from The Art of Travel

from one of my sketchbooks, drawn at the Ridges, Door Co., Wisconsin

I was going over some of my sketchbooks this morning, and I found a few notes from a book entitled The Art of Travel, by Alain De Botton. The volume belonged to an instructor at a workshop, so I read it very fast and copied out some ideas that struck me. The book doesn't give instructions about how to travel, but rather discusses the effects of travel on people in general, and some writers and visual artists in particular. The gist is that people seek beauty, "the sublime" in places like the Lake District, or Provence. It struck me that I'd like to find The Art of Travel, and reread it.

p. 183 And perhaps the most effective means of enriching our sense of what to look for in a scene is by studying visual art. We could conceive of many works of art as being immensely subtle instruments for telling us what amounts...to Look at the sky of Provence, redraw your notion of wheat, do justice to olive trees.

p.188 Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole, as Nietzsche mockingly pointed out...in The Realistic Painter: Completely true to nature, what a lie. How could nature ever be constrained into a picture? The smallest bit of nature is infinite. And so he paints what he likes about it. And what does he like? He likes what he can paint!

p.205 It struck me as awkwardly true that I had not much admired Provence before I began to study its depiction in Van Gogh's work. But in its desire to mock art lovers, Pascal's maxim (How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals) was in danger of skirting two important points. Admiring a painting that depicts a place we know but do not like seems absurd and pretentious if we imagine that painters do nothing but reproduce exactly what lies before them...But as Nietzsche knew, painters do not merely reproduce, they select and highlight, and they are accorded genuine admiration insofar asa their version of reality seems to brings out valuable features of it.

Art and Poetry

3x3" acrylic on foamcore, gold leaf

3x3" acrylic on foamcore

Cleaning Cupboards on a Gray Day
~Susan Godwin, from Wisconsin Poet's Calendar 2008
I'm glad she saved everything.
Orange and red Fiesta ware
blossoms in a riot of colors.
A cobalt bowl held paperwhites.
A rainbow of sauce dishes,
pink, yellow, green,
sparkle like suncatchers.
I wonder why they call it
Depression glass.

Style

Part of me is not very happy about our spring snowfall, and part of me is grateful that I have a good excuse to stay inside and work on my painting. I have to say that my biggest worry with regard to my artwork is that I don't see any one personal artistic style emerging. I am just as happy to design a playing card featuring Stephen King's face for the EDM group as I am experimenting with abstract paintings. In either case the payoff for me is a sense of discovery and surprise.



This little design was the result of a challenge for the Everyday Matters group. "Draw a pack of cards, or design a new face card." I don't play cards, but I like looking at their designs, so that was the approach I took. I don't draw a lot of faces, and have never tried caricature, so I searched around the internet for tips on getting started. That led to my looking at my old high school yearbook, and attempting to draw familiar faces, then moving on to the master of horror fiction. After a couple false starts I managed to come up with a design that reminded me of King. What I have learned from making myself do even the challenges that don't speak to me right away is that they don't have to be automatically appealing. Pretty often the unappealing ones are the ones that end up having an interesting and surprising result.



I think many people who draw and paint are frustrated by their inability to loosen up and be experimental. I certainly have been unhappy by many of my tight, literal paintings. In an attempt to portray real beauty in the world I often can't see the big picture because of my concern with detail. Personal emotional response, even composition, takes the back seat to picky-picky detail. With that in mind, I decided to try different materials (illustration board, gesso, acrylics) and a different approach. I'm happy with the process, which seems less like work and more like exploration, and the results. But here's the thing - the response I get at home and online where I post on Flickr, is lukewarm at best. It's not the responses I get, which are supportive, but the lack of response, as gauged by the number of times the photo is viewed or marked as a "favorite." What comes to mind is Mom's warning, If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. My assumption is that people are mostly keeping their mouths shut. I never know if lack of response because viewers don't like a loose style, or because I'm just not doing a very good job. Maybe it's some of both of those factors. Or maybe I need to include the abstract work in a different group.

Anyway, I feel the need to try new things, even if they aren't enthusiastically received. At some point I need to just usher my inner critic to the back row, and try to ignore her. I can only hope that way I can continue to grow, and in the end develop a recognizable personal style.