Musing about Henri Matisse

When I was a lot younger and in art school, Henri Matisse was one of my hero's. I particularly loved his drawings, also the drawings/watercolours of Auguste Rodin. Maybe its being French , but they both excelled in the simple line, "European line" as my sculpture teacher at RISD used to say. At the time I had no idea what he was talking about, having lived now in the US ,for half my life I do get it, in a way.

There is a seemingly effortlessness in a Matisse drawings, you know of course that he did many drawings, who knows how many, it took to achieve the one we get to see.

Having lived half my life in Great Britain, there seemed to be a heaviness in a lot of British artists work, exemplified for me by Frank Auerbach. He did a lot of portraits and would use oil paint squeezed straight from the tube. I assume the model sat and posed for weeks, as he would go over and over, making different lines and building up a belabored painting. One would never look at an Auerbach painting and say effortless in the same way as a Matisse drawing.

As you may realize, I prefer the lighter touch of Matisse, although to be fair David Hockney, patently a Brit also has something of the light touch in his drawings, so maybe being French is irrelevant. Anyway what I am trying to say is that in my work I aim for effortlessness. I want to see the fresh original ink drawings, overlayed by a more thoughtful image, building to a balance between the two.I aim to always keep a freshness in my work, I want to be a see-saw (British vernacular) or teeter-totter (US vernacular), Matisse -Auerbach.

Here are some links to Matisse drawings and Auerbach paintings. A disclaimer comparing drawing and painting is probably ridiculous anyway.

http://berlindrawingroom.blogspot.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/9652339/Frank-Auerbach-in-his-own-words.html

Heaven and Hell Finished I think

Well after all the agonizing of the last "Notes" I went into my studio today and finished the drawings. I had one plan to try going in which was to paint a thin wash of purple paint over most of the two drawings. Well as soon  as I had  done this everything looked better, before it was a bunch of disparate parts now, a blended whole. It feels like a miracle. Of course I now have  put them on my finished wall , where I will leave them for a while to see if they really are finished . First triptych is "Hell", the one below it is "Heaven" ,they are very painterly to me and remind me of the drawings and watercolours of William Blake, particularly his Dante's Inferno series, which I have always loved and which when I am in London ,I try to visit when they are on display at the old Tate, along with the Late Turner's.

Heaven and Hell Drawings are proving complicated

 I started this series of triptychs a while ago . I really wanted to show in a drawing the experience of being in a workshop with my spiritual teacher and having her extract some of the contamination from my mind and body.This particular series came from one workshop where I saw very clearly a visual of this,black shapes were spinning out of my mind. When I initially did the ink drawing of this experience, it didn't seem right,so I added two wings on either side of the drawing and it turned into a triptych.

I have kept working on them and realized that I could do a Heaven and Hell piece. The beauty of this in my mind is that they would basically be the same drawing, but the hell  one would show the sides going down and the heaven one going up. Lets face it heaven and hell do not exist in my opinion, except in people's minds. I did a stencil of a woman right side up for heaven and upside down for hell. Then I added the symbols of the chakras, deciding heaven could have the 4th,5th,6th,and 7th and hell would get the 1st,2nd,and 3rd.

Oh my , my mind was really on a roll now, I got all involved with thinking of how we are all like a drop of water that joins in with the rain and then the river and then the ocean. It is a much used spiritual metaphor and one that has a lot of validity. I then found an old drawings where a giant cloud was depicted and others where the wing symbol was linked by a circle. I had decided that heaven was silver and hell gold,so I added that to my drawing. I also added collage shapes darker for hell and lighter for heaven. 

Now I feel like I am all tied up in knots with these pieces, too  complicated. I will have to put them away for a while. I took some photos of the center of each piece, see if you can guess which is heaven and which hell?

Open Studio Saturday 1st February 2014

Would love to see you all

Longitudinal Waves

So I am continuing with the series of triptychs I started using one of the brain drawings and combining it with some imagery that feels very familiar from an old drawing. I started to wonder what exactly am I doing here. I am working with images from inside the brain, but I also want to think about the mind .  I think we all assume that the mind is located inside the brain, but where exactly.

