art, birds, nature

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Making Good Progress, or Not, with Moku Hanga

I'm now approaching my 5th year of moku hanga, though since I've done a fair amount of painting during that time, it's really not a full five years. I started off with just about the cheapest baren you could buy, eventually bought and used a plastic baren designed by Kurosaki and have replaced the face numerous times. But I always have a nagging unhappiness with some part of each print and normally it seems to be due to uneven paint coverage, though there are of course always just the plain old mistakes of one sort or another that are always there.

In any case, and particularly after watching a video of Hideki Goto, master baren maker, from the 2107 International Moku Hanga Conference, I decided it was time to buy a better baren. Eventually I bought a murasaki baren from McClain's Printmaking Supplies. I decided that a simple design was probably the best way to test it. I also decided to use a small 5.75x8 inch Shina block since it was just a test.

That made some sense, until I saw all my carved lines crumble in front of me as I tried to carve them. It reminded me of my first first Chinese brush paintings from many years ago. The ink on the brush seemed to almost leap from the brush to the paper where it created a huge blob, before the brush even touched the paper. Here the somewhat thin line seemed to break before I'd touched the carving knife to the wood. It's possible that the wood had dried out a bit and that was the problem, but mainly I think it was that I was trying to cut pretty thin lines for the size of the wood.

So I had to give up on that block and re-carve the block that included all of the lines. I spent more time testing the wood and my carving abilities than I did testing the new baren. And I'm sure I would have spent even more time on the carving if I hadn't watched another demo from the 2017 International Moku Conference, this one by master carver Shoichi Kitamura. Because he spoke in Japanese and was then translated I couldn't follow everything. But at one point he cut a line about a quarter inch from the fine lines he planned to carve. I'd always understood that this line was cut AFTER the real carving. He said that this relieved the pressure on the wood as he carved. And that seemed to be the case. By using that method my re-carving had none of the broken lines of my first line block!

As anyone who's read this blog for a while probably knows I'm not fond of bad use of the English language. Going forward(argh!!!) I try not to use redundancies, verbal barnacle-like accretions that clarify nothing and just weigh down sentences, etc. So when I use 'good progress' in the title to this post I'm joking. What other kind of progress is there? If it's bad it must be regression not progression. But the title also explains my feelings about moku hanga. Sometimes I think I'm making progress and other times I'm not so sure.

I've also been listening, thanks to McClain's Printmaking Supplies mentioning it in a recent newsletter, to The Unfinished Print, a series of podcasts with interviews of contemporary moku hanga printmakers. I think I've listened to four episodes now. And one of the things that most struck me is that, wonder of wonders, I'm not the only person who finds the medium difficult!!! But also I'm not the only one who can't resist continuing with it.

Finally, after I'd finished re-carving the line block, I was able to concentrate more on color and using the murasaki baren to get better paint coverage. In this I'm very happy. It has worked quite well, at least by my standards. Some of the uneven paint coverage that remains is due less to the new baren than it is to the fact that I'm using a floating kento. And I'm using a floating kento, rather than a kento carved into each block, because my blocks are so small that they really don't allow room to cut a kento.

That was mistake number two in my 'simple' test. Things are never all that simple when you use a floating kento! In any case the few areas of troublesome paint were normally along the bottom edge of the floating kento where I really couldn't bring the baren as far down as I needed to. As they say though I'm now extraordinarily deep in the weeds so I won't pursue this. Suffice it to say that other than this little problem the new baren worked extraordinarily well and I'm happy that I purchased it.

In art it's often true that just about the hardest thing to do well is something 'simple.' I think I re-learned that lesson here. I thought it would be a simple little moku hanga that would allow me to test the new baren. It was anything but simple! Still I am happy with the results.

It does however differ quite a bit from my print that will be in the Sumi-Fuison Exhibit at the 2021 International Moku Hanga Conference.

Given the complexity of this print it seems like a huge step backwards to do something as simple as the new Ruby-crowned Kinglet print. In many ways I think that is true. But I felt like I needed to get more control of my paint application and this seemed the simplest way to try it! Though of course it wasn't anywhere as near as simple as I'd expected.

I'd encourage everyone to look at the online version of Sumi-Fusion at the link above. It reminds me of just how varied and rich contemporary moku hanga is. I'm honored, and still a bit shocked, to have one of my prints chosen for inclusion in this exhibition!!!

Thursday, October 14, 2021

Art Is A Favor That Is Given To You

Every time I'm in an exhibition I try to advertise the exhibition, just as I'd guess most artists do, unless they are so well known that they don't need to. But it is tiresome. After all I think my art and the art in the exhibitions I'm in stand on their own. I shouldn't have to beg people to take a look at it.

