Physical books

I go to the strand to see, read, buy books, but primarily, I realized, to touch books. Since reading involves engaging and imagining, it is an activity that engages multiple senses. We see the words, the parade of ink patterns to make sense of, but also touch and smell the books in our palms. Papers of different quality, age, and material smell different. The combination of paper and ink creates variable smells, some musty, some chemical, some floral. The aesthetics of the font contributes to the overall smell of the book. Then there are the issues of the sense of touch. Does the paper feel rough, bumpy, or glossy? Is the spine hard and reliable or soft and delicate, like a baby or a lover to coax and take care of? Does the book feel docile,the kind that will obey you into your bag and get along with all the contents already there... or will it resist then dominate the ecosystem with its size and strength? Is the paper blinding white or warm yellow? Will the paper crumble in your hand or give you a paper cut? I go to the strand to touch and smell books because I love them. Perhaps I love books more than actually reading them, which became apparent when it took a while for me to realize that the Caravaggio book I was falling in love with was written in Italian. I was tempted to buy a used copy of "Art and Illusion" simply because I liked the cover in this older edition and the paper that aged with dignity. I resented a nice portable cheap copy of "Middlemarch" that hid from me when I desperately sought out a copy. Books are physical. My collage and assemblege teacher feels our paintings before giving a crit. He seems to say, "how do you know a painting without touching it?" Well, how do you know a book without touching it?

life is a collage

Started reading "the forest for the trees: an editor's advice to writers" by Betsy Keener in order to prepare for a project.. or maybe I just missed writing ... What a tiring self I am living with who needs a reason for everything? Anyway, I am shocked at how much this book can apply to visual artists as much as writers. This can attest to a common foundation in all creative work. Or maybe I just see art everywhere now. My collage and assemblege instructor says the job of the artist, among many things, is to see connections between seemingly unrelated things because in the end everything is somehow related. "Life is a collage anyway," he says... he also says "collage is a painting." So life is a collage; life is a painting. What a terrifying thought.

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everyone had the same idea

Today is one of those transition days that is not quite an autumn but definitely not a summer. It is quite beautiful and fleeting. There are not many days like these and I know my days of being able to fret over the concerns of an art student are limited as youth is also fragile and fleeting. I found myself with a couple of hours before my evening drawing class... I had too many art student luggage to be mobile and walking away my angst. So I braved the NYU undergraduate crowd, grabbed a cup of earl gray and went to the Washington square park ostensibly to sketch. When drawing gave me a headache, I started reading. First I read "the book of grotesque " by Sherwood Anderson because Michael recommended it... and I realized I read this in the ninth grade and I wrote some crazy paper about the absurdity of packaging and owning a truth. That made me feel old and confused so I started reading my portable book about writing. That made me feel guilty about not writing anymore so I looked up... and saw that all around me people are reading. A dude next to me to the left is reading some course packet. He took the bench abandoned by some prelaw who read some serious blue prelaw book after whining about the LSAT on his phone while I was trying to draw. What a loser. Anyway, another dude is reading a tiny paperback... and the cute guy across the oval from me has been reading and underlining and crossing and uncrossing his leg furiously for the past hour... so he is impossible to draw. An old guy is reading a newspaper and I prefer him over another old guy who was here reading his newspaper. Two other people have read and left and so will I. To draw. Which is a choice I keep making these days. Leave the readers and draw.

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Tabula rasa: a new pose and a new sketchbook

I performed my Sunday routine: all my pencils have been sharpened and ready for another week of drawing. Tomorrow in Michael Grimaldi’s class, I start a new pose, pose number 11, and a new adventure. Tomorrow I also start a new sketchbook. I already miss the familiar tattered sketchbook and I am getting a little nervous about being without my notes from end of July to end of Oct. I am, however, ready meet another set of sketches, demo notes, quotes, and thoughts… a chronicle of my artistic development and obsessive fretting.

At the end of my outgoing sketchbook, I am a different student artist than I was at the beginning. There’s the fact that I was introduced to so many new and exciting ideas such as constructing the ribcage and the pelvis, and modelling. But more importantly, somewhere between the pages, I have decided to take my studies more seriously and become an artist. Who will I be at the end of the new sketchbook? I don’t think I can trump all the exciting firsts that happened during the reign of the outgoing sketchbook… and yet, somehow, based on my experience with drawing & painting so far, I know that more wonderful than imaginable things will happen between the pages of my new sketchbook too. And for that, I am thrilled and terrified.

Tabula rasa: daily painting woes

Since I last wrote in this blog, I started painting in oil. I paint almost everyday now… although that doesn’t mean I get to paint hours and hours each day mainly because painting is hard, makes me hungry, and gives me a gigantic headache. So there are days when it comes down to a 30 minute session, most of which is spent playing with my palette and admiring the new funky sheen used wooden palettes acquire.

Drawing is painful but painting is a whole new torture. There, of course, is the issue of seeing color but there is also the material… all those pigments, solvents, brushes, and surfaces. It is incredibly hard to stare at the subject, take five minutes to make a color that isn’t even close, try the color anyway to find that it actually looks different on the panel, and start all over again. I feel stagnant: like some Greek myth character, I may have been condemned to try all combinations and permutations of value, hue, and chroma until I die.

I paint daily and daily I want to quit. Yet the next day, I would be going about my day and then get this feeling that I want to paint everything. In the midst of that euphoric excitement, the finished painting is palpable… then when I actually sit down to do my color studies, the overwhelming frustration returns. But it is ultimately that feeling, the desire to paint everything, that causes me to try again.

