‘There is no whiteness so white as the memory of white.’

The title of this post is something Giorgio Morandi said, according to Barbara Haskell in her book on Milton Avery.  I have been reading.  Haskell also refers to Okeefe who said , ‘nothing is less real than realism.’ I have been dreaming about those words and working.  I think some of the struggle has been about ensuring, to myself, that I have some skill and that is easy to translate into drawing correctly and perhaps drawing realistically.  Diebekorn reminds not to believe in the first thing.  I don't BELIEVE in today's beginning oil sketch, but I do know that I need to trust my memory and my sense of colour and not worry about creating 'feminine' art. 

painting in puddles

The plaster experiment has been gnawing away at me so I have kept reading and turned to other media, waiting. Everytime I walked through Hudson's room I would stop and look and feel the beautiful simplicity of the desk, the light, the shirt, the chair, the plaster walls. This morning, finishing Jane's Diebekorn book I began to think about the layers of D's paint and what he said, what he thought: 'the feelings, the desires evoked by the object can in this account, only be remembered by being successfully forgotten and represented in the disguise of successive different transcriptions. Concealing and revising, again, are the means of making meaning.' So, I sanded down the plaster, layers of revisions as an underpaint and took some charcoal to Hudson's room to sketch what mattered.  I mixed my casein, pigment and limewater and painted in puddles of water at an image that doesn't look like it will. Obstacles, I love them! 

I Red and Yellow Leaves Love You

Behind blue brown barn presides

runner geese trip toe to pond's edge

can't help but follow the wrinkle 

of fallen fingerprints

I balance on the green slice of bank

Lower the sky to them

umber trees are ivying up and over

Lay down the screen of reflector leaves

trembling in refraction

Sigh at youth's lemon-leafed sapling

wonder at its resistance 

I am the tooth of the red acacia

gnawing urgently in scratches

A typical Friday night

In response to a very theoretical but also provocative symposium on Involuntary Drawing: Art and Automatism yesterday, I did a bit of tangerine scanning and let it take me somewhere culminating in a book.  The lecture featured the film of Matisse drawing. The characters hover around orange.  And  this morning as I was just finished attaching the velcro to the intentionless tangerine closure, Figgy called to tell me she had a pivotal poetry lecture and that it doesn't matter what the writer (artist) intends.  We all make our own meaning, so there.

Envelope

 'Intentionless Tangerine' cover

P2 &3

P 3 & 4

Back cover

Back envelope

Maybe how an idea begins to evolve

I went through my sketchbooks and gessoed out all the stuff that wasn't interesting.  In a few places I glued shapes of a different colour over dark places. The rose red was part of a paint chip I'd collected in Maine a few summers ago.  I blended a bit of bluey gouache into the gesso.This morning I woke early and found some objects that would work with the direction of the red.  The objects were not red.

Next I scanned the new image and printed it onto some cartridge paper.  I worked without reference to the objects with a Matisse book opened.

All over the place

Mail art sent to Theresa (the letter project)

Looking at Dorothy Eisner, finding an old collage and rereading Barbara Haskell's Milton Avery book,  and borowing Jane's Barbara Rae drawings, reminded me that working in all directions from a range of sources, life, drawings, photos, imagination, monotypes, collages is the way I always worked before.  I have been feeling so serious and so self-conscious, mailart the only place I feel I really play or experiment.  License.  Didn't I do my MA thesis on that? And besides aren't women born to multi-task? In the midst of all this theorising I went to a talk by Daniel Sturgis at First Site in Colchester.  Interesting but in a funny way dispiriting. Only response is to fill all the moments of doubt with frenetic making. So here is some 'bad art' or in process art that might be the stimulus for the next thing. Jeni, from UEA would be proud with my 'messiness' (Jeni thought I tidied up my thought process, revealing only semi-finished ideas in my journals).  Perhaps suffering in public is the honest way.  Or maybe I shoud have a continual bonfire ablaze?

After the dinner party

I love when you notice something and have to stop everything and draw it.  That's what happened today. We had some friends over last night so I bought flowers and the tablecloth was still on the table. I collaged a few pieces of pastel paper onto the beige background, thinking of those picaso collages but then behaved as if I didn't have wonderful planes of flat colour and was carried away by the colour and pattern, as ever.