I was thinking about that this morning in relation to The Natural Eye whose official opening is today. If you actually spend a bit of time looking at this exhibition, especially if you have the chance to see it in person, you will realize I think how lucky you are to have seen it. And though I've only seen it online the exuberance comes through. It is both accomplished art and a celebration of nature.

There are many people I'm happy to say that want to celebrate nature. But the attempts don't always come off. It is not easy I don't believe. Can you make art that is as exuberant as nature itself? I think that it is possible and I think you'll find much of it in this exhibit.

As I said at the top: art is a favor that is given to you, just like nature, if you have the good sense to give it a chance.

Monday, October 4, 2021

Bouncing Around

I sometimes confuse myself by switching media and perhaps styles so I wouldn't be surprised if I also confuse others. I can only say that it always makes sense to me when I do so.

In all my years of making art, and thinking about it, and in reading about and enjoying the art of others, both visual and otherwise I've come to the conclusion that good artists always develop their own language. I guess you could also say they develop their own set of tools to help them accomplish whatever it is that they want to accomplish.

Sometimes this language probably doesn't seem too different than the language of others though the good artist may have an incredible mastery of that language. But other times artists create their own language, like for instance Beethoven. And they also are often masters of that language.

I've always had a fear of cliche in my artmaking, though that has nothing to do with taking on 'cliched' subjects. A good artist can always make a cliched subject come alive. I often think of this in terms of abstraction. I don't want to emulate the more realistic painters of the past in my painting, or in my prints either. So I think about abstracting the subject. But that is much easier said than done. So many ways of abstracting a subject seem cliched to me. I'm not so much talking about the work of others as my own.

Almost as soon as I put down a mark I think: OH, what a cliche that is!! This can be enervating. And yet for me it seems the only path to take. So, to make a long story short, I think that so much of my changing media and perhaps styles is just me trying to find a way to portray a subject in a way that doesn't seem cliched.

Because printmaking is less spontaneous than painting, especially for someone like me who has spent more years as a painter than a printmaker, I also need a better idea of the structure, or perhaps the image, of a print before I start working on it. I can't just put back all the wood I've carved away when I've made a mistake. In painting, at least acrylic or oil painting, I can just paint right over any mistakes I've made. You can't do this in watercolor.

Unless, that is you make a digital sketch, painting, watercolor! I bought an i-pad about 6 months or so ago because I just got sick of the constant slowness of my windows pc. I'm not sure of the cause but I suspect part of it is all that is being done behind the scenes to keep it secure. I could be wrong. Either way I bought an i-pad. And because I've learned that with computers it's often best to buy what you need at the start I also bought an i-pencil. I had no specific plans for using it. The graphic styluses and software programs I used in the distant past drove me nuts.

But that was 15-20 years ago. Still I had had the i-pad and i-pencil for 3-4 months and did no sketches during that time. I can't really remember whether it was viewing the video of Hockney's Arrival of Spring at the Royal Academy of Arts https://makingamark.blogspot.com/2021/09/review-david-hockney-arrival-of-spring.html or my deciding that I wanted to do sketches from the photos I'd just taken of a Red Phalarope at Wissahickon Waterfowl Preserve that prompted me to make the digital sketch that is above.

I wanted to do the sketches for documentary evidence of the sighting in e-bird and I thought a composite of sketches from my numerous distant photos was really the most revealing way to show what I'd seen, proof that this was a rare Red Phalarope. But I also was quite taken with the Hockney show, and realized, especially after I'd also bought the catalog, how accomplished the show was.

I'm not a fan at all of digital art. In fact I definitely stay away from it. One more example of technology being used because it's there not because it works better than an older technology. So I was surprised at how easy it was for me to see the artistic choices that Hockney was making in these digital paintings.

All art really is about making choices, with notes, with words, with marks with colors, or with their digital equivalent. I could see the rich results that Hockney got, not the same results he would get with traditional media, but still rich results. That I think opened me up to the idea of digital painting.

Above is the first digital painting I've ever done. Unlike Hockney I don't have any color printer let alone a huge one. So I can't print this out. It only lives on a screen. There is much to dislike about this. People spend too much time in front of screens as is. There is also the brighter than life luminosity of anything seen on a screen. BUT it was astonishing how easy I found it to make changes. Like Hockney I found that using layers made things much easier for me. Extraordinarily easier. I could make changes right and left, forward and backwards, upside down and right side up.

In other words it seemed to be an extremely quick way to combine realism and abstraction but with the added ability to get rid of anything that struck me as a cliche almost immediately. I didn't have to move away from a cliche by finishing a painting or print and then starting another to try another path. I could try another path in about 5 seconds.

So that was exhilarating. BUT it's still on a screen. There's no tactility, no sense of the handmade. I knew that my best bet was to try to reproduce it in one way or another with paint on canvas. The end result is a the top of the post.

