Chuck Paints

Edna and I did the drawings above May 19 and May 28.  I thought I would add some brief comments about each.  As I have written earlier, Edna and I get together once a week at her studio or mine.  The day starts at 9:30 AM.  We usually spend a few minutes catching up and looking over the previous week’s work, particularly the drawings we did not sign.  Then, on cheap paper we begin to warm up, drawing anything that comes to mind.  There is rarely any premeditation.  We take turns soiling the paper first.  An empty sheet of paper is so pristine.  The blankness is so inviting.  I understand taggers who cannot resist underpass walls and paved arroyos.  A virgin sheet demands besmirching.  Clean calls for dirtying.  Empty invites filling.  The sparkling says tarnish me, baby.  This marking, smearing, erasing, remarking, smudging, figurating, symbolifying, delineating, scribbling and composing goes on until 12 noon.  We eat - one of us makes lunch.  Back to the studio.  We get out the good paper, Strathmore vellum surface 2 ply all rag Bristol, which now goes for about $4.25 a sheet.  Maybe we use an idea from the morning, maybe not.  In the afternoon our drawing is no more premeditated than in the AM.  We call a halt to the whole business between 3 and 3:30 PM.  For those of you who think this kind of thinking is easy and effortless, it’s not.  A few years ago when I had a small art school, several students told me how mentally demanding painting and drawing were for them.  One student, a retired air force colonel, said that after class he had to go home and rest after a morning spent painting. 

The drawings don’t take long to do.  Some take as little as five minutes.  Some take as long as a half hour.  When the drawing goes on too long, the risk is that it loses its spontaneity or becomes over worked. 

The drawings.

Figure 1.  This is a drawing from the May 19.  I think the orangy lines on the upper right are Edna’s, but they may have been added towards the end of the drawing.  The tooth shape and the lines trailing from its roots are Edna’s.  These lines may have been made early in the drawing.  We both contributed to the smudging going on.  The two erased shapes on the left are mine for sure as well as the little series of lines in the lower left, maybe.  Both of us may have viewed the smudgy area as the figure or center of activity.  Toward the end I added the gray marks in the smudge where it makes a squarish “bite” in the long tilting shape.

Figure 2.  Done on May 28th, we really like these kinds of drawings.  It’s kinda of like a funny throw-away line.  I went to relieve my bladder.  When I got back to the studio, Edna had already done the pink and violet shape.  I just can’t leave her alone one minute.  I don’t remember who did what after that.  I think Edna did the “udder” shapes.  I may have erased into them and then darkened some of the lines.

Figure 3.  This is from May 19.  I don’t remember this drawing too well or who did what.  The little erased shapes at the bottom I think are Edna’s.  This drawing, like many of our drawings, gives the impression of some things interacting.  The erasures provide movement and a temporal element.

Figure 4.  A May 19 drawing, I probably started this drawing with the light smudges.  I’m pretty sure Edna did most of the round shape in the upper right.  I worked on the “raised fist” shapes on the right.  I may have put them there originally.  I don’t remember.  Those are Edna’s purple diagonal dashes in the lower middle.  I put in some of the lines in the dark area.  I wanted a light line to be on top of the dark area to answer the dark lines “under” the dark area nearby.  Toward the end I put a little orange in the dark area where the two shapes overlap to make a connection to the orange in the “moon” and “raised fists.”

Figure 5.  This is a drawing from May 28.  This is based on a drawing from the morning - lots of sharp things with a welling up thing in a cool context.  One thing we both agreed on, was the morning drawing had too much of a horizontal feeling.  One possible effect of a strong horizontal is to make feeling in the drawing too calm and stable.  What could possibly be a horizon tilts down to the left, and Edna’s light blue and green has an indefinite edge to further mute the perception of a horizon line.  The preliminary drawing for me had the feel of an arctic sea scape with a leaping whale.  It reminds me of Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic painting, The Polar Sea.  That’s a cold pokey painting and this a cold pokey drawing.  However, our life form in the lower right is positive, in its element.  In Friedrich’s work nature is crushing the ship, which is the foundering dark spot to right just above the midpoint of the painting.  Yew!  Enough of that goppy romanticism.

