Ordinarily, I am not a big fan of artists who are pushing the envelope on “mark making.” In fact, I am not a big fan of the term “mark making”. It seems like a 70s concept whose time has come and gone. Yes, we do draw in a variety of media, in a variety of ways. But, I would rather see this as a part of the long tradition of drawing that began with pictographs, and has continued throughout human history, rather than a human activity that suddenly sprouted up in the last quarter century. Immediately I applaud Knowles for allowing trees to draw and allowing humans to find the beauty and meaning in these drawings.

“Tim Knowles creates drawings independent of his own hand, using elaborate apparatus or time consuming practices. Interested in the process of drawing Knowles invents experimental and playful procedures to introduce chance and unpredictability into his work. Often he will employ and expose mans relationship to nature, in an ongoing series which will feature in the exhibition, Knowles attaches pens to the tips of branches of various trees; placing paper in front of them he allows the chance movement of the wind to dictate the composition of the final drawing. The artist surrenders final control of the work, questioning the authority of the artist whilst allowing the fundamental and primordial characteristics associated with drawing to be communicated.” Rokeby Gallery

Naturalist, artist, and journal-ist, Hannah Hinchman has a page of wisdom on how to do an illustrated journal. In a short space she addresses the basics of how to journal, materials and most importantly, the reasons why:

“When I teach workshops on the illuminated journal, I explain what I call a “scale of journals”: On one end is the Informational journal, the true naturalist’s field journal. It concentrates on the quantifiable and identifiable, gathering names, facts, and observations with an impartial thoroughness. It contains drawings, but they are meant to be explanatory. There is little room for the personal in this kind of journal, though I admire it for the valuable role it serves in adding to the body of knowledge. On the other end of the scale is the Reflective journal. It’s purely personal, mostly concerned with human-generated culture, investigations of the psyche, relationships, responses to art and writing, dreams, memories—as in Anaïs Nin’s diaries. The self is the subject rather than the world. The art in this journal might look more like William Blake’s paintings.

In between the two poles are two other kinds of journals that have become more and more central to my interest. The first is the Investigative: It documents the outer world, but includes many unmeasurable and unnamed phenomena, like the effects of light, ways the seasons change, patterns and textures in nature. It goes outside the categories of the Informational journal and finds links between apparently dissimilar things. Thus it includes more of the person making it, because it’s up to that person to invent new categories. Art in this journal would look more like what we find in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.

The other is the Resonant journal—so called because it acts as the place of interweaving between the person and the world. Curiosity extends both inward and outward: You are a naturalist on the trail of your own life, and you search for insights in the more-than-human world as well as the human. These two kinds of journals, as embodied in Goethe and Thoreau, seem to me the richest of all. The art included in them might look like anything from Dürer to Paul Klee.”

Morning Earth, a site on nature education, offers us a glimpse into a few of Hinchman’s newer journals. Hinchman offers some insight on keeping the writing part of journaling alive and moving forward:

“The best way to avoid the trap of dead words is to keep a firm grip on the real stuff, prickly, slimy, or bony as it may be. Think how we are awash in gutless speech: the space-filling of the report, the obfuscation of the academic paper, the evasion of the political statement.

Keep alert for dense, rich words, and don’t hesitate to fling them around. How about fox, dirt, leather, squirt, chafe, warp, vortex and crinkle? Being on good terms with words like that will keep you from losing yourself in the labyrinth of the abstract and the over-intellectual.

And cleave to verbs. A drifting, off-target account can suddenly ignite if you insert the right verb. There are plenty of verb-gems languishing out there that deserve to be polished up and placed in new settings: dissolve, mirror, badger, uproot, winnow, slather, suspend, carve, blot, bundle, contort, revolve, flood,
Crumble, dither, tamp, utter.”

