works of wanderlust

Category: art & photography

  • looking across the river.

    Breaking in a new sketchbook is a daunting moment. It’s not as if they are outrageously expensive, but after investing thirty bucks into a new Moleskine watercolour folio, peeling the plastic cover off, and quietly considering how great it was going to look full of lovely urban sketches, I couldn’t help but hesitate to put a first mark on the page.

    I bought a new sketchbook because we’re going on a plane in about three weeks. We’ll be wandering around Manhattan for the better part of five days and I plan to sit and sketch for at least one picture per day. I’ve been falling into the habit with the last few sketchbooks I’ve bought to “theme” them. I have a book of little watercolours of objects. I have a notebook that is exclusively for sequential journaling. I have a sketchbook for people. I have another for pen drawings of scenes. I have yet another that is reserved for full watercolour layouts.

    I did not have a book for urban sketches.

    I figured New York would be a great place to have exactly that.

    But then the idea of taking a completely blank canvas on a big vacation and finding myself sitting in some square in the heart of the Big Apple, overthinking that first mark on that first page… it was not just a daunting moment, but a paralysing one.

    loose lines

    Filling a sketch with life and vibrancy is a collection of a million little choices, but never in my wildest imaginations did I come to realize that half of that million choices would occur not just in the seconds of my sketches but in the microseconds. The choice to do more than translate the scene onto the paper comes from feeling the very soul of a space and an object and the various subjects of your work. Life is not made up of perfect lines and regurgitating the symmetry of a world that doesn't really exist means that we are too often drawing symbols of how we want the world to be than letting the world flow into our pens at every micro-moment of ink on paper contact. There is a looseness of letting the universe jitter and jiggle through our fingers, as if the quantum uncertainty at the edges of everything and all matter is amplified to expression on the page, and the result when done right in inescapable momentum towards art and away from mere documentation.

    My solution for overcoming two kinds of new sketchbook daunting…um… ness was simple.

    First, just draw. Now. Find an on-theme picture or scene, and just mess up at least one page. I mean, now that I’ve messed up one I may as well mess up a couple more before we leave, but that fresh, newly-unwrapped watercolour folio is now good and broken in with at least one lovely painting. With at least one drawing in that book, and possibly three or four if I get my act together, when I pull that sketchbook out onto my lap in Central Park next month, THAT drawing will just be another drawing in just another notebook. Not daunting at all.

    Second, and a tip I picked up randomly from YouTube, never start on page one. I opened that new folio right to near exactly the middle and drew on that page. Sure, I labelled and dated it, but sequentially chronology is for meeting minutes from my office job, not my art… right. Page one is so significant and weighty, so why add to the pressure of not only drawing A page, but drawing THE page… the FIRST page. So, I didn’t. I drew page forty seven or something unremarkable. Page forty seven is not daunting.

    Drawing in a bound notebook, in public to boot, is supposed to be fun and relaxing. What ways do you find to reduce the stress, even just a little, so that you can focus on the moment and not the silly details that shouldn’t be filling you with extra stress?

  • of a million little leaves.

    The autumn weather and colours brought me on a long wandering walk this past weekend through the rolling single-track trails of our local river valley. Fifteen minutes of brisk strolling in the direction of the parklike preserve finds multiple opportunities to step into a wilderness that changes with the season.

    For a few days, literally only days, each year the trail is a glorious canopy of oranges and yellows, and on rare days it is all set upon an upwards sky that acts as a azure blue backdrop to the autumn changing of the leaves from life into litter.

    I strolled with the dog and paused every few steps as a new splendour tempted my phone camera as a reference that pleaded to be put down on paper in vibrant watercolours.

    persistence and time

    While I cherish the idea of quickly sketching a few lines onto a page and leaving behind a breezy, airy form that captures the imagination, I have also known since my early art days that not every work will come so easily.  Eagerness to stamp a date and a signature on the bottom of a piece and flip the page to the next project is often overwhelming for me, so occasionally finding myself with a challenge that requires literal days of iterative work forces me to think long term, in layers, and across the trudge-like march towards something that will always seemingly benefit from a few more perfectly placed spot of colour.

