Itinerant Artist

We are traveling in Peru. Machu Picchu was our main destination and now we are in Cusco. Today we toured the San Pedro Market. We were told that some of the more traditional women did not like to be photographed so I started to sketch in my journal. But the woman I was sketching hissed at me and threatened to throw some herbs at me. I was surprised. I had thought drawing might be okay. Apparently not. And that has me thinking about the power in a likeness.

We talk about “capturing” a picture, a scene, a portrait. I draw to document my experience of a place. I have stronger memories through drawing than I do through my much more casual snapshots. So maybe she was right that my drawing might “capture” something. Although I don’t think that my drawing diminishes what I draw.

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Getting my computer updated and backed up.

I’ve got a great computer guru who keeps me up and running. I don’t fall for that scam coming over the phone where they offer to fix the problem with my computer. Learning to use my technology is challenging for me. I much prefer real paper, my Pelican fountain pen and a bottle of India ink.

Here–and Beyond–my show at the Patricia Ladd Carega Gallery

AUGUST 5    SALLIE WOLF  HERE…AND BEYOND   NEW WATERCOLORS Sallie Wolf, Squam/Light on Water, watercolor, 30 x 22 inches Sallie Wolf, View from our Veranda, Enashiva Camp, 2.23.16, watercolor, 7 1/2 x 5 1/4 inches

Last night was the opening of my show of watercolors and mixed media at the Patricia Ladd Carega Gallery. The weather was soggy, and luckily the brunt of the rain had passed and the threatened hail and high winds did not materialize. I spoke for a few minutes about the different challenges of sketching on the go versus painting “Big Brush Watercolors” in my studio from my sketches.

This show is a combination of my small travel sketches, done on sight, from observations, often in my journals, where they’ll remain, and what I call Big Brush Watercolors, based on my sketches (not photographs) and worked over time, building up layers and layers of paint, sometimes with a charcoal underdrawing.

One of my challenges is scale–in the sketches I use relatively large brushes (my favorite is a 1″ flat brush), and I can drop in a lot of paint in one stroke. The white spaces are left intuitively. I’ve been sketching like this for years and years, learning as I go.

When I go large, in the Big Brush Watercolors, it’s hard to keep the spontaneity. I use quite large brushes, but can’t get the depth of color I want in one stroke. The green in my travel box that looks great in a small sketch looks really dead and flat in a large shape. So I have to mix more, layer ore, work it more. I come back over and over, layering color until the brush strokes start to show up inadvertently. Then it’s a matter of figuring out when to stop, before the transparency is lost. Or of lifting paint with water to get back to more transparency, letting it dry, and then layering again.

Another challenge I’m taking on is working from travel sketches, not from the New Hampshire scenes I love so well and know so well.

I love to sketch when I travel. I very rarely get to stay in one spot for long; usually we are on a tour or a ship, so I can only absorb the scene for a few minutes. I do take photos, but I prefer my sketches overall. So I’m learning to work from sketches of places I don’t really know–very different from working from New Hampshire scenes I’ve studied and contemplated and drawn for almost 60 years.

Here is a photograph and a sketch of the same scene. One reason I don’t paint from photographs is they actually distort the perspective. The mountains drop into the background and practically disappear. The foreground gets enlarged and emphasized and dominates the scene. Everything in the camera’s lens in forced into one-point perspective. When i sketch, my eye shifts its focus from one place to another. I ignore the rules of perspective. I control the emphasis, the focal point, and I edit out unnecessary detail.

I think charcoal may be a good way to work into the travel sketches. When I draw in charcoal I feel as if I can sculpt the shapes, the volume of things. I can wipe out and redraw. I can create detail in some areas and not in others. And I like the way it mutes the watercolor when I come in with paint. Charcoal gives me both value and line, reminiscent of my fountain pen that I use for sketching. It builds up a stronger surface than straight watercolor and is more forgiving in terms of correction. So that is what I am looking to explore now.

 

 

Before the Moon Project Began

This is an excerpt from one of my journals:

Thinking about the Moon Project, my watchful eye, my travels. Covering things up. Layers of the onion.

I was thinking about a lot of different ideas and bringing them together:

• How can I make a real commitment to my art and still be the wife and mother I want to be?
• How can I move into abstraction?
• What information could I use?
• Looking at Diebenkorn, Pousette-Dart, Alfred Jensen.
• Thinking about the movie about Stonehenge and the really obnoxious British anthropologist who said how could this be a calendar to predict eclipses 69 years apart? These people were illiterate! And that struck a nerve with me. Literate people file their knowledge away in archives, libraries, attics, secret drawers. It remains fragmented and known only to a few. So-called illiterate people depend on memory. they tell and retell the stories, pulling together the group memory. Of course they could amass data that stretched over generations and solve the puzzles of eclipses and lunar and solar cycles.

And all these ideas–commitment, abstraction, esp. based on information, and observing and recording in a non-literate way–plus a feeling that I wanted, I needed, something that would make me go outside–all these factors and more were buried in my head the morning that I spied a crescent moon rising in the East.

