Simplify

If there in one thing I have very reluctantly learned over 40 years of artmaking it's the need to simplify. I say 'reluctantly' because I never really learn it. Instead I struggle through some works, finally arrive at something that seems satisfactory and is also much simpler than where I started. At that point I relearn the lesson that I ought to simplify. It works.

And yet sometimes you want to enlarge your experiences and start from new and bigger material. I think you also need to expand your horizons in order to grow. But when I do I always find that I'll eventually need to strip down and simplify the new material or the new way of working.

Not everyone of course loves simplicity. But for me it is the best way. I'm not sure that anyone would guess that from my work, but it is my own conclusion about it.

That said you may wonder about these two photos. Sort of a mess. Somewhat in need of simplification. Sure enough.

This watercolor and pencil sketch are based on some photos, and bad field sketches, I did of female and immature Wood Ducks along the Wissahickon this summer. I've always loved the light in the photo as well as the grouping of birds.

I'd like to make a linocut of this. I haven't yet decided whether or not there will be more than one color. Adding colors and carving reduction linocuts certainly ups the complexity.

I'll decide on that later. For now I'm experimenting with how I can take this subject and do it as a linocut, concentrating on line and contrast. You might say how could he make such a sloppy watercolor after the more detailed and controlled watercolor of the Yellow-rumps a few posts back? I can do it because I'm using watercolor more like a lino, trying to concentrate on lines and contrast.

I admit it's rough. But it is intentional. I'm trying to simplify the scene so that it will work as a linocut. I imagine there's still a lot of simplificaton that awaits me. But I thought it might be interesting to see the steps on the way to what I hope will be a successful linocut.

As an aside I'd also like my linocut style to leak back into my watercolors. I'd like to have bolder, more abstract watercolors. This means that I'll do less of the more subtle, detailed ones like the Yellow-rumps. There's nothing wrong with such work, and I'm happy with that painting. But I think my personal tastes runs toward something more bold and lively.

Recent Work with Lime Green Floral Background

I hung up rhe last of my recent prints today on the wall where I temporarily hang recent work. That wall also includes the newest watercolors as well as a few older watercolor sketches from this summer.

I guess about once a year I like to take a photo of this wall and publish it. And each year I think: "Boy that lime-green wallpaper sure is distracting." I always think I ought to tear if off but it never reaches the top of the priority list.

Why show a bunch of works, especially with this horrible background? The answer lies partly with art collector Albert C. Barnes and partly with the Paris Review. When I was young I used to read the interviews with writers published by Paris Review. I loved getting some idea on how writers actually worked. That's part of my motivation here: to show a collection of recent work all together. I think it might give some idea as to how I work for anyohe that's interested. It gives some context to my work.

And the eccentric Mr. Barnes? Well I doubt he really was all that eccentric. This was just a tag plopped on him by lazy journalists. You have to wonder if it wasn't the art establishment getting back at someone who had snubbed them and who had much better artistic judgment. It was that same artistic judgment that disallowed color reproduction of his collection.

Why? Because it's so misleading. At the time color reproduction was probably much worse than now but that doesn't account for qualities like scale, surface, texture that reproduction misses. Barnes was right to hold out for the primacy of the art itself. If you want to enjoy it, and if you really respect it, then go and see it live. See the real thing, not some poor reproduction.

He'd be sad to see that to day we live in the Age of Poor Reproduction. How many people even see live things, whether they be paintings or owls? Artists and nature lovers have something in common here. A respect for the real, not for the poor reproduction.

I'm not about to invite all readers of this to come by and visit my studio in the interests of a more 'real' experience. But at least by showing this group photo I give viewers some sense of the scale of the works. It's one small step toward reality.

When I lived in San Francisco I happened into a tourist gallery. There a salesman demonstrated an ersatz Rembrandt landscape with a light that illuminated it from behind, making the painting glow. I had to leave when I saw that. But that is exactly what a computer screen does. It illuminates paintings from behind making them more vibrant than they ever can be in real life. So ugly as my lime-green floral background is it does bring a dose of reality back into my work.

For real art, and real nature, visit a museum or take a walk in the woods. It's refreshing to see the real thing.

Conjuring Up the Birds of Summer

Yesterday I took part in the Philadelphia Mid-Winter Bird Census. I don't think it got above freezing all day and it snowed during the 2 1/2 hours that my group birded. What a beautiful day. There's something about being out birding in the snow.

But the birds didn't seem to agree. It was the smallest count I've been in during my five plus years of taking part in the census. My guess is that most of them were hunkered down, waiting for warmer, dryer weather.