This is only very peripherally related to fiber art, but the design in them is wonderful. Barnacle Press has posted a series of patterns for moving paper ‘dolls’. Note these are not the paper dolls that many of us recall from our youth, but rather humorous movable sculpture. “These papercraft toys are from the LA Times’ “Junior Times” section, circa 1922-23. I’m really excited to add these to the Supplement, they’re gorgeous little mechanical paper puppets. The subject matter is wide, ranging from cops and butchers, sports figures, cats, dogs, and birds. The art ranges from fairly realistic to delightfully cartoony, reminding me of the work of Rick Geary, which is to say that it’s wonderful!”

Natalie Goldberg is a name known to most aspiring fiction writers. She is the author of several writing books, such as Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind. In 1997, Goldberg published Living Color, a book that explored the connections between her painting and her writing.

Her beginnings were simple and persistent: “In those early Taos years, I developed a commitment that once I began a drawing, no matter how bad it was, I had to finish it. This understanding of commitment came from writing. Quitting in the middle of a writing exercise reinforced my internal critic, who said that I couldn’t do it, or it was boring, or I was lost. But continuing to write–finishing–weakened my fear, my doubt, my disbelief in myself.”

from BoldType

As is her enthusiasm for her experiments and her growth: ” I was delighted one day to paint an adobe house blue. Stepping through the belief that I must paint mud brown, I experienced an explosion of energy and freedom. It was as though blue paint were a sword slashing through illusion, bringing me into direct connection with the house’s essence. Objects began to dance unhinged from their proper pigment. That man is green, those sheep are maroon, that horse is scarlet, I suddenly wanted to shout with a new-found freedom as I gazed around me from the hilltop where I had drawn the blue house.” from BoldType

Goldberg’s technique encapsulated: “Mostly I use the same rules for painting that I have developed for writing practice: be specific (I sit in front of the actual scene I am drawing), keep your hand moving (don’t worry about mistakes), trust yourself. Then I go home and color in with paint what I have drawn. This is where I let go of having to have the sky blue or a leaf green. I paint the color that flashes in the periphery of my perception and trust what comes to my mind.” Paintings

Art Journaling Inspiration from Aisling D’Art

Aisling D’Art has a section of her website devoted to art journaling. Some of it involves images of her work, some of it is devoted to the how why we all should journal:

“I started doing these quick collages, though not consciously doing them daily. Months later, I started each day with a collage, the same as I used to to “morning pages” as described in The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. For me, collages are a more visual version of “morning pages.”

I usually allow myself a half an hour for the collage process, but sometimes go back several times throughout the day to add things until I’m pleased with it. It all starts with the determination that, whether it’s good art or not, there will be a collage when I’m finished!

Usually, I just work on the pages in a spiral-bound sketchbook, just as they are. Sometimes I’ll gesso a few pages my journal, ahead of time. Then they are strong enough to support heavily embellished collages here & there. ” How to Collage in Your Art Journal

D’Art offers large sections which cover some of the pragmatic issues of technique and materials:

“Preparing images If I’m going to use the iron-on technique taught by Jonathan Talbot, Claudine Hellmuth, and others, I coat the back of my image plus the surface it’ll go on, with Golden Gel Medium (soft/gloss). When the surfaces are dry, arrange the images in place, then— with a medium-hot iron and release paper (or a nonstick pressing sheet)—iron the images. The heat melts the gel, acting as an adhesive. Jonathan Talbot sells a special iron for this purpose, and I’ve used it happily. He’s also written a book exploring this technique in detail.” Notes from Insight Shrines workshop

The strength of these pages is the emphasis on the need to explore art daily and the assist that Aisling gives in identifying materials and their uses. Aisling gives us lots ofreasons to get out and get started!

As Natalie Goldberg says, “When I was out scouting things to draw, I slowed down. I noticed doorknobs, light posts, the peeled paint of a gate. As I slowed down things became brilliant. Grass growing through a cement crack, a stop sign–its glowing yellow octagonal shape outlined in thick black–suddenly mattered, because I saw them.”

Go out and look at things, and just draw anything. (I’ll talk about technique later in this series about travel journaling.) artists illustrated travel journals – Choosing a Subject

I’ve been reading a lot of art theory lately, looking at issues of signs, symbols and metaphors. The underlying concept, as put forth by Rudolf Arnheim, states that fully representational images don’t allow us to add or explore our own relationship with the image. As an image becomes more abstract (more of a symbol), the viewer can impress their own experiences upon the image.