    Painting leaves turned out to be a massive challenge.

    One at a time, I have drawn and coloured many of them in the past days and months.

    But thousands. Millions, maybe, like an abstraction of light and colour and life and warmth and magic all at once? Capturing that with my amature skills was almost an impossible task.

    I will admit, as I put down the first couple layers of paint and left them to dry I had a sinking feeling in my heart that I’d be either tearing the page from my art book or leaving it there as some kind of reminder-like testament to an ego-driven error.

    I went to sleep that first night, a Saturday, a little humbled by the paint’s ability to break me so thoroughly.

    Sunday morning I woke up and in my morning stupor dabbled a bit more into the piece. The drops of spattered colour had the right hues and shapes as they had fully dried and there was nothing to lose by adding a few more of them. Rather, I resumed my droplet art with some deeper reds and greenish yellow to act as a contrasting underlayer.

    By Sunday night, I was feeling a bit better… but still had a vague sense of… meh.

    Monday, more paint was added. And yet by Tuesday I had decided to be bold and deepen the contrast of the tree branches which were starting to fade into the background blurs of yellow and pinks and reds and greens.

    There wasn’t really a moment when it popped, but at some point I started to feel the persistent meddling in the finality of this piece had begun to pay off, transforming the random shapes into something closer to what I held in my mind’s eye, that reference image captured in my memory as I stood on a river valley trail gazing up into the orange canopy of leaves overhead.

    It just stuck, somehow. Worked. Though I couldn’t explain why.

    It was still imperfect, yes, but definitely not more litter for the autumn trash heap.

  • of nature studies and pinecones.

    Autumn arrived like an express train, passing between the trees with a gust of chilly wind and leaving behind a noticeable change in the mood. The leaves changed colour with its arrival, folding from a mature, ripe green hue to patterns of orange and red and yellow and brown.

    These are colours to which I have learned this year to give new names: ochre, umber, rust, and olive.

    While I spent hours of my weekend dabbling in the autumn colours of my watercolour paint sets, looking to match warm hues with the visuals I held in my mind and on the photo roll of my phone after a meandering walk through the nearby river valley, I found a better success in the simplicity of the lingering remains of summer.

    Between snapping epic photos of billowing autumn leaves patched against azure skies, I’d also gathered a small collection of photos of oblivious little pinecones still hanging (or recently fallen) from the boughs of the various evergreens.

    studies and collections

    Repetition is the king of practice, though painting the same thing over and over again could quickly become tedious. The notion of a study unlocks the frustration of repetition from the benefits, at least I think so. A study as I've defined it, is the tackling of a set of similar subjects with a common theme, similar characteristics or some other factor in common. For example, I took a stroll through the local park and snapped a half dozen photos of various pinecones. Some were dangling from branches while some were on the ground. Some were young and green while others were dried up and cracked open.  Four of those photos became the basis for my study, creating four individual paintings with four similar styles. Yet in the spirit of repetition, I mixed one set of paint, used one spread of paper, and painted each in quick succession taking the micro-lessons learned from each go inform the next.

    Groups of things intrigue me, because whether it is leaves or rocks or pinecones, the mind plays a trick on us that makes us create a kind of symbolic idealism for them in our head. It is a default mental state that almost any who do art need to overcome at some point: not painting or drawing what we think we see, but actually painting or drawing what we do see.

    Take a pinecone for example. In my mind I have an idealized image of a pinecone. It’s shape, colour, and texture are all locked in as a mental symbol of a pinecone.

    I didn’t draw that symbol. Rather I drew four pictures of the pinecones I found in my park on my walk, not a one of them really even matching the symbol I held in my head of what I was drawing. And those pinecones were not brown; the hues I used were sepias and ochres and olives and umbers, warm autumn shades that pull the cool breeze out of the air and remind those standing among the scattered remains of summer that winter is just a different shade.