One of the many pleasures of birding, particularly birding the same area time and again, is that you get to know what birds should be there, what birds you've seen on previous counts. A Lincoln's Sparrow there. A late Eastern Towhee there. There the lone Tree Sparrow of the year.

In much of the area we traversed yesterday I couldn't help think: hmm, well a Gray Catbird could still be here. They are everywhere in the summer, non-stop chatterers and squawkers. And one or two will occasionally still be around for this mid-winter count in Philadelphia. But I saw none yesterday.

One close relative though, another mimic, the Northern Mockingbird, did finally make an appearance where he's been in previous Januaries. It was looking unlikely then up he popped. That's the virtue of knowing one area, often called a 'local patch', well. You know what birds are likely to be there. So you spend the time to check that area. Yesterday it paid off.

I've not given up on printmaking. Just taking a break, slowly looking for new subject matter. Printmaking takes a bit more planning that paintings and drawings. So I'm spending a lot of time looking for something that strikes me as a promising for a new linocut. In the meantime this fairly quick watercolor of a Gray Catbird seen this summer.

A Delicate Situation

I mentioned recently that I often like to change media. This seems to help keep me fresh.

But it's also true that sometimes a bird calls out to be rendered in a certain style. I took a number of photos of Yellow-rumped Warblers at Cape May, NJ in early November. These warblers can drive birders nuts in the fall because sometimes it seems that there are 100 of them for every other warbler. It's easy to ignore them. And yet in fall they do have a really subtle and delicate beauty.

It's that delicacy that I saw when I looked at some photos I'd taken of two different birds. Such delicacy seems to call for an equally delicate medium. My first thought was to sketch these in pencil, then add the color with my old nemesis watercolor pencil.

But after I had the sketch done I just had to use watercolor instead. If you can master it then watercolor seems to do what watercolor pencils intend to do, just much better. So, holding my breath, out came the watercolors.

I am happy with these, though they still don't do justice to the beauty of the birds.

Old Prints and an Interview

As I mentioned in an earlier post my interview for Printsy, the Printmakers of Etsy, was published online yesterday at Printsy. I had no idea when I decided to join Printsy about six weeks ago that I'd be lucky enough to get a published interview. So thank you Etsy, Printsy and Diane Podolsky of Printsy for setting up the interview.

I did have trouble deciding how to illustrate the post announcing this though. It didn't make sense to put up one of my recent linocuts since they've already been seen here quite recently.

So I hunted through my old prints, prints that I haven't looked at in many years. Both are over 25 years old. The top one is the oldest, a lithograph of a wintry view from Farwell Pier on the north side of Chicago. I learned lithography in the basement of the student union at UC Berkeley. I had moved to Berkeley from San Francisco in the summer before fall classes started so I wanted to be doing something. The classes at the student union were a lifesaver. I learned a lot about lithography and etching in a short time.

But I don't think I did more than two or three lithos. In fact I can find only two. Once I started classes I found that I loved painting so much that I never took an actual printmaking course in the art department. Painting was just too exciting.

And yet about 7 years later I did the above etching at Centre College of Kentucky where I was finishing two years of teaching art. I must have had nothing to do other than read while I was there because I don't know where else I would have gotten the experimental ideas that I used in this print. Some of the shapes are embossed. My guess is that I first printed the black and white section, then printed various colored plates all cut in the shapes that you see.

What is so odd about this, and something I indicate in my Printsy interview, is that I barely remember these. I don't even remember a print studio at Centre even though I taught at least one course in it. I don't remember the process that I used in this print even though it must have been a complicated one. In any case this print looks quite similar to the abstract paintings I was doing at the time. Perhaps artistic adventurousness convinced me to find some way to transform those paintings into etchings.

So I'll end this trip down Printmaking Memory Lane. But it has been enjoyable looking at these old prints. And they prove to me something that I said in the interview. I've spent very little time studying printmaking. I barely remember making many of the prints that I made in the past. And yet the opportunity to make prints, whether at Berkeley or at Centre, always seemed to be there when I felt like making prints. Today I no longer have access to a printmaking studio or press and have printed all my linocuts at home by hand with a baren. If I get much more involved with printmaking I nay need to see if my lucky streak holds out of finding a printmaking studio just when I happen to need it.

Heron Surprise

As usual there's a bit of a double entendre in my title. The immature Green Heron pictured above was surprising in his behavior(I discovered him above me where I thought I might find a Yellow-billed Cuckoo), and the medium I used for this is watercolor pencil, a set of which I received for Christmas two years ago and which I've never learned to like.