This is a feeling I do not understand. And it does bother me that I do not quite know why I want to paint. A short, lovely, and profound book I read this week, Hawthorne on Painting, started giving me some clues. He never answers my question directly, but he does show me the enthusiasm of a painter as someone who is forever a student who searches for beauty and aims to represent it with utmost integrity. And maybe I want to paint because I want to be a painter.

Tabula rasa: the acceleration of time in art class.

One of the reasons why I felt somewhat iffy about taking Michael Grimaldi’s life drawing class at the Art Students League is the way time is marked off in this class: the shorter pose is two weeks and the longer one is four weeks. I could not fathom drawing the same pose for two weeks, let alone the logistics of setting that up (there is tape to mark of the placement of the feet).

And indeed it was initially quite challenging to adjust to the passage of time. The twenty minutes drawing increment felt like an eternity filled with starring at the model, making tentative marks, and scratching my head over why the marks don’t add up to the living breathing model in front of me. The breaks are then filled with starring at other people’s drawings and feeling completely inadequate. The timer goes off while I furiously erase away the remnants of failure. The silence descends on the huge studio and the process renews.

What the other people do in that hushed hollowed silence was a mystery to me. Seemingly random lines come together and the paper pulsates with life. My own enormous 18 x 24 in sketchpad, however, felt overwhelming and oppressive. I thought I would surely have a nightmare about gesture, proportion, and perspective.

Then today, a month later, I noticed an acceleration in time. 20 minutes pass before I have finished my train of thought. And I am anxious about finishing my drawing by the end of the week, the end of my two week pose.

During the long break, I got antsy about drawing and worked on the shading. By habit, I held my pencil out to check the tilt of a shadow shape. The model was not there and I was profoundly embarrassed. But I was mostly shocked at these new habits being instilled in me without my noticing them.

The seductive nature of the drawing process scares me. Drawing was something I always wanted to learn… I envisioned myself carrying a sketchbook around for the rest of my life and putting down some visual thoughts. How cool is that? I can have a great excuse to buy Moleskine sketchbooks. Oh I had no idea that drawing is an all consuming vortex.

I also hadn’t realized how much time it takes to actually learn how to draw. Here are the things people in my class have said to me in separate occasions over the past month and yes, I gasped to all of these statements:

It takes:

• 1 year to see that you are not seeing.
• 1-2 years to start managing anxiety.
• 2 years to learn the basics taught in this class.

I honestly though I would “learn to draw,” whatever that means, in a few months, ya know, give it a summer. Now I can totally envision myself learning to draw for the rest of my life.

Drawing seems to me not a set of skills or a craft, but a method of analysis, one that you cannot exhaust the use of in a lifetime. Besides, art is so insidious. It is permeating all aspects of my cognitive world. For example, I carefully avoided physiology in college (not all that easy as a biology major) only to learn anatomy in an art class. I see shadow shapes everywhere. Drawing is becoming and obsession. And I am not sure if that is a good thing.

*****

Yay—two books were waiting for me when I got home: Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist by Stephen Rogers Peck, and The Art Spirit by Robert Henri. When I first started this class, I found refuge in the recommended reading list because even though I can’t draw, I can read. I mean why draw when you can read all about it? I am somewhat kidding, yet it is still true that books are way less intimidating than the easel.

tabula rasa: learning to draw; learning to see.

I drew for one month at the Art Students’ League. It’s been a rollercoaster. Initially, I was anxious and exhilarated by a new craft. Then when the newness wore off, I started despairing at my inadequacies. I got paranoid thinking my brain was just wired in a funny way that prevented me from seeing what everyone else was seeing. How else do I explain that I see only the light and the dark when everyone else sees myriad values?

Dare I say that I am beginning to see some progress both in my observations and drawings? Not only that, drawing has been a good exercise in managing my anxieties and insecurities. I am still not sure if I will ever be able to have a holistic understanding of the drawing process. But I like this process of putting down line after line with intention, and analytically and strategically putting together the multiple languages.

The other thing I learned was to calm down a bit. It is so embarrassing to be in my class full of talented and/or experienced people. And it is so daunting to stare at the living breathing model and then at my blank paper which progresses into incoherent lines which then progresses into deadening tones. Still, after a while, things work out and the joy of correcting even a tiny thing and making the drawing better is incomparable to any other highs.

I was off this week from drawing in the studio. So I drew simple objects to my heart’s content… and even that wasn’t super successful. So I am already a little anxious about Monday when I go back to figuring out the figures.

Still, I think I will stick with it. I am not quite sure why. I can go into five six reasons why I decided to start drawing… but then I wouldn’t know which answer is the true one. I think for now, I won’t overthink it, which is really hard for me to do. All I know is that I find drawing to be way more interesting, challenging, and exhilarating than I had ever imagined it would be. In fact, this is probably the most intellectually and cognitively arduous process I have ever attempted. So I will get my pencils in varying hardness I have no idea what to do with, and continue to make some bad lines that I hope will turn out decent as time goes by.

In the meantime, I will chronicle my experience of drawing here… and label those posts “tabula rasa,” which is what one of my classmates called me. She said it’s good to be a beginner and learn to draw in our class. I hope she’s right… that all the good instruction isn’t wasted on me. So here I go learning to see the world anew.