  • of curious wildlife.

    It didn’t take long for me to become a paper fanatic after I started working on my art more. One sketchbook lead to three or four sketchbooks which lead to a small stack of books, pads, and bricks, each designated for a purpose or a theme or a specific style of art.

    I have a hardcover sketch book just for drawing people.

    I have a coiled watercolour pad just for scenes painted from photos.

    I have a moleskine book I use specifically for sketching objects.

    And there is definitely a canvas-bound landscape notepad reserved for travel.

    A book for everything and everything in it’s right book.

    So buying a new book these days often means trying to come up with a unique and specific use for it. Such as it was when I bought an 11.5x18cm Moleskine sketchbook a few weeks ago. I unwapped it. Flipped through it’s crisp 165g pages, and left it blank for a solid three weeks.

    And then I stumbled on an idea.

    small format painting

    There is a certain satisfaction that comes with completing a full page of lines and colour and watching it transform from a blank page into a colourful scene on the page. I find myself tripped up by that though, too. Committing a long stretch of time and a whole page to anything gives me the painter’s equivalent of writer’s block, frozen over the page with a shimmering idea waiting to be realized. But as I am just learning and practice is oh-so-much-more important than generating completed art, it struck me that small format pieces, y’know, paintings that could fit on a playing card with room to spare and focusing on a subject rather than a scene, may help unclutter some of that practice.  Voila, little paintings with no expectation for scene or palette or perfection. A few lines of sketch, a few daubs of wash, and then a few minutes painting in the details.

    This book would not be ideal for full page art, the paper was a little thin for that, but it could definitely take a gentle few layers for a watercolour doodle or a small format painting.

    My rule of thumb is literal. The goal of a small format painting is to be something that could mostly (or entirely) be covered by my thumb.

    And the subjects would be varied. No need to focus on practical size. A mountain could be an interesting image painted into the size of a postage stamp a few centimeters away from a doodle of an insect filling up a similar space on the page.

    The bunny was the second mini-painting in my new notebook, layered into existence over my morning coffee while the family slept in on a lazy Saturday. Not counting drying time, maybe thirty minutes of work. And a cute little guy too, if I do say so myself.

  • in the smokey park.

    The dog wanted to sit in the grass. We’ve been riding a sine wave of temperatures through the last month or two, going from unbearably hot to jacket cool. Today the temperature swung back up to the hot again after a few days of pre-autumn chilly, and the dog, half way through our afternoon, pulled me in the shade of some big old trees in the park and plonked down in the shade in the grass.

    I relented and sat down beside her. To my back, the sun was glinting through the leaves of the trees and shimmering in a romantic sort of way as if pushed through a bit of atmospheric smoke that has decended on the city from a forest fire burning a thousand kilometers away.

    My camera didn’t do it justice, but then neither did my painting. That said, the shimmer of the light on the individual leaves made me consider that my rough squiggly-line trees with blotchy shadows may be dramatically improved by a few carefully chosen layers of a thousand individually coloured watercolour leaves.

    Points of Colour

    I can’t say if patience is truly a virtue, but there is a time to rush through the blurry colourful mess that is a huge tree and there is a time to be more patient and ask if it’s worth painting every indivual leaf.  Truly, such a task cannot be accomplished in the short ninety minutes it took me to attempt such a feat, but my light to dark layering of hundreds or thousands of individual splotches over my rough wash, each splotch an attempt to convey the sense of an individual leaf on that tree, resulted in a depth and variation in the final result that seems to me more impressive than any mussy blotch of greens and yellows and shadows that I usually attempt.

    Obviously, given more than a rushed ninety minute piece and proof of personal concept I may even improve upon the approach. I also suspect that more care and attention to put a more fulsome subject of focus in the piece would enliven the result dramatically. All that said, I am finding myself unable to steer directly into the headlights of abstraction as I so often set out to attempt before losing my way on that road and simply paint within the narrower confined of realistic colours and shapes.

    It is a fault I hope to work towards recitifying as the months press onward.