So I had a bad day, but the blog is about art so the topic is art and here is the latest work. These things have been around here and it is time I get this stuff posted. Then I have to do more! I am thinking I may have to do the darker stuff on a nameless, traceless blog, or bury on my computer as a novel, perhaps a thinly disguised memoir.
I have been very grateful to get good feedback on the writing and I haven't journaled in too long. We all have plenty of stories to tell and I love to hear them as well as tell them. I have this luxury of time right now. Well it isn't a luxury actually. But I am going to make it one.
Let's just celebrate life. I am going to take advantage of this "luxury" of time to tackle a painting series I have had planned for a while.
Autumn is upon us and the colors of the sky and intensity of light can't be matched. Good painting weather. This monarch color is going to give me momentum to the new paintings. The photo this is from Connecticut Wildlife, a photo by Paul J. Fusco. I have tracked butterflies and identified them since I was a child, drawing them in less and less childish ways as I grew older. Paul works for CT Department of Environmental Protection and his photos and illustrations are admirable. I went to Sessions Woods in Burlington for a birding walk he did and I must do more. I am grateful to have completed the Master Wildlife program offered by DEP and enjoy the volunteer assignments I have taken. I have plenty of my own monarch photos that will work as well. I was pastel experimenting and the picture was right there. Because it is not from my own original art references I would not sell this piece and the Broad Brook Art watermark was accidental.
I use various tools and I the very fine lines I do wearing a magnifying glass. The detail I can get this way pleases me. Crazy detailed black and white birds and smudgy thrilling color sketches. Woo hoo!
My college art professors were always saying you have to pick something...printmaking or painting, sculpture or pottery. You have to specialize, have a recognizable, signature style, something everyone who sees it will know who made it. I peaked, learning art, my junior year of college. Maybe because I couldn't choose. And not choosing gave me all kinds of other opportunities to learn and teach all kinds of subjects.
If you study the long careers of artists like Picasso you know materials are fluid, colors and styles keep evolving. Then there are the tortured souls like Van Gogh, who can't shake the image in his head; painting must happen, over and over, like breathing. The paint was giving him his whole breath. He made most of his entire body of work in about 4 years. He was manic depressive, like me, although the used term these days is bipolar, and there are shades of grey within that definition, kind of like the spectrums of autism. When I see Van Gogh's work in person and I want to weep, not just because the color is delicious beyond words, the brush strokes genius, but because I know he was afraid his illness would rob him of the paint...his mission in life. You can see it in his eyes, one self-portrait after another.
I have had that all-consuming fear. We have treatments now, but when the pictures won't come, when the brush and pen are uninspired, life just isn't the same. The illness itself is shameful enough, but the loss of the pictures that filled your head as long as you can remember, the way you have always seen the world...it can be an unbearable soul sickness.
And I never struggle with that these days. If the art isn't working then I can spend an hour or two with the kids I tutor and my spirit is bursting. For me, teaching kids, especially struggling kids, you have to pull out all the stops, you have do your very best to see through their eyes, what they connect with. When you do that, when you see that magic moment when a child understands he or she can really see their own thoughts in pictures or letters or strings of movements, something magic happens...something they can carry into math and music, foreign languages, language arts, social studies or history. I feel like I can see firing synapses, like watching fireworks. Sometimes I have to reign in my excitement a little...you want them to keep making the connections, creating connections to language, to equations. They don't need to know their sports talent or outdoor recreation can be informed by geometry. It just happens for most. for some, you have to teach it on the court and finish the lesson back in the book. The best teaching tools come from the learner. then I have the advisory crew~ my best teaching tips come from the world of expert teachers all around me.
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