To Plow Or Not To Plow

"The hand that rocks the cradle, shucks, the corn, and plows the field, will never write the great American novel."

… I don't know who originated the above … but … I will add … "paint the great American painting" …

… the above quote was a metaphor [mantra?] … and one of the many answers to the ongoing questions [asked by men of the 1960s onward] … "oh yeah? Well where are the great women writers? Where are the great women painters?" … no male ever asked me that question because they knew I had an answer … "she's scrubbing your kitchen floor and her name is mom or wife" …

[btw … later …. "Art News" magazine asked the above "where" question and below their headline was a photograph of 50 female artists …]

… the 1960s was a passionate era for women … [and the 1970s and 1980s, and so on] … an era tersely described as "women's lib" … or … we were "bra burners" … an era now slowly disappearing from memory and going into digital history … I never burned my bra nor marched with the others … I was way-too-timid … and … busy learning a skill … and … plowing the "back 40" …

… once I committed myself to be a portrait painter … I turned to books written by those artists who came before me … as I usually like to do … it's amazing the wisdom one can pick up … and the wisdom I found in making it as an artist [books written between 1900 and 1960] … each first sentence began with … "First you must get a wife." … oh … well …

… but … finding a pro-active spouse is the least of any artists' concerns …. our primary concerns are life's distractions and demands … "to plow or not to plow" is my metaphor to ask the question "do I do this or do I do that?" … a hanging question throughout every moment like an arm attached to our body … rarely do I have a sense of accomplishment after a finished project … behind my busy creative mind is the sense that I should be doing something else … or … something else is not being done … because … on the whole … life's necessities are pretty much equal in importance … as are some distractions … I hear my mind mutter …. "oh … give it a rest and go play a computer game" … luckily … I learned [the hard way] my mind needs to be refreshed and my body needs to be strengthened …

… and so I'll step away from all that thinking and water my garden … but of course … every moment in my garden is filled with "I should do this and I should do that" …

… and … therefore … artists learn to hold several contradictory thoughts at one time … we become quite skilled at it … and some … like me … develop the ability to a high art …

… wait … does my garden need watering? …

Ida Kotyuk, Portrait Painter©

If you get fewer than 2,000 rejections a year, you are not working hard enough

Stuck

… I have over a dozen old computer books sitting on my shelves with nice quality pages waiting for me to draw on them … actually … they call to me … "pssst, Ida, we're just as good as that drawing paper you spend a lot of money on, we're just smaller" …

… so! … there I am … thrilled … paper that I can draw on … and play and experiment with … never to worry about the cost of the paper … and my first attempt was genius … !!! … but … I knew my temperament wouldn't see me through to the end … though I enjoy finding found poetry within every page … I didn't [and don't] want to spend my days drawing black marker lines through entire pages for a few magical words … again, it's too mechanical …

… also … despite being disappointed … despite being frustrated … artists become inspired by experimenting … no matter how bad the finished project … if there is no inspiration … [some kind of emotional feedback to what we are doing] … we know to close that door and open another … that is, sometimes …

… Japanese prints were my original inspiration to experiment with those computer pages … what I love most about Japanese prints is their combination of text and imagery … especially their landscape prints and how the text looks like falling rain … but that's because of how they write … they don't write across a page, they write in a column … and I love the results …

… surely, I, … with all my education … can come up with something similar but using my American language and the ready-made computer text … how hard can it be …

… alright … I got ideas … I got tons of ideas … I thought, I'll use the paper for sketches for my larger work … black china marker sketches should play nicely against black text and computer diagrams … except … after a few pages of sketching, I realize that I like to work out my problems directly on the canvas … instead … I had added an extra step that did not psychically reward me or get me closer to my goal … phooey and heck …

… so, maybe I need color and tried gouache … nope … the paper won't hold up …

… next, I tried brush and ink work like the Japanese … nope … the paper won't hold up …

… next … next … next … the more next(s) I tried … the more I realized I was getting away from my original inspiration … those [damned] Japanese prints …

… it's now going onto three years of labor … and nothing's working … !!! …

… but it's like Thomas Edison said after 20,000 failures … I know I was years ahead of my competitors because … I knew what wouldn't work …

… well … I still have a couple thousand pages left to scribble on …

Ida Kotyuk, Portrait Painter©
If you get fewer than 2,000 rejections a year, you are not working hard enough

Picasso (more stream-of-consciousness)

… okay … maybe this stream-of-consciousness will work … and I made a mistake yesterday with stream-of-conscious which should have been stream-of-consciousness … but that's okay … I'm not going to erase or correct yesterday's choices because the editor in my brain isn't talking to me … every time I want to correct my past he says, "live with it" … and I add, "get on with it" …

