Lots of Happy Mark-Making
In the comments on a recent drawing-related post, my friend Clive Hicks-Jenkins (who is as kind and generous as he is talented) offered some gentle and excellent advice that boiled down to this: "Have more fun! Play!" I needed to be told that, and encouraged. Anyway, Friday afternoon in the studio I got out a watercolor block of good paper; some bottled sumi ink, water, and small pots for mixing washes; a bunch of my old calligraphy tools (I used to be a professional calligrapher, long long ago); a variety of brushes - some standard watercolor brushes, some Chinese; and some stranger objects -- one of my favorite mark-making tools is a stick I whittled to a bit of a point, back in Vermont. And started to play.
The marks began to take on a bit of a landscape-like character, with some of the forms I've internized from drawing the park. And I was having a great time with the Chinese brushes. That was when this "rock" happened. I threw some salt into the wet ink on the left side and loved the result: it's unplanned, and quite free. These are the "accidents" that make art-making fun, and which propel us along. Sometimes there's just one really effective brushstroke or area of vitality in an entire drawing, but if we're paying attention, it can teach us something.
Pointy steel pens tended to catch in the rough watercolor paper, but my stick proved to be a good tool, as did certain brushes and flat-nib pens. A friend brought me the Chinese brushes directly from China, a number of years ago, and I've never really used them. It was exciting to see how different they were from my watercolor brushes, and to discover what sorts of marks I could make with them, held in different ways, and with different consistencies and amounts of ink. The marks below were made with a wide variety of tools.
Yesterday I went back to the studio in the afternoon, thinking I'd start work on a relief print from a very different drawing, a face. But when I looked at the previous day's "sampler" sheet, my fingers started itching and I got out the ink again, wondering if I could make what I had left (below) into a park-influenced painting of sorts.
Here's the result:
(click for larger view)
The floating squares were marks made with a special, stiff, square calligraphy tool that I think belonged to my mother - I didn't know what to do with them but I echoed them more faintly to the right, and now think they sort of look like prayer flags. Whatever!
You can click on the final image for a larger view. Thank you, Clive, and thanks to all the readers who've commented on these posts. I had a lot of fun -- and learned a lot in a short time. Full of ideas and enthusiasm right now.
