Archive for the ‘notes on practice’ tag
Mind The Gap…
What with everything else I’ve been doing lately, I find that I have to push myself to shoot the daily photo. I’m still carrying my camera around, but it hasn’t been as natural for me to haul it out. I need to remind myself. But the interesting thing is that forcing myself to look for pictures, makes me wake up from the plodding, somnambulism that can come over me in the course of the day: the sense that I’ve seen everything from every angle already, so I don’t have to look.
For example, I was nearing my home last night when I realized I hadn’t shot anything, so I pulled my camera out of my bag and turned back to scan the view across Flatbush Avenue. Is this such a fantastic picture? I don’t really think so, but that act made me come alert, and really look at my surroundings.
When people talk about the sacred aspect of art, I usually cringe and reach for my gameboy. But there is something that that connects creativity and ritual, and it’s that they are both ways of focusing attention in the present, and reconnecting to the importance of our existence in a particular time.
And now a shout to the hive mind: This is the new welcome page for my website. See how it does that mouseover thing with the pictures? In order to get it to do that I got lazy and used a page I found online to generate the code (a java script, and of course now I can’t find the site again). And now I’d like to get rid of those white bands between the pictures, but I’m stumped as to how to do it. My image borders seem to be set to 0, but still no difference. Got any ideas?
Tags: brooklyn, daily photo, making art, notes on practice, websiteRelated posts
Looking at naked people (and moving your hand…)
First time back at figure drawing in quite a few years, so here’s a couple of observations:
1.I needed to get my gear together to go draw, which meant in part getting a pad. I’ve got a shelf full of sketchbooks of every possible size, because I will use any excuse to buy art supplies, and will just as often use two pages and abandon it until the next urge to start a project hits, and I start the cycle again. So I go up to the shelf figuring that every one of these books, has got tons of free pages, each one is a little monument to failed good intentions, but as I start pulling them down, book after book is full of drawings. Lots of them from the last time that I was attending figure sessions regularly. so here’s like four books full of sketches from four/five years ago. And not all that bad either, which was pleasant to see. I finally did pick up one that had a lot of extra space, and so was set and went off. but that brings me to point number two.
2. I was shocked that I didn’t really remember making all those drawings. In this way drawing is dancing: I know that I spent the time doing it, but it’s so easy to forget that I know how to do it. One point of drawing every day is simply to remind myself that I can. Stuff that I figured out how to do years ago, I still act like I don’t know how to do. Once the hand gets moving it starts to come back, that knowledge.
3. Figure drawing is a meditation for me. And entering the studio is like heading into church, or temple. Not that one has to be slavishly reverent towards what happens there, but the whole experience, from assembling my tools to slipping into the somewhat hidden entrance of Spring Studio to finding a table to peering over my magnifiers at the model, brings me into the mindset where I can confront whatever my internal issues are. All my judgment rises right to the surface in the way I surreptitiously check out the other participants and their skills. It’s a judgment I quickly turn on myself when I look at the utter hopelessness of my drawings. Yes everyone is doing it wrong, including me. And then, If I want to continue, I have to forgive and try again: move the pencil differently, resettle, look again, adjust proportions. I have to let the drawing be bad, before it can ever get any better. The whole environment contributes to this: the kind of seedy tables, the cliplights, the shelves full of art books, the other devotees.
4. What kind of person pays fourteen dollars to sit on a rickety stool on a weekday afternoon in a basement struggling to make a drawing that will never be seen by anyone else? Me for one, but all my fellow strivers in the session (and the places was just about fully booked today) exhibited a kind of ongoing absorption and patience that left me wondering about who they were. Not all students I think, and when the monitor came around one hour in to collect the fee, quite a few of them brandished the multi-session cards that marked them as regulars. But during the breaks there is little chitchat, it’s not like this practice is an excuse for some other socializing. And once the pose begins and the instrument is on your hand, you’re on your own. There’s no hovering coaching, no byplay; it’s each one of us singly trying to make visual sense of the complex arrangements of the figure in front of us.
5. Even though I’m not modeling, this activity exposes me. My hand leaves a trace, accurate or not, graceful or not. I see or I don’t. And perched at the periphery of the room, with something else in the center, illuminated that we have all paid to look at, I still want to make it all about me. Every dropped pencil resounds I think. and these are the wrong pencils anyway, some new ones that I got at Pearl, but the wood is shoddy and they keep snapping off in the sharpener. I’m down to just a quarter of the 4B that I started out with. Or maybe it’s the sharpeners fault. I’d love to use the crank wall mounted one, but it’s on the other side of the room and I can’t get to it until a break. People must be wondering why I keep sharpening these pencils over and over. It’s a classic bit of vamping, stalling for time, because no matter how sharp a point I get on the 4B, it won’t help me figure out what’s wrong with the foreshortening on that left calf. Or why I’ve drawn this lean model with the simpering cheeks of a kewpie doll.