Figure 6.  This is one of a number of intestinally themed drawings with the added thrill of something running off  the edges.  In this May 19 drawing I forget who did what except that is Edna’s thing running off the right edge, which I answered with the other thing running off the left edge.  Whoever darkened the central peristaltic central shape, we both would have agreed it needed darkening to weigh it down and give the drawing a little focus.  This is definitely a drawing for a medical textbook.  Surgery is indicated. 

Figure 7.  This drawing from May 28 has a basis in fact.  I had taken a walk at sunset a couple evenings before.  The sky was overcast, except for broken clouds around the setting sun.  The fading sunlight lent some of the clouds above the Sandia Peak a low chroma pink orange the same dark value as the clouds.  The mountain below had already fallen into a blue gray shadow.  I watched until it faded.  In this drawing the mountains to the east flair to red orange  just as the sun’s disk touches the opposite horizon.  My twinge of pink tinge is in the gray above.  I started with the gray on top.  The basic mountain shapes are Edna’s.  Minutes later in the life of this drawing I added a little outline to the mountain shapes to help them stand out better and relate to the dark areas above and below.  I also erased some of the orange color in the mountains to give them a bigger value range and a hint of three dimensional shape.  The dark shape at the bottom is mostly Edna’s.  It sandwiches the illuminated “mountain range” between the darks adding to the drama, and it conveys an idea of the image that is actually to be seen.

Figure 8.  This drawing has been hanging unsigned on my studio wall for at least a month.  Well over half an hour is invested in making this image, but we couldn’t let it go.  Over the months and years we’ve been drawing, we have come to partially erase and redraw on purpose.  When we redraw over the partially erased area or shape we often redraw out of register with the underlying shape.  This adds density to simple shapes and gives the impression of movement or agitation.  I don’t remember who did what in this drawing, but at some point we turned it upside down and liked it much better.  At our last session we could not recall what we were so uncertain about here.  We signed it.  There are a drawings we just can’t decide on right away.  They look unfamiliar.   They take more time to form an opinion about.

Figure 9.  We ended the session on May 28 laughing over this one.  Edna started with the shape in the lower left.  She was using a morning drawing as an inspiration.  I wasn’t paying attention, and I didn’t know this.  I copied her shape twice more rather than refer to the morning drawing, which suggested something else.  She embellished.  I embellished her embellishments.  Edna’s polka dots make this funny.  Why are polka dots fun?

On April 28 at my studio and May 5 at her studio, Edna Casman and I got together to draw.  The nine drawings above are from those two sessions.  From time to time over the last several months Edna has been trying to introduce shapes from the sides of the drawing.  We recognize that shapes running off the bottom of the drawing give the visual impression that the shapes are something attached to the ground.  The bottom edge even can read as the ground.  This happens in the drawings of children about age six, give or take a few years.  The children attach their figures to the bottom edge of the paper as if it were the ground.  The sky is often a blue band at the top. This raises a question: Does the visual part of the brain establish the “horizon line” early in the process of creating an image?  The top edge is associated with “up” or sky.  Is our interpretation, and understanding of the top and bottom edges hard wired into our brain through early childhood experiences?  The sides seem to suggest a temporal edge or a corner around which we can’t see.  More is happening outside our field of vision. 

We thought we would give the edges of our drawings a workout.  Drawings one, four, five, six and seven address the issue of what is happening at the sides.  Working on these drawings I get the feeling that the space between the vertical sides is a space of action.  In the sixth drawing the shapes at the sides have crept up to the top.  The spatial feeling is different from the other “side” drawings.  (Is this the view from the mouth of a bloody toothed predator approaching its next meal?)

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Mari, Edna’s daughter-in-law, comments frequently on our drawings in e-mails to Edna.  Her comments are incisive and thoughtful.  Edna and I appreciate the time and effort Mari puts into writing her observations.  Here is a recent e-mail from Mari about the drawings above.

Edna,
Some thoughts about your latest works and Chuck’s blog comments. Some of the points were very close to what I think about often, so I wanted to collect my thoughts a bit.

The question Chuck posted on his blog about horizon line is very interesting. I often think about that in looking at art works in general and making my own. I often catch myself wanting to put a horizon in my prints which makes it too much like a landscape or limit movements. It is often unconscious. I do think MY brain did establish the horizon line early in process of creating an image. I don’t know if this is true to other people though. Seishi, for example, takes photos with rather unusual angles and often I don’t know where horizon line is.

I noticed in your collaborative works, you seem to emphasize the continuation of lines to outside of your paper. I tend to like the ones that gave me a feeling of continuity outside the paper more.