So that I hope explains somewhat why I might seem to bounce around a bit artistically. I'm just trying to make compelling and not cliched images. Often for me that means switching media and sometimes styles. But it's always in the interest of portraying something in a compelling way.

Sometimes I try to move from one medium to another without realizing that it might not be easy to do without major changes. This and the other moku hanga print above I'm happy to say are going once again to be in the annual exhibit of The Society of Wildlife Artists at the Mall Galleries in London. This is a link to an online gallery of much of the work, including mine, https://www.mallgalleries.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/natural-eye-2021.

This was based on a fairly painterly painting. I tried to reproduce that in this print. And I think I was successful. It's perhaps even more vibrant than the painting itself. But it also has all sort of niggling areas, areas that require more care and craftsmanship than I care to give them. A master carver could have carved a closer imitation of the painting. But I'm not one and never will be. It's not my main goal. In the end I learned that, at least for now, I should use larger areas of color in my moku hanga. And that's pretty much what I did in the subsequent print of the Red Knots. It is a continuing search for the right image and the right medium

Based on what I just said I can pretty much guarantee I will not try a moku hanga of the Red Phalarope, at least not without massive changes!! I should add that since I've done so many acrylic paintings over the last 12-18 months I have added a link to them under the Gallery heading at top right of this page.

Thursday, August 26, 2021

It All Started with Shina

I'm very happy to say that one of my Moku Hanga prints will be included in the Sumi-Fusion Exhibition at the International Moku Hanga Conference 2021. I had hoped that I would have at least one print accepted but I also feared that my relative newness to the medium, not to mention my skills with it, might work against me.

I received an email about it last week after just completing these two versions of the Red Knots and Laughing Gulls moku hanga. Above is an edition on Nishinouchi. Below is the first version on Masa Dosa. Unfortunately the photo is not shot in the brightest light so it looks a bit dark.

I can still remember how I made my first step toward Moku Hanga. I was printing a linocut of a Hummingbird Clearwing Moth in 2013. I was using Gamblin oil based inks. But I decided I'd like to try printing the background on Shina plywood, just to see what happened. There was such a feeling of openess, of a breathing surface to the result that I became completely taken with Shina. That print is below.

In my many years as an abstract painter I primarily used acrylic paint. Only toward the end, partly due to a gift from a new graduate student who wanted to encourage me, a newly graduated graduate student, to switch to oil painting, did I start painting in oil. To make a very long story fairly short I never minded the somewhat plastic surface of acrylic painting. I sort of liked the fact that you couldn't sink into it, that it instead seemed to come out at you.

So when I started printing, first with linocuts then woodcuts I wasn't bothered by the plastic surface that could result from the oil based inks that I used, especially when I painted one color over another over another, etc. But then I was. Too much plastic I thought! So that is what I liked with the Hummingbird Clearwing Moth print. It was softer.

Again to make another long story short four years later I eventually did my first experiment with Moku Hanga. That was in early 2017. I have not turned back to other methods of printmaking. But I have also struggled! In this type of printmaking there are no machines involved, no printing presses. At least for me. The simplicity, the non-toxic materials, the immediacy and the complex tradition are both appealing, and also to a certain extent difficult. For better or worse you the printmaker have pretty much control over everything. If you're successful you'll get a striking print. But there are a million things that can go wrong.

I've always been happy with my Moku Hanga prints. But I've also known how much better they could be, at least in terms of technique. So that's a large part of the reason that I applied for this show with trepidation. I'm happy to say I'm glad it didn't get the better of me and scare me off from applying! Below is the print that will be in the show. It is in Nara, Japan in late November/early December 2021. As with 'The Natural Eye,' the annual exhibition of The Society of Wildlife Artists', it is an honor to be in this exhibition. There will be an online exhibition and I will eventually write a short post on that when it is online.

A Frenzy of Golden-crowed Kinglets. Moku Hanga print on Nishinouchi p
aper by Ken Januski. Copyright 2020.

Friday, July 2, 2021

Three Red Knots, Ten Warblers and Some Laughing Gulls

It's been quite a while since I've posted anything and I am well aware of that. To make a very long story short I was worried about making my last print a bit too painterly and thus introducing more technical problems into moku hanga than I wanted to deal with. This was especially true because I'm not enamored of technique, though I can admire it in others. It's just not where I want to spend my time and energy.

So I've been thinking about a way to continue moku hanga but with simpler shapes, perhaps more outlines and less need for getting extremely small areas to register correctly. Basically this just means using the strengths of an artistic medium in concert with my own artistic strengths.

I've been working on this print of some Red Knots and Laughing Gulls for about a month. It was prompted by a news report of a great decline in the count of Red Knots along the Delaware Bay this spring. This print is based on photos and field sketches from there from 2019. Most likely this is the final test proof and I'll start printing an edition soon. This proof is on Masa Dosa.

