Small log #5

11/3: Small log #5, oil on linen panel, 5x3 in.

I guess I felt a bit more inspired this time - inspired to STOP before wrecking the parts I like. Man, I'm tired of coming up with some nice effects (accidental or not) then obliterating them totally because in some way it's more comfortable repeating crap brushtrokes that aren't working. So I left it this way, before filling it up with more brushwork of that type.

Small log #4

11/2: Small log #4, oil on linen panel, 4x5 in.

This is my first time on a linen panel and it's real nice. I lost the great smoky, tonal light I started with and ended up more and more "juicy," unfortunately.

Small log #3

11/1: Small log #3, oil on canvas panel, 3.5x7 in.

I could paint this thing a hundred times from different views, but I won't. Here it feels almost like a small dog (some proportions were altered). At last I'm beginning to have a better understanding of my neutrals and can probably begin to push the grey-brown range more in the future, without compromising the strength of the other colors - which has been less than intuitive for me for some reason. This ended up going beyond two hours.

I thought I'd share here the mountain of paint blobs that has been accumulating at my easel. Made of palette scrapings, runaway brush hairs and the occasional flying insect that's fatally attracted to my paintings, it grows with every swipe of my glass scraper. Perhaps growing slower nowadays as I try to let less paint go to waste (it's good when the scrapings are mostly thin and wet and not big dried globs). It started with an old sock used for soaking up turps or oil, but thoroughly dry - i.e., not a combustion hazard, as everything dries flat before ever being folded up in this way. Watch the folds!! Don't let an oily cloth sit crumpled in a way that its heat gets trapped. I've seen, a long long time ago, one of my rags smoking as it sat in a bag of trash, maybe not remembering what I'd heard Marshall Arisman tell of the fire that wiped out his studio when he was younger (but he used/uses really oily rags). So make sure wet rags are lying flat before leaving the room for any length of time - it won't take long for a fire.

But, anyway, this is a thing my wife will point to saying, "That's nasty":

Small log #2

10/31: Small log #2, oil on canvas panel, 7x3.5 in.

Different view of same log (and I took more than a few liberties with the shape, as I did yesterday too). I like it but I probably could have pushed some of the dark purple more in the bark, towards the middle, and done more dry brushwork throughout. This ended up being about two hours.

Small log / a Middle English poem

10/30: Small log, oil on canvas panel, 3.5x7 in.

I found this perfect little log and had to do something with it. There was a lot of dragging of paint in the beginning because I started when the underpainting was still a bit sticky, but I liked that. It was about an hour and a half, and overall it feels good to me.

Old English word of the day:

wudu [wŭd'-ŭ]: wood.

I wish some of my previous pieces were this loose, and I like the colors a lot. I'm starting to really like the blue-green that comes from lightening the weird Prussian blue/oxide red mix, as it has a watery and almost mystical feel to it. This makes me think of a fish in water, which brought to mind this Middle English poem I'd read:

Foweles in þe frith,
   þe fisses in þe flod,
   and I mon waxe wod.
Mulch sorw I walke with
   for beste of bon and blod.

Birds in the forest,
   fishes in the sea,
   and I must grow mad.
Much sorrow I walk with
   for best of bone and blood.

This is an ambiguous but incredible little poem, very personal no matter what genre you believe it belongs to. I don't know anything really about Middle English so I'm unable to elaborate on the large amount of material already written about it. Leaving aside the expert discussions I've found on rhyme, rhythm etc., and how it all comes together to create such emotional impact in a few lines, here is what I've digested.

The shift from a picture of harmony in the world to something personally troubling comes on the word wod - which if it means "wood" could continue the pattern of the first two lines, but which in this context apparently means "mad." I assume that these two meanings of wod were pronounced differently (either with a short or long vowel, none of which are ever indicated), so if there is a play on words it is a subtler one. But the real ambiguity of the poem lies in what was originally meant by beste, and therefore the source of the sorrow:

(1) To be a "beast" of bone and blood means to experience sorrow like the aforementioned animals of the sea and sky, as creatures of flesh; or perhaps the sorrow comes from simply being alive after original sin (everything being written in a Christian context).
(2) Or, being human, the "best" of bone and blood, means ironically to be the creature capable of actually knowing sorrow (and becoming mad), separate from the rest of nature. There would be no sorrow if he were a fish in the sea.
(3) It has also been suggested that this is just one of a large number of religious poems, the "best" signifying Christ - because Christ suffered, the poet sorrows; and in addition to carrying the weight of original sin, the poet knows what is expected of him in this life. Furthermore, this could be an echo of a verse in Matthew and Luke: "the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head."
(4) Perhaps the most widely held belief is that this poem is of the courtly love tradition and that the "best of bone and blood" is simply the woman for whom the poet yearns.

