STORY OF MY EARLIER WORK
When you look at people's art, do you only want to see what they are doing today? I don't. I want to see where they began, what creative journey they took in life. And what life was like in the time of their artistic output.
I like to read books about artists as I ride a stationary bike. I have gone through almost an entire series of art books that way. And I put post-it notes on the pages where I identify with the artist in some way. I may cull together all the things I've made a note of, from the various books I've read in the series, and write about that some day.
Today though, I am writing about the story of my artwork and it begins when I was young and weaves throughout my life. I began, like most children, with crayons, then graduated to other media.
If there is one thing I can say about the works on paper that I have culled from my past to show you, it is that when I set out to create, I generally don't do any preliminary drawings or underdrawings. I just pick up whatever I want to create with and I just go!
I've had different artistic eras. There was the felt tip pen era.
It was a very, very sad day when I found out that my beloved Design Art Marker Ultra Fine Nib 229 LU was discontinued. I used to refer to this marker as my "secret weapon." We had lots of fun together.
I found the perfect combination of a certain brand of felt tip pen, with the right nib to draw lines with, others to add large swaths of color to, and the perfect paper to draw on. For me, it was Hammermill Bond.
I rarely set out knowing what I was going to draw. I just took off and let it all reveal itself to me. And when I saw something take shape, I went along with what I was seeing in front of me, stopped to add my own embellishment, then let myself be taken elsewhere again.
I started off making elaborate, free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness black and white line art. Then I would go back and start adding color. I found I could achieve streak-free color, on the Hammermill bond paper, so the drawings looked as if they were printed.
l have a few of those drawings that are still "unfinished." Every once in a while, when I am going through my earlier work, they seem to beckon me to come back with some color and finish them off. That happened when I was creating this page.
Conté à Paris has been in business since 1795. Nicolas Jacques Conté, a painter, chemist, physicist, hot air balloonist and inventor of the modern pencil, developed graphite lead from a mixture of clay and graphite, to create pencils with different degrees of hardness, i.e. from the soft 6B to the hard 3H. He also invented the conté crayon, which resembles pastels, but they are harder and waxier.
I discovered the Conté crayon when I was studying figure drawing in art school. We worked in charcoal and oils as well, but the Conté crayon was a medium that we seemed to work in the most and it held a certain appeal to me. I returned to that medium in some of the figure drawings I did when working in New York.
A photographer I worked with hosted a salon after work and invited various art directors from different agencies to come and draw from a live model. It was fun to rekindle those days at Syracuse University taking Figure Drawing in Professor Burke's class, and I would recall the exercises he taught us. I brought them to the photographer's salon decades later.
Exercises like not looking at the page while drawing. Limiting the time to do a drawing to 30 seconds. Then increasing the time for subsequent drawings to a minute, then 5, 10, and 15 minutes.
It's no surprise that some of the faster, looser, more expressive drawings are the ones I like the best. I've also included a drawing here on the site, where I focused on just the shadows, which is a totally different way of looking at the figure.
I had another era when I would come home from work, have some dinner, and then get out my drawing pads and do 8 to 12 drawings in one sitting. And again, work quickly. One of them, "Goo Goo Ga Ga," is included on the Earlier Work page. Another one, from the same session, currently hangs in my dining room.
I have had several watercolor phases. I love the free-flowing nature of the medium and the texture of good watercolor paper, like Arches. I also liked to use Dr. Martin's dyes for a while, which I was introduced to by a retoucher. They had such vivid colors! And I loved working in my favorite palette of colors with those dyes. Two of my more memorable pieces, done in Dr. Martin dyes, that I framed and hung in my home, were "Neptune by the Bay" and "Flirting with the Holy Ghost," but alas, they are gone forever.