I showed Kyle my latest drawings, he is now a Physics major and started to tell me about Longitudinal waves. Apparently my drawings reminded him of these waves also called L-waves or compression waves.I know that spiritually speaking everything is frequency and vibration, and that when science and spiritual knowledge combine ,human beings will be a lot better off.

I looked again at the drawing and realized that in a way the inside the brain part of the triptych also has a part where, whatever the brain is actively engaged in is being put to use. In other words maybe I have found a way to depict the brain and hint at its workings.

Triptychs

After bringing the triptych home  after Thanksgiving, it inspired me to do some more triptychs. I love this format, not quite sure why. I had done six drawings of various inside the brain imagery. Originally I was going to use them in two triptychs, when I put them together, it was too much. So I took each drawing, using the position of each in the plan for the two triptychs, added two more pieces of paper and now will have six triptychs. I have finished the first two and will show an image of one of them below.

There are definitely visual references to the drawing done at the end of the 1980's in Houston, these new drawings are a kind of homage. The colour I find interesting, it made me think of how much colour plays a part in my work, in more recent years. I was wondering about the influence of living in California for more than twenty years. I think its bound to have affected the way I look at colour, the quality of light here is so particular.

I seem to be on a roll

Another set of twelve diptych drawings finished. I can't believe I have so much to say visually with these works. For me its partly about how can I get two pieces of paper to relate successfully together. There is something very satisfying about turning a drawing that doesn't work into four that do. There is alchemy involved for sure. As I am working on these smaller pieces while I do some larger ones there is a freedom that's apparent . I am not really sure of a deeper meaning, but I do think about the duality of mankind's experience, it sounds rather grandiose, but we do live in a world of opposites. the diptych is the perfect metaphor for this.

Return

While I was in Phoenix over Thanksgiving with my husbands family, staying with my father-in-law, I looked again at a triptych I had given him a long time ago, He had it pinned to his wall every since, he never framed it, so I was happy when he said he'd like to return it. He seemed to think it was a loan. Anyway  I made this work at the end of the 1980's, its so strange to see a piece of old work. Sometimes although I can't remember exactly my thought processes. I can see what I was attempting.

I was fascinated at the time with trying to see if I could make three pieces of paper relate together, using the lease obvious visual means. The underlying structure of this piece is from a sculpture I was doing turned on its side. The middle is densely worked, and the two surrounding pieces more graphic. I love the way the space in the almost ovals in the center seems infinite and circled in white, they are picked up again in the two outside pieces in black ink. Now I want to see if I can use this idea again in what I'm working on now.

More

 Well this is Thanksgiving week, we are off to Phoenix to eat turkey. I thought I would do a short post . I did just finish another series of 4 diptychs. I am experimenting with color and continuing the same  theme, nanobots.

When I posted the previous 12 diptychs arranged together I received some stellar comments which I wanted to post here

" Wow! I hadn't realized these were each a diptych. Now that I look at them, it's clear. You're playing with serial asymmetries."

"I love the colors. Also, there's a joy in the composition I'm not sure you've realized before, but all I could think was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful and yet again, wonderful, at least according to Harris in L.A. Story."

 "I saw the most wonderful show the other day in Malaga, the life work of Hilma af Klint. Do you know her? Reminded me a lot of your work. These are lovely. "

I will leave them with no names, you know who you are. I wanted to say again what a boost it gives me to read these and other kind comments , thankyou

Nanobots

I usually work on a few things at the same time. So along with this new series "Inside the Brain" I am working on some smaller diptychs. I have now finished three sets of four of these. Basically I am working on drawings that I discarded for some reason, either I over worked them to the point that they just couldn't be finished as is or I didn't work on them enough. Suffice to say I have talked before about my refusal to give up on a drawing. So here are these new drawings. After reading "The Diamond Age" which my son recommended, I have been introduced to the idea of nanotechnology. The idea of small microscopic pieces of technology with medical use, for example being let loose inside our bodies is both exciting and scary. I have come up with a collage element that expresses what this nanobot might look like.