6. Finally when it’s good, I let go. Just let go of the yammering of thought. Forget about posterity. Play with the page, abandon my ules , and pick whatever pencil I can lay my hands on and draw. And in that letting go is the lesson. All I have is the page in front of me, today. It’s mine to make of it what I will, but let’s be honest, it’ll get put away in a book and I’ll forget I even made it until some year down the road. There’s the point. These drawings don’t result in anything. One can never make an utterly perfect, utterly accurate figure drawing. What we see shifts from minute to minute, we move, the model moves, it’s all an approximation.
7. Figure drawing is an unyielding problem. A problem I will never solve, and that is its value. I can keep coming back to it, keep tackling it because I will never get to the end of it. It is a koan, to be met with humility and grace. In that drawing studio I need to be crafty in both senses of the word, but I can’t trick myself into thinking that I’ve got it licked. I don’t and that’s good enough reason to keep going back.
8. After making my devotions today I felt refreshed, energized, even though I tell that I didn’t have the stamina that I had built up a couple of years ago. I arrived to the session late, and by the end of it I was flagging, fatigued in eye and back and mind. But that can be built back up. I hope to get some more sessions in before the school year starts.
Tags: drawing, making art, notes on practiceRelated posts
Yesterday’s drawing…
…always looks slightly strange to me. Alien. The things I’ve made contain memory, sure, but it’s not released in the way that might seem logical. I can remember certain things about drawing, while I’m drawing, and not otherwise. A memory that resides in the hand, not the eye. So scanning what I’ve done is always a surprise.
Similarly with writing: I revisit things from years ago and can’t believe that I was able to put the words together, even though I remember the particulars of sweating it out, the strain of writing, or rather the strain of not writing, of trying to force the confrontation with the computer screen. That memory comes easily, but the fact that I got something done and that this is the sequence of words that arose? It seems far fetched.
I’ve been going over the drawings I’ve made here and a bunch of journal entries that I’m adding tags to and the effect is far from flipping through a scrap book. I’m often perplexed. And that is why the cultivation of these habits is so important. The memory that resides in the hand, the ability to connect one day’s thought to the next through making certain gestures that lead to marks, that daily caress is the first thing to disappear in my usual daily assault of media consumption.
I wrote last month about needing a blank space to project work into, and earlier this month about needing a cascade of images to prime the pump. Here’s another ting I need to get to my true working place, the daily feedback of limber up, move the pencil, start again lines and choices about lines catching thought, moving thought forward in the ways that eyes can’t on their own. When that is happening every day, the drawings can go deeper and become fuller. The next day’s surprise is that much more welcome. When the gap is too long, that gap simply becomes a measure of how alienated I’ve become from my own process.
That’s three needs, and I’m sure that are others. They are not unreasonable things to ask of myself. And not hard things to provide. The reminder that they are there, and that they don’t go away, the laying bare of what’s required, truly, for me to do this thing, that’s the most important outcome of this month. I’m setting this down so that It can serve as a refuge and an accusation to me when I lose the way.
Tags: artists' retreats, daily photo, drawing, making art, notes on practice, self portraitRelated posts
Slave to the picturesque…
Came in to town and got yet another sketchbook (because it was little and had smooth pages that could take ink and the only one I had that size was a moleskine with rough pages)and a German Donald Duck comic for some additional source material. Evidently he’s huge here, because everywhere you go there are racks of thick Donald comics. Which I guess is ok news for me, given the circumstances.
And maybe here I should explain a little bit about my working method, which is this: When I sit down to draw, I need a few key things: a cup of coffee, some sort of music playing (that I’ve chosen), battery operated sharpener, brush to take care of eraser shreds, pencils in assorted weights, and a bunch of images. Before I can get started on a drawing, I need to wallow in a pile of pictures. I’m addicted to Dover and Taschen books that have page after page of old ads, clip art, or erotica or photos of interiors or tattoos or whatever. It’s really rare that there might be a specific thing that will go from one of the books into a drawing, but I need to start the collision of different images going in my head for one of my ideas to take shape. I need the mulch, and after a bit of mental drifting through different types of drawings Something will surface. I can’t start cold.
