Explorations

 

My default process when writing is closely akin to my process when beginning a drawing or collage. I put a blank piece of paper on the desktop and begin with a mark of some kind: a word or phrase, if I’m writing; a shape, if I’m drawing; a scrap of paper if I’m starting a collage. Donald Barthelme puts it in a way that makes sense to me:

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

                                             
After that I proceed by making another, and another, and another, pushing into the space and watching what emerges as I work. As Billy Collins puts it:

The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You’re trying to discover something that you don’t know exists, maybe something of value.

The core concept, the fundamental practice, is thus purely explorational. I don’t know what I’m doing when I begin. And often, when I have finished, I would be hard-pressed to describe what I have done. The artwork, if it is successful, will speak for itself, and will invite the viewer to participate in the creation of whatever “meaning” the work might be understood to have. The “meaning” derived by one viewer will in all likelihood vary considerably from the meaning derived by another.

If this seems to be a somewhat arbitrary and potentially confusing way of proceeding, so be it. I find that submitting myself to this process to be both entertaining and, in the long run, very satisfying. (This all should sound vaguely familiar to anyone who has read my previous post about “the open text” in general and the poetry of Cole Swensen in particular.)

Anyway, all that I have written so far is by way of introduction to a few pieces I have recently completed which combine collage-making of a sort and drawing of a sort. In each case the artwork began as pure collage (pasting paper on paper), and upon completion of the collage work the pen-and-ink elements were added. I had not until recently thought to combine the two, but what resulted when I did so interests me:

 

 

 

What I've Learned

 

What I've Learned

 

 

Alas, not much. But not nothing, either. A place to start,

to begin with. Point A, as when the pen meets the paper

 

for the first time, and keeps moving until it stops and lifts,

or doubles back on itself to make a shape of some kind.

 

Or continues on into the white space, meandering,

trying to discover what it's meant to become this time.

 

Boundaries are helpful. You can go in one direction

only so long without getting lost. Better to return

 

home on occasion and consider whether to expand,

consolidate, change course entirely, or begin again.

 

The choices you make at any particular time are

mostly a matter of intuition. Often one move

 

will dictate the next, and the one after that, in a way

that will, with luck, deliver what you never saw coming:

 

A flower. A comet. A house. A star. A beating heart.

Process Reflection:

This is a poem written after I completed the pen-and-ink drawing in my previous post. The poem is a reflection on the process of drawing in general and of drawing that picture in particular; it is also, inevitably, a parallel reflection on the writing process as I understand it and practice it. Formally, I was attempting several things at once. I originally had it in mind that it would be a sonnet, or at least sonnet-ish, and that each line would contain 14 syllables. When I got to the end of fourteen lines, I found that the logic of the poem as it had unfolded in the writing suggested that I needed one more line, which was a) a surprise to me (I hadn't planned to do that) but also b) a surprise in the poem that mirrored or echoed the surprise that I felt once I had completed the drawing and began to see things in it that I had not completely intended. Although I think looking at the picture may help snap the intention of the poem into focus, I hope that the poem works as a standalone written document as well.

Back to the Drawing Board

 

 

 

 

This is the most recent in a long line of pen-and-ink drawings I have done over the last fifteen or twenty years. I have a particular way of working that has evolved over time. Most of the drawings are done on Bristol paper, which has a very smooth surface that accepts a clean line, and doesn't tear up the tips of the Pigma Micron pens (usually .05 or .08) that I like because the ink dries quickly and is waterproof.

I find the process of drawing to be enjoyable, a way of centering myself. I most often listen to music, humming or singing along to myself while I am drawing. I begin by penciling in the rectangle that I'm going to work within. I used to do the drawing first and add the surrounding rectangle, afterwards, but discovered that it is prohibitively expensive to pay for mats and frames in custom sizes, so in recent years I pick a standard-sized mat, measure out the opening in the mat, and then draw very lightly in pencil the lines that will form the outer edges of the finished drawings.

I never have a plan laid out in advance when I draw, I just put the tip of the pen down on the paper and draw some kind of shape and fill it in, then do another next to that, and another next to that. I leave white space between each shape, and as I work the white space, the negative space, starts to assert itself as a compositional focus that often outweighs the shapes I have actually drawn. At some point I will draw straight lines, like the diagonals in the picture above, to subdivide the paper into sections. In terms of composition, my goal is to wind up with a some stylistic consistency within each section and stylistic variety from section to section. (In an earlier post I wrote a poem about how this process works.)