It's for every reader to decide, but I prefer (2) or perhaps (3).

Autumn arrangement

10/21. Autumn arrangement, oil on canvas panel, approx. 6x10 in.

I may leave it at this point. If I do any more work on it, a few areas could use some touching up and varnishing to get rid of the dullness, but for the most part it feels like I wouldn't have much more to "say." It has some of the explosive chaos of the environment from which the arrangement got its inspiration. And as a color study there's a lot going on.

Work in progress

10/20.

I used some more neutrals, mainly some greys and a light warm brown-ochre sort of color, which I had been doing for a while but for some reason hadn't used lately. I took this photo more as a reminder to myself, as I have so many blobs of paint "saved" on my easel that I no longer know what's what. It's beginning to come together and I can see the end of the tunnel from this point. Loosening up a little has helped a lot, and I'd be happy with even more impressionistic color dabs. (I don't know where the background is headed; some of it was just an attempt at more sprezzatura or something.)

Work in progress

10/19.

I tried to simplify the colors more, using fewer to mix with - I find it very hard to switch to a more tonal palette suddenly, especially in the middle of a piece, but I feel I made some progress (at least psychologically) once I threw in more neutrals that incorporated the cadmiums. And it probably will have little immediate effect, but I took burnt umber off my palette completely; transp. red oxide and ultramarine can do the job of any dark brown and be a good base for some unifying greys - I've wanted to use more of the great greys I'd discovered before and I really don't know why I haven't been. Apart from reversing the value relationships in a few places and taking a better look at the pine cone, I haven't changed much, and as anyone can see this is still moving very slowly. But on what other blog can one watch a painting of tinder get dragged out this many days while reading Old English nature poetry?

Work in progress / Old English riddle

10/18.

It has been a mediocre week. I don't know where this piece is going and I'm sorry if I wrecked some portions that may have actually been ok previously. It has been like an ongoing color study, and I decided the fauvism is fine since it is an autumn piece after all. Thinking about how the subject amounts to little more than kindling made me think of this riddle I had read before, so the last few nights after painting I've been tinkering with a translation as a mental diversion:

Ic eom légbysig, láce mid winde,
bewunden mid wuldre, wedre gesomnad,
fús forðweges, fýre gebysgad,
bearu blówende, byrnende gléd.
Ful oft mec gesíþas sendað æfter hondum,
þæt mec weras ond wíf wlonce cyssað.
Þonne ic mec onhæbbe, hí onhnígaþ tó mé
monige mid miltse; þǽr ic monnum sceal
ýcan úpcyme éadignesse.

I am troubled by flame, sport with the wind,
wound with glory, one with the weather,
eager for departure, afflicted by fire -
a blooming grove, a burning coal.
Often friends pass me from hand to hand
so that men and women proudly kiss me.
When I rise up they bend down to me,
many with meekness; there I shall increase
the uprise of happiness among men.

This is "Riddle 30," a difficult one and clumsy when translated. The answer is generally accepted as a tree (béam) with its compound meanings of "cross/ship/log" and its further use as a cup, bowl, or possibly a musical instrument.

Here the tree - and the "tree" on which Christ died - speaks, as it does in another poem called the Dream of the Rood and as other riddle subjects do, in the first person. (I'd meant to keep all mention of religion out of anything I write as I'm not a religious person, except when dealing with Old English where Christian themes are so common.) It undergoes wondrous transformations, shifting back and forth between a flammable ("lightning-busy"?) flowering tree and the various uses of its wood, seemingly unconnected and in confusing chronology. "Eager for departure [the journey forth]," describing possibly a ship, has also been seen as a warrior kenning for "ready for death" - which reinforces the shift back to a log or ember in the fire, as well as foreshadowing the notion of the cross. From there it shifts to a more personal hand-crafted object going "from hand to hand" connecting people in everyday ritual. Ultimately it takes on its highest purpose as the cross of the Crucifixion – or a crafted symbol of it, the highest form of art and something that touches all members of society. In all, this could be meant as an illustration of how God is present in all things and how "[n]o other power but God’s can connect the unconnected things of the earth and the unrelated events in time" (S. L. Higley, Between Languages).