So.................it may be that my moku hanga will continue in a simpler manner such as you see here. Time will tell. But speaking of painterly that really is my background. I've spent more time as a painter than a printmaker though that is slowly changing. In the spring of last year I did my first acrylic painting of an American wood warbler. Once I started I couldn't stop. So over the next year I painted the seven paintings and ten warbler species that you see below. It was greatly liberating to have the painterly freedom that most printing lacks.

But now for a change it's nice to be back in a more disciplined medium.

Thursday, May 6, 2021

In Between

It's a bit surprising to me that I haven't posted something new in over two months. It is NOT Covid-related. I know, or at least I've heard, that Covid has left many people in odd states of suspended animation, at least in terms of their mental state. But for me it was something else completely.

After finishing my last moku hanga I realized that once again I was trying to treat my print like a painting, where if something didn't look quite right I could always put a little dab of color here, change a shape there, etc., etc. This is part of the beauty of painting, especially oil or acrylic painting. But it seems like a mistake for printmaking, which with the exception of lithography really is primarily linear.

Moku hanga is great for color but to a large extent it seems to be kept within clearly delineated shapes. Though I do love line and shape I don't like to be completely beholden to them. But I won't go on. To make a long story short: in printmaking I seem to always swing back and forth between more painterly prints and more linear ones. At some point they just get too painterly and I pause to think about what I'm doing.

But as John Kruk, at least I believe it was him, said in the leadup to a broadcast of a recent Philadelphia Phillies game: "Think long, think wrong." He was referring to a pitcher, thinking too much about his pitches but it could just as well be applied to artists. It's easy to get so lost in thinking about your art that you stop doing any.

For me one antidote to that is painting, especially acrylic painting. I rediscovered this medium during semi-lockdown last year. The freedom it offered was thoroughly welcome. After all the planning and constraints of the moku hanga method it was great to feel completely free. So rather than think more about my printmaking I just switched back to acrylic. I did two new paintings, the Pine Warbler with Ring-necked Ducks above and the Louisiana Waterthrush above.

But after I'd gotten this far I decided I needed to let them sit before determining whether to do more or to call them done. A month or more later I'm still letting them sit.

Sometime in April, knowing that migration would soon be starting I decided to do a few pencil and watercolor studies of warblers from photos I've taken over the years. They are seen in the next two photos. Their only purpose is to try to familiarize myself with their shapes, stances, anything that seems unique to them, so that when I see them live I might be able to sketch them. This never works!!!

The sketches may be alright in their own right but when I'm faced with a nano-second view of a warbler, as I have been a lot over the last few weeks, just about everything I know falls by the wayside. I think the best you can say is that some knowledge gets buried deep in your consciousness somewhere and may come out without you even knowing it. I wouldn't put money on that though.

One other thing that happened during the first few months of the year is that I bought a very small drawing by John Busby, author of 'Drawing Birds' and numerous other books. In looking at the whimbrel drawing I realized how thoroughly Busby knew his subject and how deft he was with his mark making. There is an unbelievable grace, liveliness and relaxed quality to the drawing.

This in turn got me to reread some of his other books. That coupled with the arrival of larger migrants that might stay in one spot for a second or two convinced me to do some field sketches with my sumi brush pen. The Bobolink and Green Heron drawings were done just as lines. When I got back to the studio I used a waterbrush to create a gray wash from newly put down ink from the brush. I also added larger areas of black using the brush by itself.

And finally I was struck by the complex shapes a Great Blue Heron made as it clumsily came in for a landing at the Upper Roxborough Reservoir Preserve a few weeks ago. I remembered John Busby talking about birding with the purpose of collecting interesting shapes rather than making finely differentiated bird IDs. So when I got home I tried to recreate the scene from memory, including the complex shape of the heron and the Belted Kingfisher flying above him.

It's been said that all art really aspires to music. This makes sense to me and I think applies most to painting. Painting, especially abstract painting, really can be like music. But there's also an inherent human drive to draw. In this sense you can say all art aspires to drawing. But drawing can become too mimetic, too detailed and too dead at times. At that time you might say that all art aspires to cartoons. This may seem sacrilegious but I often think that it is true. A cartoon-like drawing, like the one below, can often get closer to life than anything else.

And now migration is in full swing. It's difficult to spend any time working on art, unless it's sketching in the field. I remain 'in between.' When migration has ended hopefully I'll have figured out how to finish the paintings and also how to proceed with printmaking.

Thursday, February 4, 2021

Craftsmanship and Art

I've spent a lot of time over at least the last five years listening to, reading about, and listening to audiobooks about music, particularly classical music. One of the things that I've particularly noticed is that, at least in the past and I'd guess today as well, musicians learn some basics, for example harmony, sonata form and other forms, etc. The vocabulary for musical notation is astounding. I say all this as a non-musician so I realize that I'd have a slightly different take on this if I were a musician. But on the whole I think I'm correct.