… today it's about Picasso … I own a lot of books about Picasso and I don't know why … big books, little books … fat books, thin books, books with pictures, books without pictures … there they stand and lie throughout my house and studio … I think I have a lot of Picasso books because I don't understand the "why" … I thought I did and now I see I was wrong there too …

… at first I believed he experimented to break away from his art teacher father …. and … to break away from tradition … Picasso was a craftsman in his youth … so … who wants to keep painting the same reality over-and-over again … for almost 40 years I held that belief … but then I began to read [and watch the DVDs] of Professor Judith V. Grabiner's lectures from The Great Courses series "Mathematics, Philosophy, and the 'RealWorld'" ... and I thought "oh!" …

… it's a 36 lecture series and way too much for me to cover here … but the lectures have left me reeling … now I have a glimmer of the "why" and cubists' paintings … I haven't formalized the reasons into two-or-three sentences … yet … but knowing me, I will mull-and-mull and then mull some more … the Picasso book I am currently reading is Pepe Karmel's "Picasso and the Invention of Cubism" … Karmel analyzes Picasso's drawings and paintings line-and-brush stroke by line-and brush stroke … a wonderful in-depth analysis …

… what cheers me about Picasso's method of study is his years of experimentation … and failures(?) … does a brand name ever fail? … I had [still have?] a brilliant idea about a series of drawings I wanted to work out on a special type of paper … I was [and still am] bothered by old computer books thrown into recycling bins when the paper used by the publisher was of a fairly good quality … some are more lightweight than others … but these papers will not yellow with age … so … how to recycle the pages into drawings? …

… first … I tried the blackout technique … you know the kind … I find the poem within that page's text … and blackout all the other words … as wonderfully illustrated by Austin Kleon's "Newspaper Blackout" ... the first page I did read, "the ability to play is volatile" … whoa … nice work Ida … but … I don't have the temperament to sit there and draw my marker through line after line on a page … I don't feel creative doing mechanical work … and know that in time I will drop that idea … [this is where I always say, your art will find you, you won't find it] … that is, your temperament will guide you …

… then … to be continued tomorrow … this is a two-and-one-half year of failure after failure …

 

Ida Kotyuk, Portrait Painter©

If you get fewer than 2,000 rejections a year, you are not working hard enough

 

 

 

Stream-of-Conscious

… okay ... if I wish to post anything to this blog it will have to be as a stream-of-conscious … because … the editor in my brain is tired and is looking out at the sunrise or sunset … and … no matter how much I poke at him … [for some reason he's male] … I can't get his attention … instead … I get "you know, I think you would enjoy reading another Regency romance novel … why not pick one up and go and lie down?" … the editor in my brain knows I am easily distracted … and … has begun to try and tempt me to be elsewhere … WAIT … is that a big shiny thing! … who is this psychic creature that knows me so well … as I play the submissive to the master…

 

… okay … my editor knows my weaknesses … a gallon of ice cream … easy … hmmm… so … the secret is to keep none in the house … enough of that …

 

… what does it mean when someone writes or says "life's mysteries?" … is life indecipherable or patternless? … are we / do we exist/ in a monster's dream? … I don't get it … we become editors of our thoughts … "I should have done this or I should have said that" … while writers write to find themselves and to discover what they think … I've been at it for years … and … I still don't have a clue …

 

… he had the mindset to look for the big / the universal / in the small events … tiny parts that create the whole … rather than the whole broken down into tiny parts … his description / story / of the elephant would be just as interesting as the real elephant … in fact … there would be many elephants … some with big ears … some with tiny tails … each part creating an animal … he thought, "that's friendlier to the elephant than dissecting a real elephant into parts" … ahhh … yes … this is easier if I take the "me" out of the story …

 

… but I digress … I love black-and-white movies … they are beautiful lies … while color is a distraction … I should know … a charcoal portrait in black-and-white is a 100 times harder than one in color … put green in the shadow of the nose and you don't notice the eyes and mouth are odd … or … "that's an artist's aesthetic decision" … color will excite a portrait … but … an artist needs to know more about "art" when we need to "excite" black-and-white … a black-and-white drawing is like taking hold of one part of that elephant … how do you show an animal while you hold a big ear? … the idea began with the Impressionists … and … brought to the sublime by Picasso … who … understood … while he made hundreds [if not thousands] of experimental black-and-white drawings trying to step outside our perceived reality … where space is a beautiful lie … also …

Ida Kotyuk, Portrait Painter©

If you get fewer than 2,000 rejections a year, you are not working hard enough

Life Drawing

If you find yourself drifting through your life, take a life drawing class.

There's something about drawing a naked girl or boy that gives us focus. To this day I remember my first nude, my brain stopped chattering and turned to see what truly was in front of it.

Ida Kotyuk©
If you get fewer than 2,000 rejections a year, you are not working hard enough.