When I was studying Ukiyoe, I learned 2 distinct difference in styles. One is narrative and the other is non-narrative:representative, iconic. Until the emergence of Kitagawa Utamaro, all Ukiyoke were narrative. Utamaro started to design prints with just a head of town beauty or very unusual angle of cutting scenes so that that moment of action is caught, but you can’t always attach a story to that. I feel like every artist is comfortable with one or the other. Yes, we all do both, but I think there is a preference. Do you feel more comfortable attaching a story?  Having a story? or Do you feel more comfortable with iconic or non-narrative image? I think I am definitely a narrative person. I want to see the continuity. I want a reason behind what is represented. I think this question might be interesting to think about in your collaborative work. I don’t know which you and Chuck are, but if you both tend to be one, then your work will end up as one…but if one of you is narrative and the other is not, then you will have a mixture of both. I feel like you tend to be narrative and Chuck tend to be not. I think the push and pull I see of your collaborative works suggest a mixture.  What do you think? I think the idea of horizon line is related to this. If you are narrative person, I think you unconsciously tend to want more prominent horizon line, because it is easier to tell a story. It will have a ground.

I am attaching some examples of classic Japanese art.  I find it interesting the idea of horizon is interpreted differently here. There is a type of folding screens called “rakuchu-rakugai” meaning inside palace, outside palace. In this type of screens, clouds are depicted in gold from a bird’s eye view. However, buildings and people are depicted from the side/frontal view. It is a juxtaposition of these two totally different view points which creates both heavenly and realistic views of a castle town. In a way, one cannot really tell where the horizon begin. It is all inclusive.

It is also interesting to think of a different format of Japanese art. Folding screens and screen door paintings are meant to be viewed sitting on a floor. Sometimes it is a very different feeling of where the horizon is. There is a format called “makura byoubu” (“pillow folding screen.”)  This type of screens are placed above your pillow (people slept on a futon on a floor), so you are meant to see them lying down.  In case of “E-makimono” (hand scroll), you are meant to roll your image to the right. It is usually a very long continuation of a narrative image depicted in the same format. Artist must consider how each scene follows into the next depicting the movement of event and time. I think this can be related to how lines seemingly continuing on to the outside of a sheet of paper. 

In some hanging scrolls, you are to look at it opening from the bottom of the scroll, viewing from the bottom of the scene, and viewers eyes follow the image upwards. For some artists, this movement was very important. How do you invite your viewer in effectively to give a feeling of walking into the scene depicted in the scroll and give the viewer the experience of being in that scene. Where should the “hint” of invitation to allow viewer to smoothly step into the painting be placed? How should it move upward? Painting upward movement scroll must give sweeping feeling

These same questions can be asked for something abstract as your drawings or my prints. Where is the viewer going to look first and how would that experience continues on? Do you want that to be intentional or not? Do you want specific “path” in your work or not?

Sometimes, I think of these point more seriously when I’m doing my work. Sometimes, I’m not, but I know it’s there unconsciously. I sometimes want to break away from my tendency, and sometimes that is what I want. What do you think about these points?

Specific drawing comments:

#1. I like the feeling I get of something tearing in the middle. It feels like 2 red shapes going off page is torn away from each other and they are trying to connect back. By having two red images move horizontally, you are creating vertical movement in the middle.

#2. I feel like this one is very different from the others.  It’s more about volume for me. I like the overlapping circles in the middle.

#3. I like the gray-black coloring almost in the center

#4. This gives me a feeling of images looping forever. The shape on the right bottom re-emerge on the top going the other way…it will connect with the left image, like a ship docking…and it goes off the page.

#5. I like the reddish narrow shape (sort of like French fries) going off the page. I like it better without the top right slug like shape. I like the pull between vertical repetition of triangles and horizontal rounder shapes (French fries), and I think that movement becomes stronger without the slug form. #6. Top left shapes are fun. I like all the colors in this one.

#7 I like the overall atmosphere of this one. It has vertical movement-like river flowing-in the left side shapes, horizontal movement-2 reddish triangles going off page, and over all swirling motion created by gray shadowy tint. I like the ambiguity of that movement. I like this one the best.

#8. I see red bird!

#9. This is a bit mysterious.

Jesse commented that they all look unbalanced. Like children’s drawing-not yet knowing how to balance images within paper.
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