Still it stands in stark contrast to my artistic education and I'd guess the artistic education of many. I have a lot of art education. 80% I'd guess is in studio art, two years at a community college, a year plus as an undergraduate at a very good school on west coast, and graduate studies at the same west coast school and at an Ivy League school on the east coast. And two graduate degrees in art. Big Deal! No, not at all. All that education doesn't necessarily translate into good art. I only mention it because there was a common theme to those many years of art education as a studio artist: be enthusiastic about what you do and have at it! That was it, though it wasn't put in such blunt terms.

Was I unhappy with this? No. It's just what I wanted. Particularly I wanted to PAINT, and paint I did, mostly on my own, but also with a few regular studio mates, especially on the west coast. I don't think either we the students or our teachers expected we'd get a much out of the formal classes. We'd learn and improve through studio practice.

It's only in retrospect, realizing how much theory that there is in music and musical education, that I wonder about art education. Is there something similar in art? Is it just taught at schools other than the ones I went to? Would I have wanted a different education, one more structured and with a distinct syllabus, if I actually had the opportunity? My guess is that no I would not.

There of course is the old nostrum about reinventing the wheel. Generally it is a very good nostrum. I'm just not sure how well it works in art. Since I live in Philadelphia I do have to wonder about the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. I never took any courses there though I have known people who studied there. But I never talked to them about their training. But I do have the impression that at least the painters get a fairly classical education. And at least one of my old friends who shared a studio above mine and who studied there went on to fame and fortune as a more or less contemporary classical painter. I could tell that we looked at painting quite differently, though I don't think he ever looked down on my own work. And I admired the technique and ambition of his own work. But we did seem to come from different worlds.

In any case it just reminds me that people do get different training in the arts and often that training stays with them.

Before I started classes at the west coast school I arrived on campus a few months early and took some printmaking courses in the student union. They were pretty much one on one and I loved them. I learned enough to do some lithography, etching and a bit of aquatint, just enough for me to start experimenting on my own. I loved it. But in a few months my classes started, I had almost 24 hour access to a painting studio and I jumped back into painting. The person who taught me printmaking at the student union was also a student in printmaking. So I was introduced to both the faculty and her fellow students in printmaking. But there was just something that put me off about taking a course in it. There seemed to be some odor of technique, of tradition, of something or other that just seemed foreign to the freewheeling attitude I had toward art. I never had any subsequent training in printmaking.

So here we are today, where I have been doing more printmaking than painting over the last 10 years or more. I started with linoleum block printing, then added some shina wood blocks in conjunction with lino, then did just western style printing with one or more shina wood blocks. And now I'm finishing my fourth year of moku hanga. My most recent print, about 6x8 inches is at the top of this post.

This very lengthy introduction to my newest print stems from the fact that it could look to many like I have neither general printmaking technique, nor more specific moku hanga technique. Additionally I realize that almost all of my moku hanga prints probably seem quite foreign to the spirit of traditional moku hanga. I have to say I can't really deny that.

And this I think gets to the title of this post: Craftsmanship and Art. When I was getting my education in art crafts, at least as far as I could tell, were starting to be considered by many in the art world if not as exactly equals then at least on the same fluid, sliding scale. But that's not what I'm talking about. I have no argument with the idea of traditional crafts as art. (I don't know enough about non-traditional crafts to have an opinion on them). But some art media I believe have more of a craftsmanship tradition than others, at least today. Printmaking seems to value craft more than painting.

One of the first things I realized once I started using more than one block in any type of relief print was that registration was a big consideration. If you use more than one block it generally is with the purpose of using a different color and you want the second color to register(match up) with what you've already printed on your printmaking paper from printing the first block. As I didn't have a printing press I used various handmade jigs and devices to help with registration. They helped but there were still problems.

The thing is I didn't really consider them serious problems. For myself I didn't care all that much if things lined up properly. My guess is that if I went through all of my multiple block prints of any type I'd find that areas of color rarely match up perfectly. It's not a goal of mine.

Now I have to say, as I'm sure most printmakers will say, that sounds a lot like sour grapes or something similar. You choose to be happy with less than perfect registration in printing because you're technically incapable of getting perfect registration! I'd have to agree that I'm technically incapable of getting perfect registration. But I also don't believe it's worth the time and effort, at least for me. Just what is gained and what is lost by perfect registration? For me not much is gained, but a lot might be lost, including the ability for the print to breathe.

But it's very easy to see where at least in printmaking good registration is just considered part of the craft of printmaking. Since I didn't have an education in printmaking I'm only guessing that this is the case. But I'm pretty sure that I'm right.