But it's very ambiguous - that is, to us today. The third half-line is usually taken to mean the glory or splendor of a tree’s brilliant foliage (which is then possibly "gathered by the weather" if you prefer a different translation). But perhaps it also implies the glory of being the Lord's chosen tree. Maybe it refers to a ceremonial cross typically adorned with gold, silver and jewels, or even an allusion to the Dream of the Rood or similar story in which the true cross is similarly decked out and surrounded by light (another sort of "beam"). These old poets were cræftig.

Work in progress

10/17.

This may have been a couple of hours further along. I spent a good deal of time trying to get the red/orange/pink of the middle leaf and red/purple of the right leaf to make sense within the larger scheme. Then I played around with different elements in the background and trying out different colors. It has been very slow going but I will finish it and not let it languish incomplete (as my self-portrait is doing). Please bear with me.

The stick got a little too delineated and will have to be knocked back a little, especially on the left end. So far the bark hasn't been very complicated, just a matter of finding the right colors to lay down. I get frustrated a lot of the time knowing in my mind the kinds of effects I'm after in my painting and not being able to recreate them. Once in a while I look in my art books for specific guidance, on textures for example, and last night looked at Lawrence Alma-Tadema again for the first time in years - anyone not familiar already should find a book on him and have their mind blown. Sheesh ... what is this fauvist junk I'm painting? I need to restrict my palette.

Work in progress / Color chart: purples

10/16.

Showing something in progress is like having a crowd watch me walk a tightrope (I don't like crowds much). With no one around it's a simpler matter of getting from A to B, and what might happen in between is my business.... So here I am inching along. Another hour and a half or so, but it didn't really shape up as much as it could have. I thought the other day that I was getting sick, but now it seems I'm just in one of those funks when I can't focus on what's in front of me (the kind that used to be much darker and lasted very long times). Or maybe I need to get a really good night's sleep.

Thinking about being sick only reminded me of the great ones who died so young, through no fault of their own, yet were able to create such great work. That's to say I don't mean Janis Joplin types who drank and drugged themselves to death. But those like the poet Keats who died at 25, and especially my painting hero Richard Parkes Bonington who died at the same age, only a month shy of his next birthday - both from tuberculosis. I know I haven't made the most of my time on earth, but I am grateful to be alive.

I left this piece at the point where I began to add the purple in the leaf at right, and then did a chart of purples:

Work In progress: Autumn arrangement

10/15: Autumn arrangement, oil on canvas, approx. 6x10 in.

I felt sluggish all day yesterday and could barely get this far on this piece. I spent only an hour but a long, slow hour, and my mind didn't seem to be at full power. Hopefully I can make something interesting out if this mess. I'm not looking forward to painting the little pine cone in front, or all the bark on the stick (like in the piece before). A subtler challenge might be to make sense of the stick with its cool undertones in front of the hot red leaves and pine needles in back.

It was interesting when I looked up "autumn arrangement" to find pretty flowers and harvested fruits and vegetables, and here I've set up some dead wood that I "harvested." It just shows what I find more interesting - some fallen things as they might have "arranged" themselves on the ground, waiting for an 18-month-old little girl to squat down to investigate.

Old English word of the day:

hærfest [hâr'-vəst]: autumn; this also came to mean the
month of August.

Hærfest derived from the same Proto-Indo-European root as did the Latin carpere (to cut, divide, pluck - "carpe diem").

Closeup of stick

10/14: Closeup of stick, oil on canvas panel, 3x5 in.

Here is something somewhat abstract. I was going to set up an arrangement of sticks and leaves like a snapshot of random ground, thinking I had prepared a larger panel when I hadn't. So instead I focused on a portion of a stick purely as exercise (like jumping jacks), not caring much about accuracy, only color. In the back is a bunch of pine needles and a red leaf reduced to a shape.

Old English word of the day:

rind [rǐnd]: bark, rind, crust.

Sassafras leaf

10/11: Sassafras leaf, oil on canvas panel, 4x5 in.

My daughter loves to examine leaves on the ground. This one I took inside with me because it was in decent shape and the deep red was great. I'd seen this type of leaf a thousand times and not known what tree it comes from, so good thing we have a Trees Fandex Family Field Guide. Big kids would have fun with this book and its die-cut leaf shapes, which make it very easy to match our most common tree species (the annoying thing is that the pages catch on each other).