Obviously this drawing is not a literal representation of anything to be found it the world. It's more or less a pure abstraction, although inevitably some abstracted elements will wind up suggesting something to whoever looks at the drawing. While it's not unusual for people to tell me when they "see" something in the drawing, it is very unusual for that something to be anything I had consciously included. An example in this case is the small rectangular shape in the middle right of the picture which reads as perhaps a house or a face sitting atop something that might be read as a star. I find it interesting when those elements make their presence known as I draw, but I can't say that I have planned them. I accept them as pleasant surprises, or as evidence of my subconscious tossing up something I was not expecting and will not immediately—or perhaps ever—understand. Even the large flowery shape at the upper left emerged mostly because I was working to fill in the negative spaces left by the sixteen smaller shapes surrounding it. I was also consciously trying to introduce some semitones in the form of dots and thin lines to contrast with the more heavily contrasted black and white sections in the rest of the drawing. It became a plant form only by default.

I've had a lifelong interest in art, and have a large collection of books related to drawing and painting and collage. One of the things that satisfies me about the work that I have been doing is that there is nothing like it out there anywhere. There's some Zentangle stuff that I took an interest in for a while, but most of what I saw out there seemed to me to be over-structured and stylistically repetitive. This art is my art. Each time I sit down to draw it's an adventure of sorts, a process of exploration and observation. I enjoy making the drawing, and I enjoy studying the resulting artwork once it is made.

These kinds of drawings do not lend themselves to explanation. There's not much that I or anyone else could offer by way of paraphrase or summary. I could describe in words what goes on in my head when looking at any one section, or at the drawing as a whole, but that would be a pretty pointless exercise. They exist in a non-verbal plane.

Which is not to say that there are no parallels between what I am doing when I draw and what I am doing when I write poetry, or prose, for that matter. My writing practice is not unlike my drawing practice. Probably the most simple and elegant articulation of that process, whether working as an artist or as a writer, has been attributed to Jasper Johns: Do something. Then do something to that. Then do something to that.

I'm sure that there are some people, and you, Gentle Reader, may very well be one of them, who would question why any sane person, given the ongoing political and environmental chaos going on in the world and getting worse every day, would choose to spend his time producing hermetical drawings or often well-nigh incomprehensible poems. My response is pretty simple. There is little or nothing I can do at the personal level to deal with any of that stuff. I'm an old man. I do not see any reason to choose to spend the limited amount of time I have left on this planet tilting at windmills. My art, and my poetry, is something that gives me pleasure while I do it, and some small measure of satisfaction when it is done. Granted, the value that accrues from it does not have a positive impact on the world as it is. But it helps me to navigate and endure that world, for as long as I remain a part of it.

I'll bookend this post with the followup drawing I completed yesterday:

 

Bookmarks II

 

 

 

Just bookmarks again this week. I've been doing more drawing than writing of late. I like working small scale like this; it lowers the stakes and I can finish a piece in one sitting, whereas larger pieces can take weeks. But if you happen to have arrived here looking for something pretty interesting to read, this short essay touches on many of the themes this blog has existed to explore. I ran across it this week in One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle, a collection of essays which is in its entirety pretty awesome. As is his novel, Mink River.

Bookmarks

 

 

Artifactual

 

 

 Artifactual

What's the point? What if
there is no point? What if
the pointlessness is the point?
At what point does whether
or not there is a point become
a pointless question to even ask?


Do you feel like you owe it
to yourself to be able to offer
some kind of explanation?
What is there you can say?
It is, as they say, what it is:
right there in black and white:


Why this and not that? Why not
something else entirely?
Fact is, I can't say. I'm not sure
myself. I am just trying to make
space for something to exist
where before there was nothing.

 

Process Reflection:

I have for some years enjoyed playing around with mark-making in various contexts. One of the simplest forms of mark-making is simply doodling, and at departmental and administrative meetings I found that doodling gave me something to occupy the part of my brain that was going quietly crazy while my left brain was trying to keep up with the flow of the conversation. It's a simple process: apply the point of the pen to the paper, and see what wants to show up. The stakes are low, and if what you have drawn doesn't pass muster, who cares? It still feels good while you are doing it. At least it does to me.