This is only one element of what I consider, from an outsider's perspective, to be the craft of printmaking. Another element is consistency in prints in an edition. Especially with a complicated print involving many colors, many blocks, perhaps intricate carving there are more and more areas where the smallest little slip or lack of concentration will make one print slightly different than another. Printmakers have to decide whether or not to include small anomalies in an edition, My guess is that much of the final decision depends on how you've been trained.

For me this is particularly difficult where I've spent a lot of time and effort in the printing, mainly due to it being a complicated print. After all that effort do I really want to toss out more than 50% of what I've printed? Of course not and yet expectations are that there be at least some basic similarity between prints in an edition. My guess is that I'm more lenient than many but still I cull a lot from editions.

It's easy to understand this desire to have a consistent edition. And yet here too I find that the craftsmanship of printing is perhaps getting in the way a bit of the art of printing.

Moku hanga has a much better method of registration than western hand-printed prints. And yet I suspect that because of this there is a greater expectation of excellent registration in moku hanga prints. By those standards I fail pretty badly. I suspect moku hanga also has particularly high standards of paint application, even surface, etc., etc. mainly due to the incredible craftsmanship of traditional moku hanga. Though I strive for these and don't usually have deliberately uneven surfaces it's not something I care about all that much. It undoubtedly is part of traditional moku hanga. It's just not something I can bring myself to consider the most important part of the print. I usually won't cull a print because the color application isn't the best.

For me it is the overall experience of the print that is most important. What is it like visually, not technically? For me that means that I'm often quite happy with my prints, especially my moku hanga, even though I'm also disappointed that the registration isn't a bit better, the paint coverage a bit better, etc., etc. For many I imagine it looks as though I've failed at the craft of printing and it's hard to see beyond that. I can only guess but I expect that this is true. I can understand it. But I'm still quite happy with my prints.

It may be pushing this to suggest something similar in painting and drawing but I'm going to anyway. I love drawing, and painting as well. But I don't at all like drawings that enclose shapes in non-stop, continuous, undifferentiated lines. That may be a technique that was taught in classical academies hundreds of years ago but it is largely lifeless. The varying and incomplete lines of someone like Rembrandt are far more impressive. They go beyond technique into art, into something that is moving. The art of Rembrandt breathes.

I've gone on at such great length that I'm reluctant to say much more. In some ways I'm just thinking out loud. In the end I guess I'd use Winslow Homer as an example. He did quality wood engravings in his younger years. He was a master of line. But as he matured he didn't let himself be constrained by line. Instead it became an often invisible structure in his wonderfully free watercolors. Technique has its uses but it can also be the kiss of death for an artist. My guess is that many artists would be better off knowing when to forget about technique. On the other hand I can't help but think of Odubel Herrera, Pat Burrell and Hunter Pence, all players at one time or another for the local Philadelphia Phillies. I used to scream every time I saw one of them at the plate with their idiosyncratic wild swings. But they still got hits. I hope my prints don't remind anyone of them, especially Pence or Herrera!

Monday, January 11, 2021

WIP - 2021

Very sloppy printing I know. This is the best of four proofs I've done on a new moku hanga. It might look familiar as it's based on the acrylic painting I showed in the last post. So far I've used seven 6x8 inch blocks. I need at least one and perhaps two more. As I got further along in proofing I started losing patience in my printing because I was eager to see if the print was starting to come together. So what had been a fairly nicely printed proof got sloppy at the end.

When I started I just grabbed some paper that was lying around, not even sure if it was printmaking paper. Only as I was printing did I happen to see an Arches watermark. Eventually I'll print on a different paper but this one has been fine for proofing.

After I'd done block six I believe, the dark green block I still had only areas of flat color. Something inme wanted to scream. Though flat color, with possible grading through bokashi, and with some complex but regular pattern are part of traditional moku hanga I needed something different. That's been true in most of my moku hanga. I just am not comfortable with all that flat color. So I carved into much of that green block, creating quite a lot of pattern, movement, etc. I think it was just what the print needed. I did the same to a lesser extent with the last block, the brown one, though that one I had planned at least a little variation on.

So there you have it: a work in progress. As with most of my work it is an ongoing dance between simple and complex. Stayed tuned to see where the dance ends.

Sunday, December 20, 2020

Is That What I Want?

I have had a number of "successes" and a number of "failures" in my artistic career. I put quotes around the terms to indicate that there is a bit of artificiality in them. For instance I have been in a number of competitive art shows in my career and I have been rejected from quite a few as well. I have gotten some likes on Facebook, a very low standard of appreciation I know, and I think a much greater number of non-responses. I have sold some work, often looking quite different from one another, but I haven't sold anywhere near as much work as I'd like.

