I took a series of photos of the sky over a period of about three months quite some time ago and I hope to return to the subject again one day.  I would love to see these printed large and on a wall for people to get lost in.

How many of us look to the sky for a message of some sort?  Happy Solstice.

In a small art group that Jer and I belong to, we were given a challenge: for the next meeting, we were each to create some form of art based on “biscuits.” That meeting will be next week. I have to make some art. Using “biscuits” I came up with an anagram: “is Cubist.” I will make a Cubist-style painting, containing biscuits.

I thought the exercise would be simple. I would look at some Cubist works, get a couple books from the library and raid my bookshelves to see what others had to say, decide on motifs beyond the biscuits, and do a few sketches. Then, I would be ready to paint.

I turned to the internet to see what “making a Cubist painting” would turn up. ArtLex’s definition of Cubism is as good as any although none cover the full range of possible elements. Lots of middle-school curricula appear on the internet, it turns out, with detailed descriptions of assignments, most of them focusing on fragmentation and monochromism. Good for vocabulary, I thought, but not so useful for actually making the painting. Also a description of how to mock up a Cubist work on Photoshop, print it out, and then paint it. I’m reserving that one for when all else fails.

My pencil-sketches and sketch-paintings now number 20 and are still so rough that I shudder to look at them. The books had bits and pieces of useful information but tend to be dense and hard to wade through to get to the helpful stuff. Finding the most appropriate motifs turn out to have its own difficulties. I have settled on the biscuits, strawberries for color, and a vase or jug to give verticality. For its shape, I added the Betty Crocker (Bisquick) spoon to the motifs. I will be doing a still life, of course.

Assembling these items into something a casual on-looker would look at as cubist is yet to be accomplished.

Here’s some of what I have to think about: the interplay of a mulitiplicity of fragmented elements, pulled together across the picture plane, fitting into one another while retaining integrity, playing with motifs while transmuting them, – space, shading, monochromes, taut geometries somehow both beneath the primary forms but strongly influencing them, all elements that are not necessarily part of the fragmentation of the image but are necessary to carry out the picture plane.

And that doesn’t begin to deal with the real questions of art — what is it I am trying to evoke, to communicate, to unveil, to show?

“Where/how to begin?” How to make the translucencies, the transparencies, that pierce and interplay. According to Lucia Salemme (in her excellent book of exercises called Composition,) a light source is essential. That much I can manage.
Geometries — the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, the cube. A contemporary of the Cubists, Andre Salmon, called cubism “painting as algebra.” I have not been good at math since 10th grade. My feeling for math is very like my feeling for Cubism. I respect but don’t love either.
I was relieved, however, to find that the Cubists permitted recognizable tables, and even used table legs and chairs as part of their still life compositions. It seemed important to them that bits of objects be recognizable (an eye, a breast, guitar frets, a pear, a table leg). Other bits seem to be fillers, negative space, carefully considered no doubt, but not just another jigsawed fragment. And collage, something any self-respecting quilt artist can do in her sleep, became one of the aspects of later Cubist art.

I have to find a focus — “the means of organizing a canvas in terms of interacting and transparent facets or planes, which could be made to suggest movement and depth while preserving the unity of the picture plane.” (John Golding, Cubism). This focus will, of course, be integrated with all the other elements of translucency, interpenetration, angularity, volume, and fragmentation.

So I am embarked this week on the journey. I have an itinerary and a final station, but the details of the passing landscape are yet to be discovered. I have photographs of vases and jugs. I have made and sketched biscuits to my satisfaction. I have tried out angularities and volumic spaces. I have a big bowl of strawberries. I’m ready to roll.

This is what I call my “Queens day” picture. It is of a very old cup that was given out when a Dutch princess was born, and of a pastry desert that you can only buy on the queen’s birthday. I wanted to do something with this very old cup and this thing you can eat on this special day because I found it such a challenging combination. Also, a painting in which the color orange is the head character is a challenge because it is not an easy color to paint with, and maybe not an easy color to look at. The House of Orange is the Dutch royal family.

This picture is not about primary colors, I think.

There are more interesting painting challenges in this picture. For example, mother of pearl in the handle of the spoon and fork. Here is a 640 KB version of the image if you would like to take a closer look.

What do you think about the composition? Could it be improved by cropping, or is it about right?

I’ve gone further with this painting (which we saw at earlier stages before). I’ve been thinking a lot about your suggestions from last time while I was painting. What do I need to do to finish the picture? Any suggestions? For reference, the cloth is about 25 cm wide at its widest point. Here are some details of the picture:

Let’s get closer . . .

a bit closer . . .

and closer still. . .

In this last image you can see some of the color from the first underpainting showing through.

Here are the drawings I have been working on in the new year.

This thing is not interesting to eat anymore, but it is interesting to draw!

These are the most beautiful ginger pots I have ever seen. They look to me like they are crying because of the dripping glaze.

Why do I draw these things? To see if I am able to achieve the texture and glow that these things have, because they are old and worn out. I am scared for old age and getting old and wrinkled, but the thing is I see a tremendous amount of beauty in these old things that I draw because they have gathered so many experiences.

I enjoy so much drawing because I can do it at home with the kids. As long as I have a drawing there I feel fine. Without these, if I have to miss my studio for two days, I get totally crazy!

How do you get though these days where you cannot really work but you have to have something around that keeps you happy?

Who is the most influential art blogger? Ed Winkleman, of course. I haven’t been following his blog as closely as I would like to, but yesterday I took a look and the title of his recent post Art About Art got me excited. I’ve been working on an essay about this general subject “art about art”, and I wondered if I had been scooped. In fact, there was no connection; Winkleman’s post could have been titled “Art about making art,” how artwork depicting artists “caught in the act” of creation tells us about how artists did what they did. In my own experience this is a fruitful avenue for research, because there is much to be learned about studio practice from old paintings, (how to store brushes in linseed oil, for example, or how the palette was laid out in the 15th century). There is also much to learn from ancient art about the making, painting, and firing of ancient Greek ceramics.

Back to art about art — the concept of depicting art in art opens a lot of possibilities. The imaginary vase painting still life above is an example. I have long been fascinated by Athenian vase painting because of the potential of the vase to act as a “frame” for drawings and paintings on the vase itself. This fascination led me to a long love affair with ceramics and kiln building — that’s for another time though. The painting above is a technical study in how to paint a representation of a vase with oil colors on canvas. The form of the vase is based on studies of a stamnos in a museum in nearby Leiden, while the “red figure painting” is based on a painting on an amphora in the same museum. I studied these ancient objects by drawing in my sketchbook at the museum, then created this fantasy synthesis in my studio.

In fact, I worked out the rough form of the vase together with Hanneke van Oosterhout in a large painting we did together. I made this study to develop the technique for painting the vase before overpainting it in the large painting.

Every blog post should end with a question, right? Okay then, what do you think about Ed Winkleman’s blog? Or, what do you think about “art about art”? Or, what do you think of collaborating on artwork?

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related post: Art about art and doing a 180

I decided to start drawing again on a serious basis and I today I wanted to try to capture the texture of these pears. I wanted to see if I could make come out in the drawing the complicated texture these pears have. I think got some of the feeling of these slightly shrunken and beaten up pears. The challenge is to capture that without paint. I wanted to see if something that I could paint I could also do it in pencil.