October

Last day of October. The late afternoon sun is streaming in my window as I write and it feels less like Hallowe'en than an early summer evening. It's our second autumn in Northern California and I'm still getting used to the early morning chill, the pleasant warmth of midmorning, and the baking afternoon heat. For some reason, the afternoon sun feels even hotter in California than in Hawaii. And for most of September and October the California afternoons have put me in mind of the summer afternoons of my youth in New York State. There is talk of El Nino bringing much-needed rain during the winter months,  but we have not had more than a few drops here and there since spring.

I generally try to have one form of practice—writing, drawing, collage, woodwork, walking, something—going on, and this month it's been drawing. I started out on a series of 4" x 4" pen-and-ink abstracts during the first week of October, and have done one or two pretty much every day this month. They are, like much of my work in previous years, explorations of what can be done in a small space with just black against white. They are not intended to be representational, although sometimes when they are done they seem to be want to be read that way. Most of them begin as movements of the pen and hand in defining small black spaces, but the creation of those spaces creates negative shapes in white, which by the time the drawing is done are what command the eye. One of the things about this way of working is that I can only begin to sense what the drawing is actually going to look like when I am more than halfway through. Once in a while I'll start with an overall idea in mind, block out the areas in advance, and work from the outside in, but must often I just start with one small shape in some random place on the paper, then add another, and another. I know at some point for sake of variety and visual interest I'm going to have to segue into some other set of contrasting shapes, but I do that more or less by feel, when the time is right.

Then there's the question of when the drawing is done. Sometimes I will choose to leave a large area of white unadorned to set off the areas that have been heavily worked. This often has the effect of turning the abstract image into a landscape of sorts, with the white areas reading as sky:

Each of these small studies takes two to four hours to complete. Every once in a while I'll go for a larger format which gives me the chance to set up individual zones that play off one another, as in this 7"x9" piece which was recently accepted for the annual member show at the Marin Society of Artists:

Equinox

A piece like this can take anywhere from five to ten hours to complete. In this particular case, I decided to include a more or less literal nightscape: mountain and moon and stars, as the last element in the sequence, both for visual balance and because, as often happens, a theme ("Equinox") had occurred to me and I wanted something to reinforce that.

A similar thing happened when I was working on this last 4x4 study. Earlier in the day I had had a conversation with my granddaughter about ladybugs and for some reason the very odd nursery rhyme ("Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home; your house is on fire, your children will burn.") was running through my head as I was drawing, and that theme made its way into the drawing as I moved from my beginning in the top left down to completion in the bottom right.

Fly Away Home