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Yesterday we went back to San Martin Tilcajete for its fair of alebrijes. About twenty artists had booths all around its center, and in the middle, people sat at a long table painting alebrijes. Munchkin asked if we could do it and we said no, we wanted to go to San Bartolo before the end of the day and anyway, we were already planning to go to a four-hour alebrijes-painting workshop the next day (today, Sunday). She asked again later. By then, we’d given up on the plan of going to San Bartolo, so we said yes, reluctantly. Ten minutes later I told her it was a fantastic idea. I was painting. The soreness in my shoulder disappeared, Donald Trump vanished from my mind, and it was just me, a paintbrush, and this sea turtle.
Munchkin made a penguin and Joy made a flamingo. Pretty good for our first foray into this art form!
And yes, we are about to go to a four-hour workshop and do it some more. Munchkin also wants to learn how to carve them, but that opportunity is harder to find.
Apparently, the craze for these beautiful little sculptures is causing deforestation of the copal tree. We will have to help plant more.
I made a thing! I’m learning how oil pastels work. They seemed like the right medium for this saturated color and light, seen in the Don Cenobio Hotel in the town of Mitla.
My main sabbatical project is to make art, with a goal of doing so for several hours almost every day. The past few weeks, however, have been mostly “preparing the studio”: packing up our house for the renters, cleaning and repairing and buying and sorting, getting all our traveling ducks in a row (traveling ducks, how cute), and once here in Oaxaca, house-hunting and such. And I was on study leave for four weeks, so was doing a lot of writing and reading. I read Christ for Unitarian Universalists, by Scotty McLennan, which was well-written and interesting; and Promoting Diversity and Social Justice: Educating People from Privileged Groups, by Joan Goodman, whose interesting topic was overshadowed by the prose, which was dire even by dissertation standards (it clearly was written as a dissertation); and a boatload of fiction, including, at last, Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy–well, the first book and a half of it so far.
All necessary before the arting could begin. But I knew I would be glum if I didn’t do some art along the way, so I’ve been drawing, doing ceramics, or sketching notes for future pieces, and am now in the rhythm of doing some art every day. I’m almost done with my first piece in clay at Ishuakara (I don’t know how it came by a Japanese name; I keep forgetting to ask), and have another I’m hankering to start. All three of us can work there and have been doing so.
Several nights ago, in the fertile time of half-sleep, I thought of a series of pieces that seem so obvious and in keeping with things I’ve been thinking about for years that I couldn’t believe they had never come to me before. I won’t write about the project here except to say that it’s about the ambiguous nature of decay. I will post photos as I begin to make the pieces. One wrinkle: I am completely ignorant of printmaking and I am pretty sure that this series wants to be prints. An iron for the wrinkle: Oaxaca turns out to be a positive hotbed of printmakers, printmaking teachers, graphic arts collectives, and printmaking history. So I’m going to learn printmaking. While I am occupied with other things I am doing a little research on the different kinds of printmaking (I am telling you, I’m ignorant–I have heard of lithography and etching and monoprint and silkscreening, etc. etc., but since I don’t know how each technique works, I have no clue which one/s is/are best suited to the vision in my head).
Last night, on the way to a dance performance, I picked up a seedpod with such cries of delight that my peri-adolescent daughter treated me to half-disgusted condescension: “You’ve never noticed those before? I have.” Nope, never have, and don’t know what they are–I’ll have to go back and look at the tree–but this morning I drew it, intending this first pass to be very simple and monochromatic, almost schematic. As is always the way with drawing from nature, the process helped me see things about this lovely subject (I was going to say “object,” but it’s a subject) that mere looking hadn’t shown me. Can you see the mistake?: at one point, not yet wise to the necessity of keeping a finger on the podlet I had just drawn, I lost track of where I was and mixed up my figure and ground. Escher would have made something brilliant of that, but I just laughed at myself.
The light on my daughter’s face, and the face, were so beautiful that I said “I wish I could draw you,” and to my surprise she volunteered to hold still for 10-15 minutes.
It’s not a bad impression. It has that faraway look she has when she’s thinking. Naturally, it’s not as beautiful as the original.
A day late…
A couple of pages from my art journal, where I joyously dove in to three quick pieces this weekend.
Today was a pretty good drawing day overall. I spent a lot of time on portraits and hands, and a lot of things clicked in those areas.
The nose, on this next one, shows an effect of light that I see all the time and have never managed to portray. I should keep it so I can keep referring back to it and figure out what I did.
