I recently took Susan Shie's great online drawing class, drawing every day in a big black book, then coloring with markers and watercolor.
Maybe that woke me up from the inside out. That, and my growing exuberant love for making things -- my art. I want to make things every which way. To focus down, I am studying Elizabeth Barton's Visual Guide to Working in a Series. It's about trying to go slow, to find subject and/or method that interests me enough to explore for a half-dozen pieces.
On p. 20 Barton says analyze theme and variation of six favorite artists.
I picked Beatriz Milhazes, whose great show I recently saw in Miami. Constants: strong color, abstractions, sharp edges, simple shapes (leaf, circle, flower), stripes, similar -- even identical -- shapes . Variations: Square or rectangle.
Joan Foster, mixed media artist. Constant: nature in muted colors. Variations in size, some have grid reference, some have tree-like shapes, some have irregular edges.
Katherine K. Allen, fiber artist. Constant: Large abstracted meditations on nature, with organic shapes and movements in a few subdued colors, paint spatters, printed leaves, dark below and airy above. Variations: Added color, cotton or silk, lowered and/or eliminated base line.
Faith Evans-Sills, mixed-media artist: Constant: dreamy botanicals and bugs that she calls a "personal map," layers, vertical watercolor swipes and drips, similar palette of clear colors (turquoise, pink, gold, orange, with black and white), black silhouettes, verticals in background. Variations: Some have triangles, some have shapes of simple buildings, some have more black and white.
Poet Marie Howe: Constant: Blank verse that is intimate, with scrupulous detail looking at life as it goes, referencing her brother John, who died of AIDS at 28. Abrupt, clarifying ends. Dark. Variations: Time changes from childhood memories to John's death and then afterward.
Then I chose several favorite poems:
Tanka by Claribel Alegria
Be helpless, dumbfounded by Rumi
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
It's the dream by Olav H. Hague
The Mystery, a Celtic rune
Songs, an Inuit incantation
Ask Me by William Stafford
Constants include blank verse, incantatory, dreamy feel, referencing water and air (through fish, sea, dream, current, harbor, breeze, stillness, bubble, gyre), a kind of epiphany. Variations: Rune, song, Told in first person, second person, or third person.
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