At home I have hundreds of different books that I can flip through to get myself going. When it came to traveling here, I had to decide which few to bring with me, and to sort of trust to the environment to provide. One thing I’ve learned is that for some reason, I can’t really do the image riffling on the screen of the computer. I have a ton of pictures that are supposedly source material with me on various flash drives, but it just doesn’t work for me. I need to print them out if I’m going to use them. So I brought about five of those packet sized Taschen books and a couple of books of Bear Sex Manga that a friend gave me, and that was it. Having been here for a couple weeks at this point I needed to add something else to the mix, so I went down to the local bookstores, to little avail. I’m kind of surprised, because Taschen seems to be pretty ubiquitous in Europe from my previous experience, and they’re cheap. It was pretty slim pickings at the places I looked,however; just a couple of very expensive coffee table books in the art section. So Donald and kin are going to have to suffice for now. Maybe I’ll make a drawing of a money vault or something
Tags: daily photo, drawing, making art, notes on practice, SyltRelated posts
In response…
A friend wrote me a letter and after thinking about it for a while I decided that I wanted to respond to it here. He consented graciously to me reprinting it:
hi Nayland, I hope you’re enjoying your travels. Can you answer me this? How do I keep the faith when everyone tells me my work is great and yet I can’t land a NY gallery? I know it’s the worst time in history, but it’s been years..(and my Boston gallery just closed) I met with my buddy J the other day and told her that my Armory experience left me thinking that the “art” of art these days lies in the facade that hides that fact that all art is a spectacle. The armory show just felt like a wave of junk for rich people and that all the art lost the importance of effecting cultural change or critically examining it. There just didn’t seem to be any impact, or discussion, or reflection.. I’m really losing it.
Take care,
O
O-
I’ve read this over a few times now trying to come up with an answer for you. Here’s the best I can do:
There are two different things going on here in what your asking. First you ask about not having a New York Gallery. And then you’re asking about art’s ability to effect change. Both of them are factors in “keeping the faith” as you put it. First I urge you to separate them.
Galleries are retail shops, plain and simple. They are stores and artists should treat them as such. So everyone tells you they like your band, why don’t you have a record deal? There could be a million specific reasons why but they boil down to this: No shopkeeper in New York has thought that they could make a buck selling your work. That’s all that it means. It doesn’t mean that there will never be a shopkeeper who thinks differently. It doesn’t mean that the previous ones have been right in their assessment. The idea that having representation in New York “means” something about your level of achievement as an artist is smoke and mirrors. Your achievements in your work should be the things that are evident to you when you look at what you’ve done. Ultimately it’s the only barometer that matters, because you are the person who spends the most time with the work, who lives the experience of making it.
If you get to experience being in the midst of the moment of creation, of exceeding what you thought was possible for yourself, you’ve already won. That is what we should be in the game for. That’s what’s really at stake in the life of an artist. Being able to get up and do that when ever we feel like it. It’s a thing all humans sense as being valuable, but very few have the courage to pursue for themselves. Because people sense that it’s important, and because we live in a market society, galleries take the form that they do. We sell the results of that communion to each other. But all of that market activity is secondary, like buying the plaster image of a saint to remind you of what a saintly life should be. Your real job as an artist is to live that life. I’ve had an inordinate amount of “success” in my life, and I wish I could tell you it had something to do with talent or smarts, but when I look at it it’s been pretty much random. I know smarter, more talented artists who haven’t done nearly as well.
So for the second part of your question: Your sense about art fairs is exactly right. It’s expensive to do those fairs, which are just like the CES fair or the E3 fair. When Sony buys a booth at the electronics fairs, they do so to showcase the stuff they think is going to sell the most. It’s an investment. Same for art fairs. People are laying out a lot of money and they need to make it back somewhere down the line. In previous years it was possible for galleries to delay their return: they could afford to put up a big installation because they were demonstrating that they had lots of money to throw around, that they didn’t need to make it back right away. They could afford to soft sell. They were selling people on the idea of associating themselves with someone who had so much money they didn’t have to think about money. These days it’s different. The mask is off. Everyone is worried about making their rent and their payroll for THIS MONTH, so they can’t afford to rent that square footage at the fair and not see some immediate return.
Where does that leave social activism? Or any engaged difficult idea you might care to name? Back where it usually is, in the hands of people who make and care about such things. Ask yourself: how often in history have shops and trade shows been the forums for social action and change? I don’t think we should expect them to be. We live in a time where the viability of brick and mortar retail is increasingly in question. Who knows what the next model for the distribution of art is going to look like? I do know this: the history of market success and the history of interesting ideas in art diverge more often than they connect. I grew up seeing an art world where that success immediately made your ideas suspect. You grew up seeing one where market failure meant a failure of idea as well. Each situation was fleeting and in the larger sense meaningless.
I think that the way art makes change is one consciousness at a time. It forces us to stop our usual patterns of processing information sometimes through causing us confusion, sometimes through pointing us to pleasure. It is through arguing for the inherent worth of a life lived with confusion or pleasure that art makes us re-think the world we live in. Because in those moments we are revealed to ourselves and others without pretense. We want those moments but we fear them as well, so we tame them, we cloak them in formulas and focus our attention on less threatening things like income levels and social squabbles. So much for change. Our real job is to be the guardians and cultivators of those moments where ever we find them.
