Return to Montmorency

Some readers may remember last summer's exploratory series of drawings and paintings of the Montmorency waterfall near Quebec City, where I did this charcoal drawing:

I've had an abstract drawing from that series on my studio wall all year, and this week I went back it as the basis for another relief print. At the top of the post is the block being cut. Here's the back of the print, after a first pass with the round baren, with half the print fully transferred to the rice paper using the back of a wooden spoon.

And here's a finished print from an edition of seven. I like this better than all the paintings I did last year, though I'm still fond of several of the drawings.

When I was younger, I seldom worked this way, delving deep into a subject until it is really internalized. Each piece was kind of a one-off – I'd be inspired by something, do a painting of it, seldom even sketching it first, and that was that. Though working that way can be wonderful, it's an entirely different way of approaching art.

Reading the letters and biographies of artists, as well as studying their work (the recent show of Picasso's guitars at MoMA is a good example) made me want to do more of this "horizontal" exploration, making sketches, playing with different media, trying to see deeply into the essence of a particular subject and my own response to it – what is it that I find compelling? Form? Line? Rhythm? Color? What's my emotional reaction? What can I do with the subject to make it my own? Picasso's inventiveness and refusal to stay in one category or style is an inspiration to me. Gauguin's woodcuts and transfer drawings, which I was looking at this week too, couldn't be more different in mood than Picasso's drawings, prints, and ceramics, but I saw, now, how complementary they are to his paintings; you can see Gauguin working on the subjects, going deeper into their emotional impact and his own psyche. Over in Wales, Clive Hicks-Jenkins returns again and again to his St. Kevin, holding the blackbird's nest, and to the blind saint Hervé, and his wolf, and there's a strong sense that he, too, is looking within.

There's something extremely exciting about moving in this direction, and realizing that a handful of subjects can provide such a rich ground for creative and personal exploration, not just for great artists but for me too, if I have the determination to stay with it over time. "It doesn't really matter what the subject is," a painter and teacher once told me. "You just have to be drunk with it."

 

Coming Up for Air

Lately my life has felt like this Chinese fan: colorful, but busy busy busy. The work retreat has ended, though, and today is the first day when I could stick my head up, out of the computer and work table level, and not only take a look around but walk out the door. Where I ended up was crawling around underneath our overgrown juniper and barberry bushes with a hand pruning saw, cutting out dead wood and somehow managing, with the armor of heavy gloves and a long-sleeved shirt, not to get too scratched up. There’s something enormously satisfying about pruning, and this was the macro sort – cutting big branches, hauling box elder saplings and rampant wild rose and Virginia creeper vines out of the tangle of thorny barberry branches with all my strength until they came free with a gratifying thwack.

On the other hand, I’ve loved the work our small team of four accomplished during a three-day intensive retreat, from the planning to the interviews we conducted, to the intense brainstorming sessions and evenings of food, drink, and continued discussion. So much of my professional life has been more segmented and linear: meet with the client, go home and do the work, present mock-ups for approvals, get the jobs printed or produced. But I greatly prefer working in a somewhat larger team where the responsibilites are divided up according to expertise but the creative effort is much more shared by the group. This particular job is complex and involves not only good ideas and technical execution, but a careful strategy as to how we’re going to build alliances and gain approval among a diverse, often competitive group of leaders in the client-institution.

All four of us are around 50 years old, and we all said, toward the end of our time together, how impossible it would have been to do this particular work when we were younger, since we’re all finding it necessary to draw on all the experience we’ve accumulated to try to figure out how to pull this off successfully. It’s hard work, but the kind that makes you run on all cylinders – and that’s fun.

If all goes as planned, we’ll have lunch with my father-in-law tomorrow noon and then head north for a week. This has been another intense week of work, culminating with a presentation this afternoon; all that went pretty well and if the boss doesn’t do something unpredictable tomorrow, we might actually have a few days to regroup and relax. I wonder, especially in exhausted and frustrated moments, why I still do this – and the answer is that it’s fun, on certain levels. Today we met some new people, consultants from D.C., and they were smart, interesting, engaged, very likeable, and impressed with what we showed them. It’s that stuff – the chemistry, the creation of teams trying to fulfil a challenging and worthwhile goal, the figuring out how to do something new from scratch – that makes communications work fun and interesting, even when it’s also maddening.

On the other hand, there are limits.

If all goes as planned, we’ll have lunch with my father-in-law tomorrow noon and then head north for a week. This has been another intense week of work, culminating with a presentation this afternoon; all that went pretty well and if the boss doesn’t do something unpredictable tomorrow, we might actually have a few days to regroup and relax. I wonder, especially in exhausted and frustrated moments, why I still do this – and the answer is that it’s fun, on certain levels. Today we met some new people, consultants from D.C., and they were smart, interesting, engaged, very likeable, and impressed with what we showed them. It’s that stuff – the chemistry, the creation of teams trying to fulfil a challenging and worthwhile goal, the figuring out how to do something new from scratch – that makes communications work fun and interesting, even when it’s also maddening.

On the other hand, there are limits.

If all goes as planned, we’ll have lunch with my father-in-law tomorrow noon and then head north for a week. This has been another intense week of work, culminating with a presentation this afternoon; all that went pretty well and if the boss doesn’t do something unpredictable tomorrow, we might actually have a few days to regroup and relax. I wonder, especially in exhausted and frustrated moments, why I still do this – and the answer is that it’s fun, on certain levels. Today we met some new people, consultants from D.C., and they were smart, interesting, engaged, very likeable, and impressed with what we showed them. It’s that stuff – the chemistry, the creation of teams trying to fulfil a challenging and worthwhile goal, the figuring out how to do something new from scratch – that makes communications work fun and interesting, even when it’s also maddening.

On the other hand, there are limits.

If all goes as planned, we’ll have lunch with my father-in-law tomorrow noon and then head north for a week. This has been another intense week of work, culminating with a presentation this afternoon; all that went pretty well and if the boss doesn’t do something unpredictable tomorrow, we might actually have a few days to regroup and relax. I wonder, especially in exhausted and frustrated moments, why I still do this – and the answer is that it’s fun, on certain levels. Today we met some new people, consultants from D.C., and they were smart, interesting, engaged, very likeable, and impressed with what we showed them. It’s that stuff – the chemistry, the creation of teams trying to fulfil a challenging and worthwhile goal, the figuring out how to do something new from scratch – that makes communications work fun and interesting, even when it’s also maddening.

On the other hand, there are limits.

If all goes as planned, we’ll have lunch with my father-in-law tomorrow noon and then head north for a week. This has been another intense week of work, culminating with a presentation this afternoon; all that went pretty well and if the boss doesn’t do something unpredictable tomorrow, we might actually have a few days to regroup and relax. I wonder, especially in exhausted and frustrated moments, why I still do this – and the answer is that it’s fun, on certain levels. Today we met some new people, consultants from D.C., and they were smart, interesting, engaged, very likeable, and impressed with what we showed them. It’s that stuff – the chemistry, the creation of teams trying to fulfil a challenging and worthwhile goal, the figuring out how to do something new from scratch – that makes communications work fun and interesting, even when it’s also maddening.

On the other hand, there are limits.