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.

Dorothy Parker - "I hate writing, I love having written."

One day, out of nowhere, the above line became a descriptive mantra much like a music refrain we can't erase, year-in and year-out . I remember the exact moment. Bent over in my garden pulling weeds I stood and shouted, "I hate gardening, I love having gardened." Dorothy's lines define my relationship with daily and seasonal chores.

 

But, there are periods when I don't hate, and one is in my studio. Studio time evokes many emotions but never hate or dislike.

 

Dorothy shows me,

I am where I belong.

 

Ida Kotyuk©

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

How Do You Pronounce Kotyuk?

I'm a "yuk" not a "yak." Then someone will spell my name "Kotyuck." Or, at the pharmacy, I give them my card with the clear embossed name Kotyuk and get their receipt with the name "Katyuk" in bright red three-inch letters.

"Why don't you change your name? It's too hard to pronounce." a friend once said.

"There's only six letters. Picasso has seven letters and you know how to pronounce his name!"

Some family relatives pronounce the name as Ko Ti Yuk. It has something to do with school teachers and the theory of language.

Others in the family say KÓ tyuk. I grew up pronouncing it ko Tyuk. [Like the sneeze, achew!]

In college, I gave up. My new friends asked, "How do you pronounce your name?" I would say "ko Tyuk." Then I would hear a series of "Ko…Ko…"

Enough already. What do I care how it's pronounced. What is important to me is you can read it clearly on my paintings and drawings. So now I say, "It's Kot Yuk," a phonetic pronunciation. In the meantime, please feel free to say it as you like.

See "Chicken With Its Head Cut Off."

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