At some point I began, in the comfort and privacy of my study, trying more ambitious projects for which I felt the term "doodling" was reductive and dismissive. I preferred to think of them as black-and-white drawings. In some cases those drawings included some recognizable real-world elements. In many cases they did not. (Samples here and here.) I was primarily interested in exploring the ways in which these two simple elements, black and white, interact with one another, particularly in the negative spaces they create for one another. And the time I spent drawing began to feel a lot like a meditation exercise for me as well; I feel calmed and focused while drawing, and I'm often pleased with the results even when I can understand why someone else might not see them as being "art" in any sense of the word they might be familiar with.

The other night I happened to be in the mood to draw, but as it happened I had two sheets of blank paper in front of me rather than one, and while I drew I was also thinking about what to write for the weekly meeting of the poetry group that I host on zoom. So while I was drawing I began turning over in my mind the whole question of the value and worth of what I was doing, both as an artist as a writer, and as the words presented themselves I write them down, and as the movement of the lines proceeded I did that as well, more or less contrapuntally. The finished drawing is above. In writing the words, I was aware of trying to mimic, in a playful manner, in the sequences of the sounds the repetitive movements and patterns in the drawing. 

The next morning I took the lines I had written and did several revisions, of which the poem you see above is the product, but quite probably not the end product. I have yet to get feedback on the poem from my group. But it seems to me at this intermediate point that the poem is driving at something that I feel is at the core of both drawing and writing: they are disciplines based on a certain sort of magic, which is to make something out of nothing. And I do believe that what results from any particular exercise need not necessarily meet anyone else's criteria of excellence. It's quite enough for me that it makes me feel good when I'm done with it.
 

 

 

Quarter to Twelve

Quarter to Twelve

A strident sun overseeing what might
be desert, what might be sea. Rocks
just here; on the horizon, perhaps, hills.
Something breaking up in the middle
(where it all began, where it always
begins): buckthorn bursting into bloom,
grackles harassing wrens, or maybe
some kind of business with an axe.
Over on the right, a building? A book-
case? A mirror? All of the above?
The whole surrounded by a wall:
contents under pressure. The light
doing its definitive work. The day
nearly over, or just about to begin. 

Process Reflection:

It's been a while since I did a pen-and-ink abstract. Wound up doing this one yesterday. It's small, maybe 4" x 6". As usual I had no idea what it was going to turn out to be as I was doing it. I started in the middle drawing more or less random shapes, and worked my way around, ending with the circular figure in the upper left. I was aware, as I worked, of wanting to break up whatever patterns were emerging as I worked, which is why I went to some horizontals in the lower right and then to some verticals and right angles in the upper right. By the time I got to the upper left all I had left to do was circles, so since it was looking landscapey by that time I decided to do a sun thing.

But I kind of liked the way it came out. And today when I was trying without success to get some traction on a poem, I put that work aside and thought I'd just try to work out from the drawing and see what words showed up. I was conscious of wanting to have the poem have some of the same shiftiness that was present in the picture, as well as some of the same continuity. The title just popped into my mind somewhere in the middle of the third or fourth draft.

Looking at the picture as it will appear here, I notice that it appears a little lumpier than it would if I had taken it with my regular camera than with my iPhone. But you can kind of get the idea of what it looks like.

Drawing as Exploration

Put the point of the pen down

somewhere in the upper left

corner of the paper, and move

your hand, leaving a mark, an angle,

a curve, a line that moves away

and then comes back to connect

with itself. So now there's a shape,

and that shape sets the direction

for the next, which must of necessity

be similar or different, larger or

smaller, closer or farther away.

Now there are two, now three,

now twenty. Along the way questions

arise. How long, for example, before

whatever patterns begun by accident

should by design be broken? How much

of the surface should be inked, how

much left white? How close to the edge?

What about the negative spaces?

Inking is another story, silent, automatic,

eye and hand in motion, mostly

without thought. Music can help

to mark the time, set the rhythm

and the feel. It will take longer

than you think. Often the pen tip

starts to fray, or the ink dries up.

Switch pens. A pen with a big tip

makes the work go faster, but

if your hand strays it's harder

to correct the mistake. Hold

your breath, pay attention, learn

to trust your hand. When

the drawing is done, touch up

the tiny white spots with a fine-

tipped pen, and you're done.

Step back and see what you've got.

-->

Checking In

Funny how fast a couple of weeks can slide by. Last time I posted something here was eleven days ago. I've been writing; just not here. I've gone back to my Moleskine, which confers some freedoms while making others harder to exercise. The writing I do there feels more relaxed and less fraught, maybe because I know while I'm writing that the only one who is going to see it is me. But it also tends to be ultimately more impulsive and fragmented, because the kind of patient building and layering and re-shaping that I can do over the keyboard is much harder to do with just a pen.