I wished I could capture all the subtle colors on this leaf, or at least make a translation that conveyed a fraction of the complexity that I saw. But I could go nuts trying to do that, as I felt I might when I went over the same area for the fourth time to get it "right." So, on the other hand, I wish I was able to simplify a leaf (the way I possibly could with a fruit) down to the point that all surface nuances were left totally to the imagination. I guess the idioms I use in translating could be better at times. Here the main challenge was balancing the dusty purple in the center, which I played down, and the seemingly hundreds of hot and cool reds throughout.

Magnolia leaf

9/19: Magnolia leaf, oil on canvas panel, approx. 6x4 in. SOLD

At first this seemed easy. I felt I understood the twisting forms well enough and didn't think the foreshortening would be hard to deal with, but of course it turned out to be quite a little challenge. While painting these leaves I kept Bruegel in mind - in a few places I thought I had managed to touch on that simple quality that he had, but most times not.

Sometimes I imagine how Bruegel would approach something, he and his thin paint. For him it was a matter of delineating some shapes and filling them in, which is maybe why many of his great crowd scenes are just complex arrangements of simple shapes (or simple arrangements of complex shapes). This is after all what kids do, before being taken in by brushwork and paint build-up and various other art school pretensions. Now, Rembrandt is a god and I love a thick brushstroke as much as the next guy, but "lean to fat" doesn't have to mean "lean to obese" - that is, paint build-up doesn't have to be the goal of all oil painting just because Rembrandt showed us his way. How many painters are out there who can do a good job and are totally unconcerned with brushyness? In my humble opinion, the simple falling of light on the cap or the sleeve-folds of a bagpiper in Bruegel is at once earthly and sublime in a way unmatched by Hals and Sargent and their wannabes, or even Rembrandt and Velásquez.

Magnolia leaves #2

9/17: Magnolia leaves #2, oil on canvas panel, approx. 4x6 in.

While painting the dry, brown and nibbled-at portion of the leaf, I was reminded of the Old English riddle I revisited the other day. The challenge of translating is similar to that of painting from observation, in that an attempt to "literally" restate what's presented to you isn't usually the best way (I am still learning this). Of course, all subjects get simplified in a painter's own peculiar way, even subconsciously, but invariably there are sections that have to be more dramatically edited in order for them to make sense. That section of the leaf was challenging enough because of the complexity of color and pattern on the surface, but made trickier by the small working area. I took on the challenge instead of changing the leaf entirely to avoid it, and worked and reworked that small part until I felt it was both simplified enough and yet had enough of that quality I found interesting to begin with. I don't know how successful I've made it, or how I would have done it differently. But the nice thing is that no one but I would know for sure what the leaf actually looked like.

As I worked on the riddle of the swan I liked the specificity of some of the Old English words and kept them literal. But a few lines were more demanding. "Flóde ond foldan" is literally "flood and earth," or, flow/tide/sea/stream/river and dry land/soil/ground/country. In my mind the literal approach seemed the simpler one, but the more I thought the more detached it felt from the sense of the poem. The challenge was to find a better way and one that wasn't an attempt to outdo the well-crafted original with something I had just crafted. I'm not the first to suggest "field," though that has its word, feld (but they are probably related). And even though the whole riddle speaks symbolically of the swan as a "ghost" traveling between worlds, the specific ideas of field and stream make more sense to me in creating a picture of the animal than weightier symbolic terms like earth and flood.

More of a challenge was "oþþe þá wíc búge" in the second line (or third half-line). It literally says "or the dwelling(s) inhabit" - it's not clear to me if it's plural. That is, occupy/dwell (in) a dwelling/house/village. Wíc survives in some place names as -wich or -wick and so I took license and thought of it in a broad sense, unspecific like "ground" and "waters," hence my pick of the word "place."

Before starting to write this I found the blog "Brave New Words" which talks about translation. It seems interesting and I'll have to read it when I have more time.

Magnolia leaves

9/16: Magnolia leaves, oil on canvas panel, approx. 4x6 in. SOLD

Well, we think they're from a magnolia - I collected a few leaves from around some saplings we saw by the water behind the apartments on a neighboring street. As well as an exercise at foreshortening this was at one point a more deliberate color experiment, with the blue-green of the background (mainly cerulean and ochre) much stronger, but that became very distracting so I softened it.

Pine cones

Pine cones, oil on canvas panel, approx. 8x10 in.

8/3. My accuracy here wasn't so good. I think I may have even added an extra row of scales somewhere on the upright cone.