey--there are in moments of memory.

July 1

July 1

Going west soon:  I'll be gone for two weeks.  This small painting, of flowers in a tangle of field, I did yesterday.  I'll leave it out on view in the studio, too.

chang chang ge

chang chang ge

Chang chang ge is Chinese for "sing, sing, song"  or "lots of singing" or "there is song all around."

The calligraphy here does seem to move around:  from square to square, square with a line through it, square under a line, and there is emphasis and syncopation, lightness and heaviness of touch.  The open square is kou, "mouth." You see kou in the top two changs (and twice, smaller, in the lower character ge).  The other part of chang--the two squares each with an inside line--means "sun," "splendor."  So you have in the Chinese word for "sing" the notion of mouth and sun/splendor.

There is much song around, here in early July.  Robin fledglings are fussing, sparrow parents call out warnings, finches and orioles share the news of newly dried seedheads.  The cicadas have started buzzing eveningtime.  How is there one moment or word for "song"?

wafts

summer field

Not so much splashes of color as wafts of color, these.  The day was hot and the field buzzing with activity.  Some of the pastel marks almost melt into the paper.  After awhile you are drawing out and about.  The waft-marks become floaters above the field; the breezes, the air become integral with the field.  If splashes of color are water-filled, wafts of color are air-surrounded.

This field I painted on site, with pastel on paper, over a probably six-hour period.  The paper size is 22x30"; it is Fabriano Artistico, 140lb, hotpressed.  I love this paper and use it often.  Especially on a hot day:  the paper itself starts living and acting and interacting.