Inquiry in Process

I know so much more than I did in 2014 when I took up painting, but—OH MY GOSH—it is perfectly clear that I will never run out of things to learn when I paint!

How hard can it be to scribble, you might wonder. 

Plenty hard enough, I might reply.

For me, at least. 

I was so challenged this afternoon! 

I scrambled to do the kind of scribbling I wanted to do and ran headlong into limitation after limitation … incompatible supplies, tearing the edges of the paper as I gave free rein to movement of my hand, poor quality pens, wanting some kind of result that was halfway pleasing to my eye.

I think I've got myself an inquiry in process.

study in scribbling
ink, pencil, water soluble pastel, oil pastel,
and acrylic paint markers on a book page
5 x 7.5" collage paper

A Tangle (Finding God 1)

I get tangled up in process more than once while painting this canvas.

Then when I complete the piece, the tangle is precisely where I find God.

God Shows Up in a Tangle of Meadow
(after 60 days!)
30 x 40"; acrylic, pencil, oil pastel, ink, latex, and collage on canvas
abstract floral
2020

in situ

---

tickler file: humble beginnings

day 1

day 1, detail

Rust and Trust

I felt rusty on Sunday, painting for the first time in nine or ten days. Bumped more than once into discouragement, frustration, and/or negative self-talk as I developed another postcard from my first Lake Champlain work-in-progress.

What grounded me and diminished my struggles was twofold: trusting my lived experience of process, and Simone Nijboer's reminder in her most recent podcast that painting offers us the possibility to experience again and again how [we] can come back every time to the simplicity of being.

A Place in Which Convenience and Cleanliness Were Not Required
4x5"; acrylic, latex, collage, ink, pencil, and oil pastel
abstract
2018

Started roughly here with this piece:

Soft Gray Morning

I love a bright warm sunny blue-skied summer morning.

I love a soft cool gray closed-in summer morning.

Soft gray's what I had as I painted this piece …

… along with painters in and out the front door, up and down the stairs, in the hall, in the bathroom.

I snagged a few supplies from my studio before the painters knocked on the front door. Then I set up a make-shift space on a desk in another part of the house and puttered.

Stray Seeds Dropped by Larks and Linnets in Flight
4x6"; acrylic, ink, collage, oil pastel
abstract
2018
[gift]

Immigration Outcome

My favorite painting moment today comes when I've decided this postcard is complete. I use my paper trimmer to take care of a few rough spots on the edges, after which I pick up the resulting scraps.

Done.


Or not …

I notice a particular snippet in my hand—my eyes widen with delight.

Back to the glue pot!

Love the intrepid migrant that leaves everything it knows from where it used to live on the lower left border and contributes an unexpected pop of pattern in its new adopted home.

Flanked by Largely Friable Cliffs of Sandstone
4x5.5"; acrylic, latex, India ink, collage, and oil pastel
abstract
2018

detail 

Summer Dance

I do like me a low-humidity, blue-skied, sun-and-light-breezes summer day—bare feet, a simple sundress, no fuss, no muss.

I snip a second 4x6" piece from my first Lake Champlain work-in-progress. Lose myself in the adventure of following the lead of one mark and then the next, while summer dances on my skin, and vacation memories play background music.

It's Best to Tell the Truth Full Stop
4x6"; collage, acrylic, latex, oil pastel, and ink
abstract
2018
[gift]

A Gift of Daily Painting

I didn't have much heart to bring to painting today, but my feet made their way to my studio anyway.

I took my first 18x24" Lake Champlain work-in-progress and snipped a 4x6" piece from it to explore.

One thing led to another and, even though I didn't bring much heart to painting, painting brought me to my heart.

Pitted with Rust on the Outside
4x6"; collage, acrylic, latex, oil pastel, and ink
abstract
2018

Lake Champlain, Day 8

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/15/18]

Sweet sweet summer day, slipping now into evening's hush as I write from the porch of our vacation cottage with our car mostly packed for our return home tomorrow.

3rd Lake Champlain work-in-progress,
18x24"; mixed media
fifth layer,
paint marker shapes, stencils, ink doodles

final layer for now,
ink and paint-marker doodles, oil pastels, veiling, print collage

detail

detail

detail

Lake Champlain, Day 7

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/14/18]

The days of our vacation layer one on top of the other, each day distinct in its textures, shapes, nuances, saturations, and hues, and all of them together more than any one.

I start a third painting in my vacation series, laying down one idea at a time—before breakfast, after a hike beside a bog where we talk with wildlife management folks installing a beaver baffle, between a trip to the St. Albans Historical Museum and a lakeside walk, after indulging in the guilty pleasure of Island Ice Cream.

first layer,
India ink applied with new calligraphy pen and then a calligraphy brush

first layer,
India ink,
detail

second layer,
oil pastels
detail

second layer,
oil pastels
detail

third layer,
latex paint dripped and manipulated with the handle end of a paintbrush,
detail

third layer,
latex paint dripped and manipulated with the handle end of a paintbrush,
detail

third layer,
latex paint dripped and manipulated with the handle end of a paintbrush,
detail

fourth layer,
gelli plate monoprints,
detail

Lake Champlain, Day 6

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/13/18]

Huh. 

This painting has surprised me more than once as I've worked on it at our little vacation cottage on this little island at the north end of not-so-little Lake Champlain.

Today, still a work in progress but 'finished' for now, it surprises me again when I step back to photograph it: I’ve painted a little self-contained island!

work in progress
18x24"; mixed media on drawing paper

detail

Lake Champlain, Day 5

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/12/18]

We sleep all night with the French doors in the bedroom open to the attached screened porch overlooking Lake Champlain. A Mary-Poppins-like wind blasts the day in with vigor.

