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Content warning: image of a grief-stricken child
This is as done as it’s going to get–I think I’m better off starting from scratch if I want to improve it. But the making of it has been painful and beneficial. I am trying, over and over, to embrace my art as a spiritual practice and only secondarily concern myself with the physical artifact that results.
The subject is a child whose name I don’t know, who came to this Gaza hospital a couple of weeks ago when the refugee camp that is her home was bombed. Next to her gaze, and the so-adult expressiveness of her hands, it’s the little details of normal life that wring my heart (as normal as life in a refugee camp can be said to be). Someone helped pull that Minnie Mouse shirt over her head. Someone pulled her hair into a ponytail with that white elastic. Is that person’s blood on her shirt now? Is that person alive? Is she alive?–an ambulance just outside the hospital has been bombed since, and the lack of fuel is turning Al-Shifa into a “mass grave,” although a rumor that a group of Israeli doctors actually called for the hospital to be bombed seems to be sheer invention. (I found reports about it, but searching for the “Israeli news site” they claim to be citing, and the name of the group they claim is doing this, turns up nothing. “The truth is the first casualty of war”; read with care.) 11/7/23, ETA: I saw the same story with full citations here, thanks to Jewish Voice for Peace. At this writing, over 90 doctors have signed the letter. Utterly sickening.
I will never know her story. I just know that I hope neither I nor anyone I love ever has to look upon whatever horror her eyes are seeing.
Content warning: image of a grief-stricken child
It’s so hard to give my heart’s attention to what’s happening in Gaza and Israel: not to intellectualize, avoid, or take any of the other escape routes away from grief and despair, but just to be there with all of the feelings. I thought drawing some of the images that have haunted me might help. Like my brother-in-law John, on whose social media I saw it, I’ve been unable to forget this little girl, who was photographed at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza City, after Israel bombed the refugee camp where she lived. The photo is by Samar Abu Elouf for the New York Times (“As Warnings of Crisis in Gaza Mount, Palestinians Struggle to Find Room for the Dead,” October 12, 2023). Drawing her feels like a prayer. I’m holding her in my heart the whole time, wishing her well, as if the point of the pencil were a hand gently touching her hand, smoothing back her hair. I wish it could be. I hope someone is caring for her that way.
This drawing is far from finished, but I wanted to share what I’m doing.
Expect to see more of these as I try to be fully present with the people whose images are passing before our eyes daily: parents carrying the wrapped bodies of their children, the horrifyingly small packages of body parts awaiting identification at a morgue, people wailing at funerals. I don’t expect to show anything gory, but they are emotionally grueling, so I’ll give content warnings.
Sabbatical Activity No. Umpty-Ump is, of course, making art. I’ve been doing art almost every day, which is a major accomplishment.
A lot of what I’ve been working on is nothing I want to show yet: more explorations of the Tower of Babel and several themes that cluster around it. I’m working on one right now that uses the names of God in several dozen languages, and I think I’m likely to keep exploring that direction for a few pages of the sketchbook.
I’m annoyed at myself right now because I’ve had the below piece ready to submit to the Tiny Show (at Studio Gallery, early November to late December) for weeks, and was holding off only until I finished another piece that fit the dimensions, thinking I’d send them at the same time. But I finished that piece and didn’t like it–I don’t think I can make it work at this scale–and so I finally photographed this, frame and all, and submitted it.
Except that the deadline was not the 25th, like I had in my head, but the 20th. How old was I when I learned that I could not trust the dates I held in my head? About 12. Oh well. My chances of its being accepted were slim anyway; they didn’t want the ginkgo piece, citing too much similarity to other things they had already accepted for the show, and to my eye, anyway, the two pieces have a lot in common. But I really like them both, and that makes me happy.
I would like to show my art, but as every artist knows, it’s a whole other job to submit it, and takes a lot of time and effort that I’d rather put into half a dozen other things, including making art. I will renew my lapsed membership in a local art network and keep an eye out for opportunities, though. I love Elizabeth Gilbert’s practice of responding to rejections by immediately sending the piece right back out (just read about this in Big Magic, which I read for class), but for that you need to have a list of potential galleries.