Sometimes these are more meaningful to me than others, for instance I'm always quite happy to have my work accepted into the annual exhibit of The Society of Wildlife Artists because I think so much of the work that I'm showing with. I've been excited to get into some competitive shows when I was an abstract artist often to find that I wasn't at all happy with the work that hung beside mine. But I also realized early on that competitive shows are often the end result of competing tastes on the part of judges or other 'stakeholders' and that the show reflects it. Often they are odd hodgepodges. Again I think that this is not the case with 'The Natural Eye,' and that's why I'm always happy to be in it. I used to be somewhat depressed not to get into another competitive show that I applied to frequently. But I always got the catalog of the show. And finally, after quite a few years, I finally said to myself: "This is silly. I don't LIKE most of the art in the show." And a year or two after that I stopped submitting work.

My end of submissions isn't necessarily a critique of the show but it is an understanding of myself by myself. I'm far better off creating art that I like and only trying to exhibit it at shows I'd be happy to be in. What's the point of trying to get into a show, even a prestigious one, if you don't like most of the art in it? In the same vein what's the point of trying to gain entry to various galleries or associations if you don't appreciate the work of most of the other artists involved?

To make a long story short at some point I decided I really have to make sure I'm the judge who counts most. What do I think of my work?!

And that leads me to my most recent painting at top. I like it!

I have been reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina over the last month or so. In it there is an artist, Mikhailov. I'm not really sure of why he's there but what struck me is a section where he expects very little from the people who come to look at his paintings, then begins to think much more of them when they say something that might possibly be interpreted as positive. Tolstoy I think is criticizing him but I think the scene might also ring true for many artists. As soon as someone says they like your work, or purchases it, you tend to see them and your work in a slightly better light.

I'm reminded of that by the watercolor painting I did of two Whimbel pictured below.

It is one of a number of paintings and drawings I did on the way to the painting at top. It is a bit more realistic. It's also true that I've sold a number of my watercolor paintings. I'm happy with the watercolor paintings and I'm happy that someone likes them well enough to buy them. But I realize that I might disappoint some of those buyers because I don't too often put those paintings up for sale. That's not because I'm too fond of them. It's because I don't do that many any more and I'm often not happy when I do most. But when I put them up for sale it's because I do like them.

The thing is I realize that my own watercolor paintings don't do much for me. When I'm done with them I ask, as the title of a well-known blog says: Is That What I Want? I've come to realize that though I admire many who work in watercolor it's not something I really aspire to in my own work. When I do I often feel more like I'm imitating something I like rather than painting what I like.

What I'm getting at is that whether I achieve what I want in a work of art, even if I don't know what that is when I start the art work, is what determines the artistic success. It is meaningful to me. There are times of course when I'm fooled. I think I've made some sort of breakthrough, then days, months or maybe years later I decide that the artwork wasn't all that I thought it was. But most times this is not true. If I'm really happy with a work I stay happy with it, even years later when I might work in a completely different matter.

I've had a number of such moments with the acrylic paintings that I've done over the last 6-9 months. To me they are showing me the path of the future in my work both in paint and print.

Some are more successful than others. The sumi brush pen and water soluble crayon drawing/painting below is somewhere in between. It seems like a step toward the painting at top. There are things I like about it but it seems a bit derivative. I'm not sure I would have done the painting at top without it. But the painting at top seems like What I Want.

I realize that not all artists can worry about What They Want. They have to worry about what their customers will buy so that they can pay the bills, etc., etc. I've seen no sign in my life that it's easy for an artist to make a living as an artist. Throughout history many of the most successful artists in any medium have had to keep their customers/patrons happy. I can't criticize that and I don't. What I'm saying is really more personal. I do know when I've done something that I'm happy with, regardless of what others think. That is my idea of artistic success.

Just to round off these thoughts the drawings above are done with sumi brush pen and are all based on photos that I took. I like them in many ways but I'll probably never really like work that I do that is based solely on photos.

The sumi brush pen sketch below on the other hand was done from life at 2 Mile Landing in Cape May, NJ in May of 2019. I was looking through a scope at some distant whimbrel and was thrillled with this sketch that I did over a 5-10 minute period. Later I looked at it and realized how crude it was. But I still loved it! It captured my reaction to what I saw. It too is an artistic success, far more so than the sketches above or even some theoretical sketch from photos that is far more detailed. Such a sketch wouldn't be successful to me because it's not what I want. It would just be a study

On the other hand I was thrilled with the field sketch below and I think I'm even more thrilled that i've been able to do a painting based on it that still has the same feeling. That to me is true artistic success.

