Art & Perception

“Why haven’t you been writing much?” I asked a many times published writer friend of mine one time.

“I need time to breathe.”

“Breathe?”

“Yes. But you have to know what I mean by ‘breathe.’ I mean sail a boat across an ocean, climb a mountain in the Himalayas, photograph lions in Africa… Something of magnitude. That does the trick. Then I’m ready again. Then there’s no stopping me.”

“Ah. I do know what you mean. I think I need to catch my breath too.”

What do you do to rekindle your artistic energy?

I don’t know why anyone would have a problem with it, but commercial art is cool.

N.C. Wyeth — Title Unknown (I just like this one.)

All right, I do know why some people would have a problem. Working with clients can be ghastly. I remember saying these exact words to one guy one time, “Look dude, I’m not your art dog.”

“But I’m paaaaying you,” he whined while amazingly managing a smug smile, thinking, no doubt, that he’d just laid on me an argument for which there could be no possible riposte.

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“The greater danger is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”

Michelangelo

Just recently we had some discussion of New Year’s Resolutions. One of mine had to do with achieving some body sculpting goals. To accomplish that, I put myself on training regimen, but very soon, I noticed, “Well, I’ve done this before, and I’ve never achieved the kind of results I’m after. What’s it gonna take? What’s it really gonna take?”

So I started doing some research. I began with the knowledge that though I’ve been a jock pretty much my whole life, maybe, just maybe I did not know just exactly how to get “ripped,” and sure enough, I found that I had more than a thing or two to learn about reducing fat while increasing muscle. In fact, it was on a little motivational excerpt from one of my resources that I got the above quote.
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Well, it’s very difficult to post today. I’ve been too busy drawing to write very much; furthermore, I can certainly not manage handling any comments. I’ve hardly had time to comment on anyone else’s post for the past 48 hours. For example, Leslie wrote an excellent post on artistic changes of opinion, and I’d love to chat on that most interesting topic, but it’s no use. When it comes to a choice between the talking, whether on the internet or in person, or art, the talk goes.

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I’m not sure that this post will be very interesting or useful to anyone here since it seems that what I do, artwise, is not something anyone else does. I have not even heard any aspirations in the direction of classical figure drawing either, but here, nevertheless, is a quick synopsis of my method.

I decided to attempt to recover some of my earlier methods in order to illustrate the story, but lacking pastels for the moment and furthermore basically despising using the computer to simulate the effects, I recovered only certain aspects of the earlier style — mainly a sense of dynamic motion and form. If you’d like to see some more, you can have a look at the non romantic exposé of my penultimate post. I lacked the time before, but this past week and a half, I’ve done nothing but make time and pick up the pace, so here’s my first recent blush at a classical theme in a long time — the fight between Heraklos and Antaeus.

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Saturday morning, eight am, and still no post ready.

I have a good reason: I’ve been too busy drawing to write; moreover, I certainly have little time or patience for image manipulation with a computer.

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Making money at art is as easy as jumping off a cliff.

Therein lies the rub, as has been said.

Antaeus, Robert Liberace

In high school, starting when I was about sixteen, I fell in love with pastels. Not those hard waxy kinds, but the good old fashioned soft oils. Some artists naturally gravitate towards figure drawing, and I was definitely one of those. People are ever interesting. Always different, every blessed one of them beautiful in some way. Being something of a jock, it came naturally to draw the football players practicing, the divers taking high leaps, the basketball players dunking, the cheerleaders dancing.

I became a regular fixture at practices, whatever the sport. I’d do these wicked fast gesture drawings, then take them home and work up some more elaborate studies. There I’d discover what parts of the figures I needed to pay attention to (the hands — geez) and watch and draw some more. Then I’d start combining the figures in multi person action scenes, and these would become pastels. I had only a little paper, and the pastels, given me by my mom, were dear, so I developed a deft, no mistake kind of style.

One day, one of the deans asked to see my finished stuff. I brought a portfolio to his office. He already knew I had no interest in art classes, so he wasn’t one of those dumb counselor types who thought I should be taking art classes. No. He happened to have some connections with a local newspaper and a gallery, but he insisted that if I wanted him to make some calls, then I’d need to become more involved with some school activities, like helping out at functions where he’d be happy to see my work displayed.

So that was my first show. A pep rally. All the adulation was pretty embarrassing to me. I was not comfortable with all the attention, but it got worse. I got a call from a gallery and then a newspaper reporter.
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