I also circled back around and did a drawing over two days that harkens back stylistically to the series I was doing in late summer.

Combine

While it does bear a family resemblance to some of the others I've done along the way (see below), its architecture and temperament are uniquely its own. The combination of centripetal and centrifugal forces in the composition makes the piece feel pretty alive to me.

I started it by just just drawing and connecting the generally horizontal and vertical (and occasionally curved or diagonal) lines into a loosely structured grid, just black on white. The second step was to populate each area of the grid with some kind of shadowing, either by cross-hatching or by filling in areas with black. The last step was shade various blocks with one shade or another of brown ink. Total time invested on this one: maybe five hours. It's time that I consider well spent, even when, as sometimes happens, the experiment goes awry. There's something both calming and satisfying to me about working through the challenges that a drawing presents as I attempt to bring it to life on a blank piece of paper. It's an activity, like washing the dishes or sweeping the leaves off the sidewalk, that has a clear and concretely experienced beginning, middle, and end. And the result of the process is (most if not all of the time) visible progress. You can check that one off. It's done.

64 x 61 (The Road)

Been gone for a week or so. Just got back. Didn't get to write while I was gone, but did work on a series of small drawings of the kind I was doing a while back but had gotten away from.  Now that I'm back I'm trying to find my way into a working rhythm. Again. Here are a few from the recent series:

64 x 60 (Nothing Is…)

I started drawing tonight on a piece of paper five and a half inches square. It's basically a backwards drawing: inking in the black spaces creates the white lines. Right now, it looks like a collection of black shapes on a white background, but once it's done, it'll be a latticework of white lines against a black background. Nothing is but what is not.

Out of Dreams

As a child I often had dreams that consisted of colored geometrical shapes against a black background, moving over and through one another: rectangles, triangles, circles in motion, combining and recombining, morphing into one another.

Over the last few years I've devoted a fair amount of time to what might be thought of as abstract expressionist drawings of a sort. But whereas the abstract expressionists were enamored of the spontaneous gesture, making their marks in bold strokes, the drawings I have been doing are spontaneous only in conception; in execution, since they are being done not with a brush but a fine-tipped pen, they are very slow to evolve. Just to do one dark black line or curve involves drawing two outlines at either side and methodically inking in the space between. It's a centering exercise, slow and and deliberate, and most often when I'm at it I'm listening to music as well. (I toyed with calling the last one below 400 Lux, because Lorde was a dominant presence during its gestation.)

These drawings typically begin with an impulsive mark—a random shape, a line, a squiggle—and then evolve outwards. Having made one shape, I make another next to it, and another next to that, working around in a vaguely circular motion toward the edges of the paper. Often, early in the process, a rule will suggest itself: this drawing will have only curved lines, or only triangular shapes, or only shapes that do not touch each other. Sometimes the rule is that the drawing will consist only of solid black and solid white; other times I will use an extra-fine marker to create shading via parallel lines and different degrees of cross-hatching. Recently, I've played around with adding ink washes of varying consistencies for contrast:

I rarely have any idea at the start what the drawing will look like, and most often I will make an effort to steer away from anything that begins to look like it might want to be something. Every once in a while what emerges from under the pen is so strongly suggestive of something real that I will go with the flow and let it become what it seems to want to be. In one case that caught me by surprise, I found myself looking at some kind of fishlike creature, at which point I just gave him some additional fins in the back and let him be:

The drawings I've been doing lately have reminded me very strongly of the dreams I had as a child. In several cases, I've actually gotten ideas for drawings from the latent images on the inside of my eyelids as I was arising from sleep. The image below had its origin in just such a way. I was waking up from a nap and the image of the blue rectangles with the incomplete lines moving in from the edges to the center were in my head, and I thought, okay, maybe I'll try drawing something like that:

So while my drawings may not have a subject as such, they do feel true to a deeper, discursive logic that arises from within me. The two most recent ones I have completed were both more complex and more satisfying in the way those complexities resolved themselves:

There were several points in this last one where I was tempted to stop and leave more white space, but it somehow wanted to keep growing. Now it's presenting itself as some kind of fantastic tree. It didn't start that way; it really began up toward the top in the darker section and grew downward. But once it reached the ground, I felt like it was in fact done.

So this is the current state of my art practice. I'm hoping to work my way back to painting at some point, but in the meantime, the drawings are helping to keep me tethered.