"Neptune by the Bay" (on the left) was inspired by Noyack Bay in Sag Harbor, New York, where I once lived. "Flirting with the Holy Ghost" (on the right) was an expression my father often would say before he took us all off to church. Notice the reflection of a window on the frame's glass. The watercolors were hung about 15 feet away from the window. Even still, they were ravaged by the effects of the sun.
I learned, the hard way, that museum glass is a must for watercolors and Dr. Martin dyes; that some of my favorite colors are less color-fast than others; that dyes don't stay vivid forever; and that both watercolors and dyes should not be hung anywhere near sunlight. So now, I plan to make reproductions of my watercolors, for those interested in buying one, so they have a better chance of not fading into the ether, like the aforementioned two that hung in my studio in Santa Fe... about 15 feet across the room from a window, but the indirect sunlight at 8,000 feet was still bright enough to do irreparable damage to my artwork. May they rest in peace.
I had a phase when I would do drawings of my room, or from my room, when I travelled, for pleasure or for work. So I packed markers and oil pastels and either a sketch book or a drawing pad and documented my travels around the world. Now I have my iPhone with me and I shoot pictures. Not the same as making drawings, but still it's a creative outlet for me and can be a catalyst for other creative pursuits.
"Surreal Shirt" exemplifies my fascination with surrealism; the visual games I can play through collage.
I got into doing collages and assemblages when I was in college. I took a Nature Drawing class just so I could work with a professor I had for another class, Ed Fricke, who was a bit zany and might go along with what I wanted to do in his class. On the first day of Nature Drawing, I told him that I wanted to do an independent study, rather than drawing from nature. I wanted to work on just one project… a 3D assemblage that I had dreamed up and wanted to see it realized. I wanted to take something familiar and transform it into something completely different, yet still be functional.
I had this idea... a Dada-esque bride and groom, sitting in a car, heading off on their honeymoon. The car was going to be made out of a grocery cart. It would have wings, like the old Cadillacs did, but they were going to be white and made to look like an angel’s or a bird’s wing. As I described other aspects of my idea in more detail, my professor was very enthusiastic and encouraging and agreed to the independent study. So I got to work right away.
I found a grocery cart and a couple of mannequins from someplace or another. I began work on the car by sculpting the wings and covering them in fluffy, white cotton. The car was painted a brilliant blue and I affixed mirrors along the entire length of both sides. The front grill was made up of lots of Coca Cola bottle caps and there were many other materials that made up the fenders, the side mirrors, and the bumper. The bride and groom fit perfectly into the “seat” of the car/grocery cart. I dressed the groom in a classic black tuxedo with a ruffled ascot, painted his hair and eyebrows jet black, and gave him a Dali-esque mustache. I dyed an old dress red for the bride’s wedding dress and did the same for the veil. I added a brown wig, which I strung with a strand of white twinkle lights and painted her face with a colorful psychedelic design.
I will never forget wheeling the final creation across campus to show it to my professor for my final grade. This weird sculpture got a lot of double-takes from students and faculty walking by. Needless to say, I aced “Nature Drawing.”
After that, I created a giant tulip out of a floor lamp. I had visions of making a spaceship out of a refrigerator, but graduated from school and got waylaid by a new job in an advertising agency shortly afterwards. So much for the execution of the spaceship idea.
But that whole premise of taking something and adding something out of the ordinary to it, is still very much behind some of my favorite mixed media work.
I like the tactile quality of making collages and assemblages. And collecting weird stuff for them.… from snake skins, to staples used to stitch me up after my back surgery, to EKG sensors, to shells and animal skeletons and birds nests and wish bones, to candy wrappers and curlicued bits of rubber, to rusted out rake heads and driftwood, to vintage fabrics and photos, and lots of old magazines and artsy paper, and well…just about anything.
I get donations, too. Just this past weekend, my sister-in-law presented me with a little gift bag and said she thought I could “do something" with what was inside. I peered in and found an enormous mushroom... right out of Alice in Wonderland. I am mulling over what to do with it, but I don’t have much time to "mull," since fungi do not last forever.