I also have an idea for a mural in my neighborhood, on a wall that really wants something. I feel like I shouldn’t describe it here because the theme is directly related to the business in the building, and I haven’t talked to the owner yet. That’s the biggest “if” to actually making it happen; both the owner of the business and the owner of the building have to want it (I’m pretty sure they aren’t the same person). Once I’ve sketched a few ideas to my more-or-less satisfaction, I’ll take them and some other paintings that show what I can do, and go talk to the business owner.
So, back to drawing.
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Water is endlessly fascinating to paint as well as to watch.
I think this is done.
I have finished this painting, or rather, I’ve stopped working on it. It’s not totally unsatisfying, but I couldn’t get the precision either of line or of color with acrylic paint. Joy and I went to the Kehinde Wiley exhibit at the De Young today, and aside from the beauty and gut-punching power of his art, I was also looking at the oil paintings and saying “How does he DO that?” His lines are razor-clean and his shading looks both impossible to do without a brush and also like no brush hairs can ever have touched that surface.
I will learn more about painting, I’m sure, and develop more control over the brush. For now, I loved working with oil pastels so much that I’m going to make another painting of the roses, same size, with that medium.
Oil pastel on paper, 10.5″ x 7″
It’s a heart-thumping kind of game: I pulled off the tape that was holding this in place, put away the pastels and other materials, signed it, and propped it up, all while averting my eyes. Then I left the room and came back in, glancing over at it from the doorway, as if I had never seen it up close. I wanted to see if the magic had worked, and to a pleasing extent, it had. Scrawls, strokes and dabs of oily sticks on paper were transmuted into light on water.
Just as some ink paintings are called drawings, making this felt like painting even though it was done with a dry medium without brushes. I think I’ll paint the same scene tomorrow.
Looking at art in museums, and also making a drawing of a building in SketchbookX, where I can’t make very precise marks, I noticed how little it takes to show light and shadow. So when we say by this patio at Palacio Viana, Córdoba, I tried to put in just enough to show the light.
I am now sitting in the park Miradoura de Sāo Pedro de Alcántara, in Lisbóa, looking out to the castle and hillsides of buildings. For music, there’s a breeze, the clink of coffee cups behind me, and a man with an acoustic guitar and a beautiful, unadorned voice playing bossa nova. I might get out my sketchbook and draw the light on the buildings, or I might just keep reading and making notes on How to Be an Artist, by Jerry Saltz, for my grad school course (The Arts as Leadership) that starts next month. It’s all good. More than good.
Edited to add this, the view from here, since I did do some drawing.
It’s amazing how you can walk into a room full of 17th century Dutch paintings, take a quick glance around as you move through, and know immediately when your eye falls on a painting by Vermeer. I could spend the rest of my life trying to do what he does with light, but I figure the only way to begin to learn it is to draw it. This is “The Astronomer,” the only one of Vermeer’s that is currently in residence here at the Louvre (“The Lacemaker” is out on loan).
I was in this wing in search of Rembrandt, and found the roomful a couple of rooms along from Vermeer. This self-portrait (below) is from 1660. There are a few here from 25 years earlier. I love how honestly he shows the changes time and experience have wrought on his face, though through my own limitations, I took about 25 years off again.
The first try was way too small, and when I went closer to see some details that I hadn’t been able to see from the seat on the other side of the room, I hadn’t left myself room to have a prayer of including them. So I started again at twice the size (still a thumbnail of a detail; the painting is about 3×4′). As with Vermeer: the light, the light, though with Vermeer I always have the impression of light’s falling on the subject, whereas with Rembrandt self-portraits, I usually have more of a feeling that he is emerging, partway only, out of a palpable darkness.
Both graphite pencil on 4″×6″ sketchbook paper.
Munchkin and I are at the Louvre. I communed with one of Michelangelo’s “Captives” while she went in search of more recent European sculpture.
I was lukewarm about returning to the Louvre, and came mostly to accompany M, but this time spent drawing made it more than worth the price of admission, and the wait.
Sermons in Stones 
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