SEEING & TRUSTING the PROCESS to LEAD YOU to SEEING

When I began the process of really looking at the photograph to determine which colours were needed, I did not "understand" the shapes that I was seeing, where they fit and whether the colours in the photo were a result of a freak of the camera...but I decided to be slavish to what I was observing, and to create the shapes that I was seeing, in the colour/hue that they presented themselves to my eye.

In other words, I had to TRUST the PROCESS and know that the OUTCOME would be OK. Why is it so hard to TRUST the process, or is it not trusting ourselves?

It wasn't until I had completed the Collage that I realised that the difference in tones on the white keys, were actually a cast shadow of the open piano lid.

In the photo, the colour of the white keys seemed grey and beige. The beige shape was obvious and easy to create. The gray was more difficult. I used a translucent white paper over a gray textured paper to create the graying tinge that I wanted that was not as dark as the gray textured paper available.

The next day, as I sat at my piano, it was the first time that I observed that the lamp on the piano cast a shadow over the keys...something I had never noticed before, but something that was there as soon as the piano lid was opened. I opened and closed the lid, watching that line move back and forth, and understanding a bit more about SEEING things correctly.

The light on the side of the black keys was a light blue in the photograph, and even though I use a darker blue in the Collage, the 3 dimensional impression is well realised, something that I would probably not have seen/been able to do, if I had not approached this as an exercise in searching for the appropriate materials to represent what I saw as the bits and pieces of shape and colour that comprised the picture.

I'm impressed with the end result...it came alive and THEN, I saw what I was doing, rather than SEEING before hand, and having a great MASTER PLAN of how things should go....some lesson in there for the rest of life...things EVOLVE, if you just take it bit by bit. Scary, because in the middle of the process it seems like madness and the questioning and self doubt begin to creep in...don't you have anything better to do with your time? It's been 3 hours already and this thing isn't shaping up? Time to quit? Leave art for the artists? Who're you kidding? Cutting up bits of paper and getting glue all over your hands is for kindergarteners? Time to grow up?
As I discard this inner dialogue and just keep plodding on, IT emerges! WOW!

I can even see the black key that is ready to be depressed! I can hear it since I have perfect pitch! I can play it! Two Black Keys...maybe I'll call this Collage, CHOPSTICKS!

Good exercise in SEEING, and in STICK-TO-IT-IVNess.

I like it. Good lessons here for the teachers in suspending judgement and SEEING the bits and pieces in their kids, until the WHOLE emerges, beautiful in its own right, individual, one of a kind, not to be judged, ridiculed, put down, compared to any other, but to be accepted as a wonderful part of CREATION.

Yes, I like my collage. Probably the most difficult part is knowing where to begin, and then knowing that it really doesn't matter where one begins, just as long as one does. Just BEGIN...not just DO IT, because the latter implies knowing what IT is.

JUST BEGIN, and TRUST that IT will show up. IT did!

It looks simple, and one would think that I should have been able to do it quickly, but it took me 4 hours....what's a Saturday afternoon for anyway. 8-)

Inside looking Out - Jenny at 99 over London

Homework Assignment for Intro to Painting, Spring 2008.

Jenny Bowen Forde at 99 on London Eye: Painted March 5, 2008 from photograph. Acrylic on paper 14 x 18

I would not have believed that I could render this painting in the way that I have. It took a life of its own, and Jenny B came alive in the scene. The assignment was to take a photograph of a window, and paint it showing both inside and outside. This photograph was taken in 2005 and was an amazing shot of my mother surveying London from the pod of the London Eye.

The most difficult was getting started. How to, what to, where to etc. etc. Then I just started, drawing a grid on the photograph and on the paper. I wasn't sure how to start, whether to draw the images first and then paint, or to just start painting. Before I knew it, I began painting shapes of the same colour as in a "painting by numbers" painting. I painted the largest shapes first and was amazed to see how the human figure emerged. The hat should have been a bit more rounded at the top, and not peaked, but the hat is her hat, the head her head, the turn of the neck her attitude, and the curved back, her 99 year old dowager humped back, still regal in her summer silk coat.

