On the Fly

I was really hankering to settle in with some linework and rounding of corners Wednesday afternoon but I was on the fly, prepping for a day trip to Maine the following day.

I circled back to the idea of wanting to try my hand at a neurographic painting on a neutral atmospheric background, an idea that had caught my attention a few weeks ago.

Only got as far as the neutral atmospheric background. 

a start

 

Archiving the Messy Middle

I've long been a bit of an archivist. 

I started writing a journal in 9th grade to vent my extreme irritation that my younger sister Laurey had somehow wheedled a rule-breaking extra cookie for dessert. Following that start, I kept journals faithfully and regularly for about 20 years.

I started a diary of sorts my senior year in high school, using an engagement calendar, in which I jotted activities, books I'd read, correspondence, and the like. I continue that practice.

I started keeping photo albums once I had children and kept up with albums until my kids were grown and on their own. 

I like having personal archives I can reference for all manner of reasons … including messy middles, which brings me around to this blog of mine in which I have been keeping a record of my painting adventures for the past seven years, starting a year after I took up painting.

I love seeing process both in my own blog and those of other artists. I love seeing starts. I love seeing messy middles. I love seeing starts and messy middles resolve into completed paintings.

Here is today's messy middle, a rough draft, if you will. It awaits revision, editing, and polishing. I'm eager to see what surprises emerge once I begin playing around with it.

messy middle—work in progress

Backstage

I love backstories, the stuff that goes on behind the scenes—or behind the seens—in art.

Also, I love thinking about where to start the telling of a story.

For this story—the story of a new painting in process—I'm going to begin with a blogpost of mine from June 2016. 

What was I doing poking around old blogposts from 2016, you ask? Well, maybe my story needs to start there.

I recently set out to weed my email to free up some space on my computer and declutter my mind. I have multiple tidy, well-organized email folders where I save messages of importance to me. Within those multiple tidy, well-organized folders sit thousands of messages, a huge number of which (a) are no longer of importance, or (b) I never reference because I no longer have any idea they're there. 

I was able to delete a bunch of folders without a backward glance.

Then I bumped into the folder that contains the nightly emails my dad sent to my sisters and me for nearly six years, starting when my mom had a stroke six months before she died and continuing until my dad's death just shy of a year ago. Those emails I am rereading (and mostly saving), usually in one-week clusters at any one reading. Because I started my art blog a few weeks after my mom's stroke, I am also rereading the blogposts whose dates correspond with whatever cluster of emails I'm revisiting.

Yesterday, I bumped into a post in response to which my muses woke up and took note. I loved the quiet application of neutrals I'd used to start a painting, followed by an overlay of blind contour drawing. Two posts later, I bumped into the very inviting what-if-I-did-this mindset that is always a gift when I paint, and my muses perked up even more.

I thought, what if I started a new neurographic painting with a neutral atmospheric background like this rather than on plain white drawing paper?

To be continued …

Containers

In simplest terms, the basic guidelines for creating neurographic art are essentially these:

    • Use a marker to draw a long, looping, criss-crossing, scribble-like line on paper.

    • Round all corners where lines cross or turn, filling in the resulting gaps with ink (Have I mentioned how much I love rounding out the corners?!).

    • Add color.

What I notice the more I play with this neurographic form is that for me the doodles become structured, supportive containers that invite me into their protective confines to practice my art. Today's container beckoned me to play with size and shape, light and dark, compositional balance, freeform linework, busyness and resting places, and monochromatic neutrals.

The Musky Smell of Fallen Tree Trunks
and Mushrooms and Moldering Damp
4.5 x 5.25"; ink, watercolor, water-soluble and oil pastels
on drawing paper
abstract
2022

 

Bookmarking Moments

My days are robustly, resoundingly, generously, (sometimes) overwhelmingly, and unfailingly filled-to-the-brim of late.

I bookmark moments as I move through each day.

This morning:

• smoothing out blanket wrinkles together with Dave while we make our bed first thing;

• walking at 445a in a world filled with birdsong and sunrise and fresh air;

• searching high and low for—and then locating!—at Stop & Shop the sandwich 'slider' rolls requested by Caroline for her upcoming visit;

• writing up reminders for my tutorial schedule for next week;

• plucking a ripe ripe red red strawberry from our garden and popping its burst of juice in my mouth;

• restocking toilet paper in our bathrooms; and

• making a bookmark—an actual physical bookmark for marking a stopping/starting place in a book—from a postcard I painted earlier this year.

Not Following National News
1.75 x 5.75" bookmark; acrylic, ink,
pencil, and collage on cardstock
abstract
2021

Books and Bookmarks (2)

Re books:

You can tell 

she’s really good at reading 

no matter where she is 

or what’s happening around her. 

There’s this look on her face 

like she’s not there at all, 

she’s gone wherever 

the book takes her.

—Rodman Philbrick, Max the Mighty

Re bookmarks:

Here’s another thing I like about a hand-painted bookmark: its beautility! A bookmark is an exquisite marriage of beauty and utility. It has an immediate chance to broadcast its beauty—it doesn’t languish, waiting to be purchased; it doesn’t end up stuffed in a drawer or box, neglected or forgotten. I can do the equivalent of putting it on display instantly. Not only that, but also it has a practical job to do and gets busy doing it the moment the paint dries, snuggling cozily for short naps between the pages of whatever book I’m reading, all the while holding my place with an expectant eye half open and its whole self ready to radiate creative expressive energy all over again when I reopen my book. The best!

