A Taxi and Some Thoughts

Working with watercolors in a 5 x 8 Pentalic Aqua Journal

There are still some piles of snow yet to melt, but it did warm up enough towards the end of last week to entice me into some urban sketching. I noted this Yellow Cab tucked in the back of a tire shop along my walking route last fall. It definitely has seen better days, but I was surprised that those days were in Idaho. I've never seen a Yellow Cab on the streets around here, although it is true that is an Idaho area code painted on its side. So I definitely wanted to capture it in a sketchbook and hoped it wouldn't disappear while I recovered from my nerve issues and winter weather precluded outdoor sketching. I spent one session outlining the shapes with a Pigma Micron Pen (which didn't work well on the watercolor paper) and went back the next day to add some color. I'm very much a novice with watercolor so every time I get out the little travel set, it is an adventure and a learning experience. And really kind of fun!

I've been reading through Sue Bleiweiss's The Sketchbook Challenge, a collection of various textile and multi-media artists' approaches to working with sketchbooks, highlighting some of their favorite techniques. This is especially of interest to me since I started my water series sketchbook, comparing how I am using mine to their's, nodding when my experience is similar to someone else's, and picking up a tip or idea here and there. Sue herself is included, and I appreciated the comment she made at the end of her sharing of her process:

"Serendipity is great and will always have a place in my studio, but you can't rely on it to get you where you want to go."

Gosh, this struck me as such a bold statement to make when so many art quilters really do say everything is serendipity with their creating. I've never bought it 100%, and think a lot of very poor art is being made "serendipitously". I don't discount its value, but like Sue, I don't feel it can be relied on totally.

Austin Kleon threw a few gems at me this week worth sharing. You might file these under the heading "Points of View", adding to my recent post of the same name. This first one is a Saul Steinberg quote from Steal Like An Artist and resurrected in this post which is worth reading too.

"What we respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her own limitations.”

Since I KNOW I have limitations and do struggle with them, it's nice to know I'm not the only one and that it is ok for that struggle to be a part of a finished work.

On the occasion of singer Scott Walker's death, Austin shares, among other things, an Albert Camus quotation, the part below in bold which showed up on the back of one of Walker's album covers. (Lots of links and a video in his post It's Raining Today.)

"A time always comes in an artist’s life when he must take his bearings, draw closer to his own center, and then try to stay there…. A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. This is why, perhaps, after working and producing for twenty years, I still live with the idea that my work has not even begun."

I hardly know what to say to that but I can't stop re-reading it and thinking about it. And feeling it prodding me back to my art.

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March 29, 2019

Rather than put this in a separate post, I'm amending this one to include a quotation from John Berger's Ways of Seeing that was included in a thoughtful excerpt from the book What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky. Copyright 2018  as posted on Longreads.com (The Miracle of the Mundane). While the excerpt only peripherally references art, its thoughts about our current consumer-driven world and what that does to how we end up viewing ourselves is pretty interesting and possible worth your time to peruse. On to Berger, who I add here because his thoughts somehow complement and expand upon those of Saul Steinberg quoted above:

"It is necessary to make an imaginative effort which runs contrary to the whole contemporary trend of the art world: it is necessary to see works of art freed from all the mystique which is attached to them as property objects. It then becomes possible to see them as testimony to the process of their own making instead of as products; to see them in terms of action instead of finished achievement. The question: what went into the making of this? supersedes the collector’s question of: what is this?" 

I rather like that part that encourages us to see art as action rather than finished achievement. It goes so well with my own experience of often being more interested in process than the finished product. The journey is a major reason I create, and perhaps that is why when looking at a finished work, we somehow can't resist wondering about the how, imagining indeed just what went into the making of it.