I let the fresh-off-the-lake bluster gust through me all day. Love its cleansing, invigorating energy, the intense feeling of charged weather.

collage and neutrals added to work in progress

more shapes, more neutrals

detail

detail

Lake Champlain, Day 4

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/11/18]

I pull out a new sheet of 18x14" Canson 90 pound classic cream drawing paper this morning and begin playing, playing, playing.

an amalgam of art viewed earlier in the week and an imagined super-magnification of Bryozoa
(the phylum of aquatic invertebrate animals referenced in yesterday's post)

spiral-shaped gastropod fossils

a few delicate fern-like leaf patterns (detail)

Lake Champlain, Day 3

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/10/18]

We visit Fisk Quarry and Goodsell Ridge on Isle la Motte, a few miles from our vacation cottage, where we see 480 million-year-old fossils. I still can't quite wrap my mind around the following information from a Lake Champlain Committee article (boldface mine):

Imagine sitting in a lounge chair with your feet in the water looking out over a tropical sea. The sun blazes away and the reefs around you teem with life. There was a time, nearly half a billion years ago, when the area we now call Lake Champlain hosted such an environment. This was before life existed on land, before the bedrock of the region had even formed.

At the time, the continental plate upon which Lake Champlain sits today was located in the lower latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. Carbon dioxide levels exceeded today’s levels by 14 to 16 percent, and the earth was so warm that practically no ice existed.  As a result, sea levels were much higher and the continental shelf was covered by a shallow arm of the Iapetus Ocean. In this arm, some of the world’s earliest reefs developed.  

Today, most biotic reefs are formed by coral, but at the time of the original reefs, corals had not yet evolved. The first reef builders were instead small branching organisms called bryozoans. Later in time, large cabbage-like stromatoporoids (related to present-day sea sponges) dominated. Over time, other organisms came to occupy the reefs along with the stromatoporoids including the first corals, though corals never dominated these early reefs.  “These structures represent a pivotal moment in the evolution of life on earth, because they are the oldest known, multi-organism constructions on the planet.”

For three days I have been playing with collage, paint markers, acrylics, stencils, pencils, and more, enjoying what I think of as mark-making—until now when I realize I have been layering small branching bryozoans and large cabbage-like stromatoporoids, building an older-than-time reef right here on a piece of drawing paper on a picnic table in front of a cottage in Vermont near the border of Canada.

work in progress
18x24"; mixed media on drawing paper

detail

detail

detail

Lake Champlain, Day 2

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/9/18]

Improv.

I notice the surface pattern on a duvet in our vacation cottage, play with elements of it on my big piece of drawing paper.

Lines seen in stained glass window art at a local gallery travel through a paint marker onto my drawing paper.

A wildflower leaf pattern transplants itself into the lush tangle of mark-making growing in front of me.

As the day unfolds, I ad lib in short little snippets of three minutes here, ten minutes there, creating without preparation from whatever I have available: I press a few pieces of collage into place, spread some paint with my finger and spritz it with a spray bottle to trigger drips, draw angular lines with a China marker against a metal straight-edge tool, use a brayer to veil.

work in progress
18x24"; mixed media on drawing paper

detail

Lake Champlain, Day 1

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/8/18]

I paint today in a sweet little vacation cottage, with windows and screened porches in abundance, all of them wide open to magically warm June daytime air and the perfection of cool deep-sleep nights. A bit of the huge expanse of Lake Champlain laps the edge of our front lawn, and Vermont mountains trace the horizon.

I grab the pad of Canson classic cream 18x24" 90 pound drawing paper I have with me and begin playing.

Blacks, whites, China marker, print collage, latex paint, architect tracing paper, matte medium.

Messing about.

work in progress
18x24"; mixed media on drawing paper

Is That a Clearing?

After bushwhacking with varying degrees of good humor for several days now, I think I spy a clearing ahead.

Hot damn!

My step feels lighter, my heart lifts, I hear myself humming a tune.

Not home yet, but here are some details from the thick of things:

A Saturday Morning with Daddy

I have a distinct memory of an early childhood physics lesson.

As I walked along a sidewalk on North Street in Cranford, NJ, one Saturday morning, holding hands with my father, I came to understand at a conscious level that I had to take more steps, and faster ones, than he did to cover the same ground and not fall behind.

That's what my little body and mind were busy learning.

What my hand and heart already knew was that when I was with Daddy, the world was a wondrous place.

How lucky can a little girl be?

How lucky can a grown-way-older girl be to still share the wondrous world with her father?

Pretty danged lucky.

Happy Father's Day, Futh!

Saturday Morning Errands with Daddy
3x4"; acrylic, ink, pencil, collage, and pastels on paper,
mounted on card stock
abstract
2017
[gift]

Magaguadavic Maps

This week I live on a little bit of turf that is entirely new to me.

I set up an improvised studio space en plein air, and what lands on the turf of two 9/12" sheets of drawing paper is entirely new to me as well.

work in progress, working title: Beaver Harbour

work in progress, working title: Scribbled Solstice

Here I Am, Day 2

Today, again, a day filled with blessings and richness and activity and responsibilities and opportunities and tasks and undertakings beyond my ability to count.

Today, again, I pay attention to and seek the spaces in between, hold myself as open as I can to the stillness always available to me if I will but drop into it.

Today, again, I go to my studio.

Today, three new colors to play with—all house paint hand-picked by my granddaughters.

Outwardly, the scene is one of my hands and eyes working together, using foam rubber brushes to move some paint around on paper, on the start I created yesterday.

The inward experience? A wordless simultaneity of stillness and movement, of deep peaceful energy, of elemental flow.

work in progress
working title: here i am
day 2

Birthday Card

Birthday card from yesterday's start:

this is the sun's birthday
3x4"; acrylic, ink, and collage on drawing paper, mounted on card stock
abstract
2017
[gift]