Thursday, December 3, 2020

Leaping Into and Perhaps Beyond Cliche

With so many years of abstract painting behind me I found that I had a lot of artistic tools that also served me well when I started using subjects from nature. I didn't understand the structure of much of what I saw in nature. So I had a lot to learn about birds and insects, not to mention mammals, vegetation, etc. But there was one thing in naturalistic art, though also in the figure drawing that I spent a number of early years doing, that really wasn't in my abstract art. In fact off the top of my head I don't think it's in most abstract art. That is movement and/or weight.

I did a lot of figure drawing in my distant past, about 3 hours a night, 3-4 days a week for a year or more, followed by additional classes in graduate school that often included figure drawing. I loved figure drawing, though I particularly loved quicker poses. I'm not sure how fond I would have been of 1 hour plus poses. What I loved was trying to capture both movement AND a sense of weight and how it was distributed. No I don't mean how heavy a model might be. I mean an almost physical empathetic knowledge of whether there is a lot of weight on one leg, very little on another, a great stretch in one area of the body, perhaps with a contraction in another part of the body, etc., etc. I don't think this can be easily explained. You either look at a drawing and get that feeling of where the weight and movement is, or you don't, assuming of course that the artist captured it. Most of all I think it is a matter of physical empathy.

I've noticed this in the drawing of others, and also sculpture where it seems even more noticeable, with various subjects, people, horses, hippos, birds, etc. But with birds in particular there is one new element: loft, that physical sense of weight that you can sometimes see and feel when something is moving above the earth, sometimes 100s of feet, sometimes just a few feet as in the female Black-throated Blue Warbler above.

I was reminded a bit of this when I watched part of a so-so show on Rembrandt on tv last night. One early painting showed a hand that seemed to be lying lightly on whatever. But there was a definite sense of lightness. It wasn't a dead lobster, heavy as could be. It had the sensation of lightness. This in turn reminded me of seeing something similar in a hand by Giotto, probably a Madonna and child, seen at the Uffizi in Florence many years ago. Some of the best artists capture the weight of limbs as they portray them. Sometimes they are light but other times you get the sense of real weight bearing down into the ground.

Of course with birds the sense of weight is just different, at least if they're in flight. I have to confess that I've never flown, at least under my own power. Neither has any human as far as I know. And yet I think we can still feel the sense of soaring in a soaring hawk. Though humans have no real experience of flying or floating many can still 'feel' what it is like.

I know artists who can capture the sense of flight in birds while drawing them from life. I can't do that. Perhaps I could if I tried harder and had more experience with seeing birds in flight, particularly soaring raptors. But if pressed I think I could do a sketch with some sense of reality.

That is not the case with birds that leap into the air, mainly to pick off something to eat. This is a much less seen phenomenon than birds soaring. If it were much more common perhaps I would even try it from life. But the fact is often I don't even know it is happening. I only realize it because I take photos and some of them show the movement. So for instance with this female Black-throated Blue Warbler feeding on the berries of Devil's Walkingstick I really couldn't see what she was doing, even when looking throughout my high quality binoculars. Only the photos I took showed it.

So I'm faced with a dilemma. Do I want to paint or print a subject that requires photos? I really don't like art that shows a heavy reliance on photos. I'll admit that this could just be a matter of taste, which can be very personal and change from person to person. Nonetheless I really don't like such art. Too many well delineated ripples in water will drive me screaming from the room! Most often they can only be done by using photos. Humans don't see that way.

So deciding to use a photo of a bird leaping up into the air was hard for me. Not only will any art I do based on it look like it came from a photo but it might also look quite cliched: Bird In Flight. Nonetheless I decided to go ahead and use this as a subject. I did so because I think it's fascinating to see birds in flight. And I wanted to try to capture it.

As I was working on some of my recent acrylic paintings I kept noticing the sketch I'd done weeks previously of the Black-throated Blue. I guess you could say it just kept calling to me. Finally I decided to return to moku hanga using it as a subject. At top you see the finished result. There are two slightly different versions, one in a edition of 9, and the one pictured here in an edition of 8.

Recent Exhibitions

The Natural Eye - The 56th Annual Exhibition of the Society of Wildlife Artists, London, UK, October/November 2019
The Natural Eye - The 55th Annual Exhibition of the Society of Wildlife Artists, London, UK, October/November 2018
The Natural Eye - The 53rd Annual Exhibition of the Society of Wildlife Artists, London, UK - October-November 2016
The Natural Eye - The 52nd Annual Exhibition of the Society of Wildife Artists, London, UK - October-November, 2015
Wild at Art - Three Person show with Melanie Fisher, Ken Januski and Lynnette Shelley, Manayunk Roxborough Art Center, Philadelphia, PA - November, 2012
The Natural Eye - The 49th Annual Exhibition of the Society of Wildlife Artists, London, UK - November 2012
The Natural Eye - The 48th Annual Exhibition of the Society of Wildlife Artists, London, UK - October-November 2011