While doing reading on Arnheim, I came across this writing at Arteology that does a wonderful job of summarizing Moles’ writings about the importance of the discovery process in art. According to Abraham A. Moles (1966)…

“the greatest pleasure produced by perception is felt when consciousness is allowed to function at its maximal effect, that is, approximately at the rate of 100 bits a second. According to this, first of all, a work of art should contain a sufficient amount of superficial content or decoration immediately appealing to the senses. As a starting point to the interpretation can serve also the name of the work, if any. But to qualify as competent art, the work must be able to offer also a deeper content. Finding this deeper content will then produce the pleasant feeling of “eureka” once more, provided again that discovering it is not too easy. If it is very easy, or if there are no deeper layers to be discovered, the aesthetic pleasure remains brief and thus meager, and the work of art risks being classified as kitsch.

The perception of a profound work of art proceeds thus as several (or at least two) step-by-step phases. Each successive stage of comprehension should optimally be attainable so that the flow of new information remains always in the range of 100 bits per second, i.e. near the maximum of human abilities of perception. The deeper content can be a background structure, or anything else that arouses interest, for example an invitation to an emotional mood, or a message.

The most rewarding work of art is one in which the process described above can take place several times successively like in the figure on the right. Such a multi-faceted work of art can be looked at over and over again. In each new vista the observer finds something new; first perhaps a solution to a problem which remained unsolved in the previous phase of observation, and second, a novel surprise: another problem motivating him to a deeper still reflection. Each phase of observation leads to more profound comprehension and thus increases the aesthetic value of the work.”

image: “Church Street El,” by Charles Sheeler, 1920

I love comic book art and I love the Pacific Northwest (at least I do in the summertime). I have just stumbled onto the perfect combination of the two: “The Frank Book” by Jim Woodring. Woodring has color, humor and a peculiar grace. Best of all, his tales are wordless narratives.

In this quote, Woodring talks about the power of image and the necessity of empty space. It seems that this could be as applicable to the traditional quilt square as it is to the comic book.

“The power of the comic art, he says, lies in the human ability to instantly recognize images. A human face, he argues, can be more effective the further it is from a photographic replication. By stripping literal detail and making an image more iconic, the artist can direct the reader’s focus.
The gutter of space between comic panels is a magical place, he says, because that’s where the reader invests imagination and supplies transition to the next scene. The difference between one panel might be a shattering jump in time, space, even subject, but the reader usually finds an explanation.”

Woodring has created a fantasy world that combines elements of Loony Tunes with classical realism – all with a slight twist. His furniture appears ready to dance and his walls are poised to speak. The color is wonderfully overwhelming. Unnamed creatures sport yellow and purple spots arranged over psychedelicly intricate linework. Most compelling is the way his art overflows with singular vision and full force conviction.

Stephanie Hansen is this week’s interviewee at the Artists Loft of Soul Food Cafe presents The Self Portrait Challenge. The challenge which appears easy at first glance, but could offer lots of opportunities for artistic growth.

“How about, when you have nothing better to do, you lie on a big sheet of paper and get the girls to trace around you and then do a self portraiture using the body shape. I am doing this with some Grade 6 kids and I am about to get my Year 12’s to do it as well. It is a real hoot!

Once you have the shape hang it up for awhile – answer some of these questions and then go for it using all your favorite mediums – language, collage, whatever takes your fancy…”

In her interview, Stephanie talks about her work and the importance of language to the visual arts. “My work is filled with the articulation of unpopular truth. A mirror on which I painted, “I am the most important person in my life. I am more important than my parents or my children,” was actually fought over by two women in their forties, each one determined to take it home. But first, each one gasped and declared, ‘I can’t believe you said that!’”

For more of Stephanie’s work, visit her website at: http://worthworks.com/

Any volunteers to coordinate an art quilt challenge around this??