But this next drawing is the one that really made me happy. It is a good likeness, and portrays the things I most wanted to: the lean of the head, the darkness of the eye that was reminiscent of a skull. This, as much as anything, is why I draw: for the rare moments when I look from the person to the paper and see the same thing coming to life under my hand as I’m seeing standing before us on the platform. They’re electric:
It was so satisfying that I was very jazzed to follow it up with a long pose–more time, more time, please!–and we did have a 40-minute pose (we don’t always–usually the longest is 20 minutes). It doesn’t work as well, though, and the face doesn’t look like his. I like the left hand a lot, and the shadows. I just never took the time to step back and see the overall effect, or I would have known that I needed to smooth out some of the dramatic shading (it looks garish on the right arm and left leg) and deal with the background, which is inconsistent and confusing.
After several years of drawing almost entirely with charcoal, I decided to take the plunge and try two new things: color, and a brush. I have a couple of brushes, but I couldn’t find them this morning, and just grabbed one of my eight-year-old daughter’s, with plastic bristles (Poor child! We must treat her to some proper brushes). I recently bought a few bottles of ink in shades of reddish brown for another project, so I brought those, and also the watercolor tubes I haven’t opened in five years.
I brought my box of charcoal just in case, but I didn’t use it. But I was tempted. So tempted, because . . .
. . . This was hard! I didn’t know what I was doing. I was figuring out the media as I went: how does ink spread? How do you judge the color when it’s in the dish? How much liquid does the brush hold? What happens if you paint over a place that’s already been painted and dried? I felt like I was back in kindergarten. It was less playful than scary.
That fear was a humbling reminder of something I wish were not true of me, but often is: I do not like to do things I’m not good at.
Huh? What am I in the studio for, if not to do something I haven’t done before? Am I really playing it that safe most weeks? I hadn’t thought so–each session is certainly challenging and exciting, just trying to draw with the charcoal–but the way I felt today was unmistakable. It was what I feel when I’m doing something new and scary.
As a result, it was also the most exciting session in a long time. The drawings are messy but (rather, and) full of novelty. In every one, I was trying something I literally haven’t done in decades, if ever. I even got my playfulness back.
As Munchkin was looking at the drawings, she said, “I like these. You can tell you were really looking at the light.” I demurred, saying, “Sometimes I was, but mostly I was just making it up as I went along.”
She looked at me and said, “That’s what art is.” My daughter, my teacher.
Joy said about the drawing I posted earlier, “All self-portraits have that same expression.” True–it’s the expression of someone concentrating. Just to prove it wasn’t the only option, I did this one just now, working fast and having fun, though my tongue started to feel dry.
Robert Arneson actually did this years ago.
I didn’t go to drawing today; it’s rare for all three of us in the family to have a weekday off, and we preserved it as a family day. I did some drawing at home, though, which I seldom do in any sustained way, so I’m pleased.
Usually I have my paper propped up on my knees, but this time it was flat on the table. As a result, what looks pretty correctly proportioned at the angle at which I drew it–
–shows all its distortions when propped up perpendicularly:
This was also a foray into Bristol vellum-texture paper; I’m looking for something as smooth as the newsprint I’m accustomed to, but of more archival quality. It’s close.
I also spent some time with Munchkin’s Hawthoria succulent, until the attention to detail was driving me squirrelly and I stopped.
These six, the last from my great sweeping-up of all the accumulated drawings from several months, have something in common. In all of them, I was trying to use mostly the shadows and darkest places, rather than lines, to indicate shape as well as the fall of light. It works well. For example, I think the most successful bit of this one is the shadows defining her right hand.
This next one too. (Same person, left hand.)
Same day, therefore same person modeling, in this next one. I was just really taken with what was emerging when I looked for the shadows and reduced a lot of grays to black and white.
The last three are also all of one model, and from one day. The approach was quite different than in the above three, but had a similar narrowing of the range of shades. Not too many grays. Black, or white. Lines and the edges of shadows show the contours of muscles more than they do the outlines of the body against the background.
In this next one, I used hardly any outlines at all. It gives a very different feeling about the relationship of the man and his environment.
As sketchy as the face is in the last one, it’s still a rather good likeness, which goes to show . . . something. Amazing how little it takes to make a recognizable portrait.
As I often do when I draw, I feel very moved looking at these drawings, at how vulnerable people are, and how beautiful.
Sermons in Stones 
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