I was at Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia sometime this summer and heard a harsh clucking sound above me, in a heavily leafed out Horse Chestnut if I remember correctly. There was also a lot of activity across the stream to my right, Paper Mill Run. Perhaps it was even early fall as I know I was looking for wood warblers along the stream. When I heard the sound I thought it might possibly be a Yellow-billed Cuckoo. So I put my binoculars above me. There I was astonished to find an immature Green Heron.

I'm always thrown by herons in trees, just like Wood Ducks. Even though I've seen them there, seen them build nests there, and of course that's where they're at in heronries my primitive brain still says: Herons=Water.

I don't believe I got any field sketches that day. But eventually I got some photos, particularly when he flew to some trees, covered in wild grape.

As I was looking through my old photos for inspiration yesterday I was struck by a photo of him in the trees, along with many of the wild grapes.

But why did I choose watercolor pencils? I have only had bad experiences with them. They are in a word: recalcitrant. They don't seem flexible at all. I did pick some up this summer or early fall I think and do a drawing or two. I still couldn't stand them but at least I saw what seemed the proper way to use them: lightly, wtih a soft touch and no expectation of rich colors. Love tints or love trouble.

I'm not big on washed out, tint-ridden work. I like something bolder. So why try these for the heron? Well for some perverse reason I thought that I might be able to use them boldly, maybe mixing them with watercolors, or at least using watercolor brushes rather than waterpencil brushes, with their limited flexibility.

But once I got started I lost all thought of boldness. The boldest I got was to sponge out most of the background toward the end when I felt it competed too much with the bird itself.

The other reason I think I did this is that I just felt like working differently. I've been doing linoleum cuts for about 6 weeks now, with I think one quick watercolor thrown in. I wanted a change.

This Sunday I should have my interview at Printsy posted online. In it there's a question about getting around artistic slumps. My answer is to switch to a different medium. That's what I tried here.

It's disappointing. But not so disappointing as to dispel the notion of finally figuring out how to use watercolor pencils in a productive way, at least once a year or so.

Wildlife Art Journal

Though the sidebar at right of this page goes on forever some of you may have actually scrolled down it and noticed the link to Wildlife Art Journal.

It was about a year ago that I decided to join and pay a subscription for this online magazine. As the magazine itself says, why pay when everything online is free? Well publishers such as them are making a bet that people will pay for quality content.

It is the same bet that all publishers have had to consider over the last 10 years or so. Will customers pay for content in the face of all that's now free on the web? For awhile many thought that online advertising would pay for the free content. Except that then came the recession and advertising declined, in almost no instances paying for the cost of providing content.

I won't go on about this, though 25 years in the newspaper industry did get me to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it. With Wildlife Art Journal I decided that I wanted to place my bet on people being willing to pay for quality content. Personally I believe that there is no other business model that will work. Quality content takes time and money to produce. Somebody has to pay for it. Or we'll just have low quality free content. Worse we might forget what quality content even was.

All well and good you might say but why write about this now? Well the main reason is to note that the pastel at top is in the Gallery of the Commons in the new issue. It's the second time I've had something shown there. So I just wanted to mention that. If you click on the link above you can close the pop-up box asking if you want to subscribe. Many of the articles are free, including Gallery of the Commons. There you'll find a collection of 57 photos of 'wildlife art', some good, some not.

I realize that there are probably few readers of this blog who are interested in wildlife art. So you may want to stop reading right here if you have no interest.

The thing is I myself didn't even know if I was interested in wildlife art when I subscribed. My educational background is 'Fine Art.' I have Bachelors of Fine Art and a Masters of Fine Art. Once I decided to start working with natural subjects, birds in particular, I realized that I was abandoning, and would soon be abandoned by, Fine Art. The two just don't overlap, neither in the 20th nor the 21st century.

When I started using birds as subjects four years ago I didn't even like wildlife art. Almost everything I saw seemed cliched, kitchsy, formulaic, anything but vital even though it had 'life' in its very name. But over the last four years I found that there were some wildlife artists who I really liked and respected. And what convinced me to subscribe to Wildlife Art Journal was that it seemed to be raising the same questions about wildlife art that I had.

And that's really why I'm writing this long, somewhat rambling post. The newest issue seems particularly vibrant, raising all the right questions about art, nature, wildlife, the environment and their connection. And it's far more than that. A recent blog entry there had an essay on Laurie David's 'The Family Dinner', about the importance of a family getting together around dinner. I don't find that a far cry from a concern for nature and for a love of art that cares about nature.

I really found the new issue to be somewhat like a Christmas present, and an unexpected one at that. If you have any interest in nature, art, wildlife or conservation I'd encourage you to pay a visit.