I thought it was beautiful, caught in the tree branches. There was a star–probably the planet Venus–close by. It was about 6:30 am and I wondered what the moon was doing, rising at the same time I was. I made an intention to mark it in my journals and to see what I could teach myself, just by looking.

That is how the Moon Project began. November 30, 1994.

More about Poems

I have a collection of poems I really like by other writers. While I was pulling some of them together I noticed a funny coincidence, that I am not sure really is a coincidence. As someone who watches the moon, charts the moon in my journals, and has a major art installation titled The Moon Project, I am naturally drawn to the many haiku written about the moon:

Listening to the moon
gazing at the croaking of frogs
in a field of ripe rice.

Buson

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky—
the moon seals it.

Buson

The moon tonight—
I even miss
Her grumbling

Issa

Moon, plum blossoms,
this, that,
and the day goes.

Issa

 

This haiku has a different subject:

When the winter chrysanthemums go,
there’s nothing to write about
but radishes.

Basho

 

And here’s a poem that makes me both laugh and cry. Do you think Karla Kuskin had read some of these haiku before she wrote this?

Write About a Radish. . .
by Karla Kuskin

Write about a radish
Too many people write about the moon.

The night is black
The stars are small and high
The clock unwinds its ever-ticking tune
Hills gleam dimly
Distant nighthawks cry.
A radish rises in the waiting sky.

 

PS–I am frustrated with the auto-formatting that I am unable to overcome. When I learn more about how to format these posts, I’ll clean them up to make it easier to read the poetry. And if anyone has suggestions about how to do it, I am all ears. Thanks!

 

PPS-Thanks to my nephew Jake Lloyd I have been able to format this post in a more sensible way. Still need to learn more about how to control the spacing.

 

 

 

 

What is Poetry

Or what makes a thought a poem?
I’ve begun writing near daily haiku which I think of as “Weather Report.” When I begin my journal entry each day I always make a note about the weather. (Thomas Jefferson did this and I’m basing my practice on his.) Often the words I use to describe the weather strike me as having a poetic quality, and often they have a syllable pattern that fits haiku. Here’s a recent example:

 

Red House, wrapped in cloud

We are waking in a fog,

Waiting for coffee.

June 30, 2017

 

 

Or

 

Almost a rainbow

Around a not quite full moon–

Rain in the forecast.

July 6, 2017

 

 

These haiku adhere to the format of three lines divided into a syllable pattern of 5-7-5. If I did not stick to this pattern, could any short thought be a haiku? What separates poetry from prose?

Visiting the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM

The highlight of a recent trip to Santa Fe, NM, was a visit to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. There was an excellent video about her life. In Texas Georgia O’Keeffe found her artistic voice, reducing very complex forms to their most basic colors, shapes, and lines. In New Mexico, she found her subject matter.

One of the things I liked best was seeing tiny line drawings–very minimal thumbnails–hung beside finished paintings based on those sketches.

Study for No. 24 – Special

No. 24 – Special / No. 24, 1916-1917

I actually prefer the sketch, which is about 3 x 5 inches or 4 x 6, to the finished painting. Here’s another example–

These six diagonal lines, on a 4 x 6 inch (not sure of the size) piece of paper

Untitled (Abstraction), 1963/1964

became this painting, which is fairly large.

Clouds 5 / Yellow Horizon and Clouds, 1963/1964

The painting is quite beautiful and one I’d not seen before.

There were also a larger selection of her watercolors than I’d ever seen. She used intense, saturated colors, laid down very wet, but with separations. She tended to use primary colors, straight from the tube. There were at least 3 versions of Evening Star, 1917.

Evening Star

Evening Star No. II, 1917

Evening Star

I wonder how many versions she did and whether she trashed any?

Much later in her life, with her eye sight failing, she returned to watercolor and abstraction.

Untitled (Abstraction Green Line and Red Circle), 1970’s

Untitled (Abstraction Green Line and Three Red Circles), 1970’s

Untitled Abstraction, 1970’s

Untitled abstraction, 1970’s

These later abstractions were painted on full-sized sheets of watercolor paper (22″ x 30″).

She traveled a lot in the 1960’s and kept travel boxes of papers gathered in each of the countries she visited.

Travel boxes

Travel boxes

Untitled (Mt. Fuji), 1960

Here are some of the “take-aways” I left with:

• She repeated her compositions over and over, like Evening Star.
• She painted the same mountain over and over, as did Cezanne.

 

Pedernal

Pedernal, 1941/1942

Road to Pedernal, 1941

• Many of her paintings could be cut into large puzzle pieces.

The White Place – A Memory, 1943

Is this painted from memory?

• Her figure studies sit on the paper like the figures in Japanese woodcuts.

Figure

I left eager to work with my own Southwestern sketches, pencil scrawls made as we floated down the Grand Canyon on a motorized raft. Her colors, her shapes, her compositions all speak to me.