Finally, how do we keep going? We do so by making a life that supports the work. And part of that is asking what the work needs. What it needs in terms of material support, as well as emotional support. Do you really need recognition, or response? It’s been my experience that response gets you a lot further. And the responses that have meant the most have been those from the people closest to me. Recognition is a lot easier for me to worry about however, because as I stated above, it’s random and utterly out of my control. So I don’t have to ask myself the inconvenient questions about what I’ve done to cultivate it. I’m safe in my powerlessness. With response I have to be willing to open myself up to people that I’m going to see again, and I’m going to have to give something in return. I’ll have obligations and I’ll be vulnerable to real people not abstractions. As a number of my friends can tell you, that’s not a space I navigate with much grace. It’s where I fuck up a lot. Which tells me that it’s the thing I need to do more of, it’s a thing that the work requires, just like fucking up drawing hands means that I need to draw more hands. That’s the gift that creativity gives us: the imperfections of our creations tells us what we need to work on next. Which is another way of saying which imperfect parts of ourselves we need to work on next.
The adventure of doing that is the only real reason I can think of to keep going.
Tags: art world, daily photo, making things, notes on practice, practicing artRelated posts
The Void and Why I Need It…
Creativity requires a void. There has to be something missing for us to want to see something new. When life is two replete, where there is no blank wall, no empty space, the urge to make anew flags and ultimately stops.
Early on in your career, you’ve made no mark on the world, it all feels blank, awaiting your voice. As time goes on it can feel crowded, choked with all too much stuff, or a comfortable, affirming mirror. Neither possibility leads to working.
The abundance of infostractions dumped in my lap by my computer keeps me from feeling what I need to be working towards in the studio. Click by click I move away from the unquiet thoughts of my own lack that prod my arm to move the pen across the page. I know so much about so many things that ungraspable, shifting bits. Why do I like to see where a show of mine is going to happen? So that I can begin to play with that blank wall in my mind. It’s something to push against, so cozy up to or to reveal in an unexpected configuration. I have to make that something happen in my workspace if I hope to get anything done. I need to see a box to put the thing in.
Tags: art, daily photo, distractions, night, notes on practice, workRelated posts
A return to answering…
siokaos asks; “for an artist with no entrepreneurial spirit, how does one penetrate and deploy their material, when normal channels such as “art school” seems more of a career steps posing as a legitimate educational experience?”
A weighty question, if I parse it correctly. As I read it you are asking “How do I get people to know about what I do in a way that is different from the normal way?” Is that it? And then there’s the comment about “art school” which I’ll get to secondarily.
I think every artist has to separate the pleasures and perils of making things from the the life that those things have after they are made. And then they have to ask the question “What do I want to have happen to these things that I’ve made?” In answering that question, you begin ton to think about what kind of a career you want. There is no one prescribed path. The sharing of cultural ideas happens in a lot of different forums. For me is the willingness to engage in that moment fully that give it it’s importance, not the locale where it takes place. These days when I want to be inspired visually, I go to antique stores or look at the layered streets of New York, much more than I go to museums. So, when you say penetrate and deploy, you have to ask what kind of people you want to have that exchange with and then look at where they go to get their cultural fix. What are the forums you respect? What are the locations and communities you value? Deciding that can then give you ideas about how to become active in those forums.
Art schools prepare people to function in one limited kind of cultural community, just as music conservatories do. In that sense, “career step” and “legitimate educational experience” are one and the same: people are being trained for a profession and trained in the rituals and expectations of that profession as much as they are being trained in artistic technique. So if that is the community you want to reach, you are going to have a hard time if you don’t at least acquaint yourself with the norms of the locals. But there are plenty of other art communities that do not rest upon those norms and in fact reject them.
So to sum up: How you alert people to what you do depends on who you are talking about, and what your desire is for the interaction after you’ve alerted them.
March remains question month. I’ll do my best to answer any thing you might ask, and you can ask it here
Tags: art school, art world, making art, notes on practice, Question MonthRelated posts
It’s two weeks away…
…and for the first time in my life, my show is basically done: the work is finished except for a couple of minor things, and I just spent the afternoon at the gallery hanging it all. There is something unnerving about that fact.
Things are not completely installed: the gallery will need to use the space for a private showing of something for a client this coming week, so they will document the position of everything, take it down and then I will go back in and do the final hanging, and there are a couple of things at the framer or in transit from other places, but we know where everything is going on the walls and it will be the matter of a couple of hours work to get it all in its final position.
But those of you who have been through this with me before (waltzingtree, girlfagpnw) know that in every other instance I am running around assembling works up until the very last minute. I’ve always used the deadline of a show as the way to bring works to completion. This time, I worked in a completely different way.
Tags: art, daily photo, notes on practice