And that annoying popup box that follows you around the site is offering a special subscription fee of only $8 for the next year. It's well worth it, and about twice what I paid!

Almost Done

I have just a couple of tiny tweaks left on this before I print an edition. But since I don't know when I'll have time for that I decided to post this version. It's on the same paper, Rives BFK, that I'll use for the edition. Size is 8x11 inches, with the image itself being just 6x9.

One thing that surprised me in printing on this paper is that it's a lot less absorbent than the Hosho I've been using. So I needed to press down much harder on the baren to get the ink to print. But since I'm so new to this I'm sure I'll continue to learn about both inks and papers.

I said last time that I'd mention some of the thoughts I'd had as I developed this. One was a quote from artist Chris Rose about the importance of the quality of line in a linocut. Line can of course be important in any art work. But there's something about linocuts that can make each line really stand out, both a positive line, e.g. the color of the ink, or a negative one, what's been cut away.

In fact in my last Laughing Gull linocut I used some lines in the water that became a very important part of the overall design. And yet I hadn't even comtemplated their existence when I designed the linocut. I just noticed them and decided to develop them and make them more important.

I did less of that here, but still lines did play a part. That was one choice I had to make. Another was how large a range of values to use, especially as I was really limited to just two: the color of the ink and the color of the paper. Through extensive hatching and cross hatching I was able to get some sense of the gray/brown and orange that are dominant parts of a robin's color scheme along with the obvious black and white. So I spent a lot of time working with hatching here, a method really more natural to etching than to linocut. But still I had to do something to enlarge the value range and so that's what I tried.

In a certain sense the regularity of hatching works against the more lyrical and expressionistic lines that seem to be the strength of linocut and woodcut. But I wanted both so it was another challenge to try to have both without them contradicting one another.

And then there is all that white, of the snow on the ground, of the snow and water in the birdbath, of the striking eyes of robins. As I developed this I tried it to get the white to work with the black and quasi-grays.

As I said earlier, I was really struck by this scene when I first saw it in our backyard about 4 years ago. One of the beauties of art I think is that there are no rules that say you can't go back and redo a particular theme. If Hitchcock can do it why can't I!?

Nine Robins, Ten Versions

Just a very quick post of version number 10 of the Nine Robins linocut I started yesterday. Still many versions to go I'd guess.

When I next write maybe a bit more about the many choices I faced as I developed this.

CBC Delays Robins

It was almost four years ago that I did my first large-scale and most ambitious watercolor with birds as subject. That is the watercolor above. Actually it may have been the most ambitious watercolor that I'd ever done in my life. Which just goes to show you I think that until the end of 2006 I'd barely touched watercolor.

The odd thing is I thought it was successful because I'd been so happy with the original composition, based on nine robins at our backyard birdbath during a blizzard of late 2006. I did admit in the back of my mind though that I didn't understand birds, even robins, well enough to paint them well, and even if I did I certainly didn't have command of the watercolor medium. It seemed like my many years of experience with oil and acrylics counted for nought with watercolors.

But that image still stayed with me. On Thursday and Friday I did some preparatory sketches and finally started a new linocut based on those robins. I just loved the sense of a peak into the social world of birds, in this case a highly gregarious social world.

I also liked the many striking eye-patterns in this grouping so that's what I've accented first. Who knows where this will end up but I think it's safe to say that there is a long way to go.

But it went nowhere today. Instead we decided to get up at 6 a.m. so that we could go spend the day in primarily sub-freezing temperatures and count birds. This year marks the 111th anniversary of the Christmas Bird Count. It was developed partly in reaction to the Christmas Side Hunt, which as you can imagine was some celebratory holiday hunting.

111 years later it's hard to know what it means to people. Many things most likely. For us it means a chance to get outside in less than ideal weather with a specific goal in mind: contributing to the scientific knowledge about birds in a certain area. I think it's that sense of science that forces us to stay out longer, finding birds that really should be around, like today's Winter Wrens, Golden-crowned Kinglets and Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers. There's something exhilarating about being out in cold weather, especially if you're dressed for it. Then there's the added bonus of both seeing, or hearing, birds and knowing that you're contributing to an honored tradition that both helps science and the birds that you're seeing. A wonderful holiday activity.

And because of that my poor robins at top remain at version four, cockeyed no less because I didn't bother to register the paper on this trial run. But maybe tomorrow they'll see some improvement.

Fittingly the species with the highest count today was the American Robin: 50. I just wish I'd had the time to look at them more closely. I'm sure it would have come in handy as I continue this print.