Someone at class said it looked like the Queen looking down at Big Ben. She is a regal lady and I'm still amazed how well her attitude was captured...well, I copied the photograph, but still, I'm delighted at how this first attempt turned out.

I didn't know what to do with the scenery in the horizon outside the window. There was too much detail and I didn't know where to begin. So I squinted my eyes, saw the dark shapes and began the "painting by numbers" approach. A blob of paint here, another dark shape that looked like a bird over there, and bit by bit, the scene emerged. Amazing. I chose to exclude details of all the buildings except Big Ben on right and a little bit of Parliament buildings on her left.

The sky emerged as well, as I moved in my painting by "numbers" approach, finding where the same colours were located in the grids across the page. The perspective of the window frame was a bit tricky until I began to pay attention to the angles and differing widths between the right and left of the picture.

It worked...amazing...how do you draw glass? You don't! You draw what you see, and everything emerges.

So I've decided that the artist must first deconstruct the images in order to reconstruct the painting. Bit by bit, the deconstructed pieces are laid down on the canvas/paper, and the brain then pulls those pieces together to create a recognisable whole. Is this how the brain works when we look at anything, and perhaps in painting, we are slowing the process down enough so that each step of "seeing" becomes a separate observable operations.

Much like a toddler beginning to walk...each step is deliberate, shaky sometimes, but distinct and separate from the overall automatic procedure of walking. Automaticity is not yet present.

In the beginning reader, automaticity is not there. In the young person learning their multiplication tables, automaticity is not there. The artist, experienced or novice, works in a similar way. There is no automatic act of rendering an image unless you are a camera. The act of drawing or painting, requires the accumulation of a number of steps, shapes, colours, angles, bits and pieces of the whole which the brain pulls back together into a composite whole.

An artist has to be able to see parts within the whole. The artist must break Humpty Dumpty into little pieces and have a strategy for putting Humpty Dumpty together again. The strategies for putting the pieces together to make the whole, are what a skilled art teacher can convey to anyone, whether artistically "challenged" or supposedly "gifted".

Drawing & Painting is about seeing, about understanding and recognising relationships which are in essence mathematical relationships. Ratio and proportion, angles compared to a horizontal or vertical, and recognising the basic shapes, circles and ellipses, triangles, quadrilaterals and the combination of these.

You also begin to see light and dark, shades, shadows and hues.

This was great fun. Nothing like having the evidence that one is actually seeing. How do we translate this into "seeing" with the spiritual eye, and differentiating the real from the not real.

This was a priviledge to paint my now 102 year old mother and to see her and her hat, emerge. One more thing...I used the analogy of the "melting lollipop" to get going, and gave myself three 45 minute time slots to complete the painting. Not only did I paint by numbers, but I painted by alarm clock.. It worked.!

Melting Popsicles

Melting Popsicles.




Melting Popsicles: HW Exercise for Intro to Painting, Fall 2008, TC, NYC.

I now see that this is a metaphor for time slipping away, which brings meaning to Dali’s melting clocks which never really made sense to me before. “Time and tide wait for no man”. Make that Time, Tide and Uneaten Popsicles wait for no man”. The melting clocks show the concept of time as represented by a time piece, in a dynamic not static state. Time is fleeting, and is essentially melting like the popsicles. The underlying message from this exercise is that we need to “Just Start It”, not “Just Do It” as Nike insists. Sometimes we don’t know “how to” or “what to do” and procrastination kicks in while we are stuck in the phase of “pre-doing”. Like writer’s block in getting the book proposal completed. Melting lollipops, melting clocks, melting time, unwritten books, lost opportunities.
“Three things that come not back, the spoken word, the sped arrow and the lost opportunity.”Omar Kyham.

Now we can add to that the melted popsicle and Dali’s melted clocks.