When I'm Reading, Wherever I Am,
I'm Always Somewhere Else
1.75 x 5.5" bookmark; acrylic and collage on paper
abstract
2020
sold

Neutrals (12)

Neutral-thinking exploration

• Change takes place whether I notice it or not.

• The open window beside me admits air spun with wren song and sunlight into the room with me.

• Test scores are test scores.

Painting-with-neutrals exploration

postcard start #10, resting

Neutrals (11)

Neutral-thinking exploration

• Yesterday I placed holds online for several library books; there's no interlibrary activity yet per covid-19 guidelines so I had to select from only those books available on the shelves at my local library.
• One of my nephews is now affianced to his sweetheart.
• I will start picking kale from our back-deck-railing flower box this week.


Painting-with-neutrals exploration

postcard start #9, resting

Neutrals (10)

Neutral-thinking exploration

• Air at the moment is dry, sky is blue, sun is shining, indoor temperature and outdoor temperature match at 71 degrees Fahrenheit.
• I have heard no news yet today.
• The gray file cabinet in the green closet holds far fewer items than four days ago.


Painting-with-neutrals exploration

postcard start #8, resting

Neutrals (9)

Neutral-thinking exploration

• My day started itself moving in one direction and then veered off in a totally different direction.
• Blue spruce, in my region of the country, is susceptible to a fungus.
• Spilled latex paint can be cleaned up fairly easily.


Painting-with-neutrals exploration

postcard start #7, resting

Neutrals (8)

Neutral-thinking exploration

• My tutoring table—and central command post for almost all my deskwork—is a 1950's kitchen table with green Formica laminate top, chrome metal edging around the tabletop, and chrome legs.
• This morning's high humidity gave way to an afternoon downpour.
• Today I set about drafting my post by intentionally not including any headings initially. I entered my first statement above, and Grammarly identified the tone as joyful. After entering the second statement, the post as a whole was optimistic, and it remained optimistic as I wrote this very sentence. I then began entering the heading for this section; the tone remained optimistic until I entered the word exploration, at which point Grammarly indicated: anxious.


Painting-with-neutrals exploration

postcard start #6, resting

Neutrals (7)

Neutral-thinking exploration

• When I stand still for more than a minute outdoors at 445a, a mosquito finds me.
• When I sit two hours later beside Bass River, I am chilled by strong breezes.
• Our back deck, where I usually eat lunch al fresco, is today occupied by house painters, drop cloths, ladders, scraping tools, electric sanders, and a boom box.


Painting-with-neutrals exploration

postcard start #5, resting

Neutrals (6)

Neutral-thinking exploration

• A painting crew is sanding the exterior walls of our home.
• I received payment for a painting yesterday.
• I have a phone appointment this afternoon with someone I've never met before.


Painting-with-neutrals exploration

postcard start #4, resting

Neutrals (5)

Neutral-thinking exploration

• Grammarly is a free online writing assistant app designed to improve word usage, spelling, punctuation, and the like.
• In addition to having word usage, spelling, and punctuation checkers, it has a tone checker.
• Grammarly has identified the tone in this post and its three predecessors as anxious*.


Painting-with-neutrals exploration

postcard start #3, resting

* !!!!! **
** And, yes, neutral is one of the tones Grammarly checks for.

Neutrals (4)

Neutral-thinking exploration

• My magic pants (Columbia® calls them something else) and walking shoes were comfortable for 51 degrees at 500a.
• I changed out of my magic pants four hours later in favor of a skirt and flip flops.
• A 5 x 6-foot closet can hold a significant number of items.


Painting-with-neutrals exploration

neutrals postcard start #2, resting

Neutrals (3)

Neutral-thinking exploration

• This afternoon I will burn a bag of outdated paperwork culled from a file cabinet upstairs.
• I discovered in a stack of stored folders a pad of lined paper with a company logo at the top of each page and have been unable to decide where to give it a home for future use.
• I don't have criteria yet for facilitating my decluttering of the green closet.


Painting-with-neutrals exploration

neutrals postcard start #1, resting

Neutrals (2)

Neutral-thinking exploration

• I learned today that pH stands for power of hydrogen or potential for hydrogen. If that information ever came my way previously, it promptly left.
• I encountered several lengthy interruptions in my plans today.
• My ankles are swollen, especially the left one.


Painting-with-neutrals exploration

Inquiring Mind Wants to Know; Neutrals (1)

Giving my 24 x 48" work-in-progress a rest, I plan to engage in two inquiries for the next week to ten days:

1. poke around with conscious neutral thinking to see what I might learn, and

2. poke around in my studio to see what I come up with by way of a bunch of grid-format postcard starts using mostly neutrals.

Accordingly, neutrals:

1. I pulled out the copy of Little Women I used as a painting journal while I was in Virginia in January and February, found some fresh pages, and applied white gesso.

2.

starting to neutralize book pages

Simple Pleasures

• spying a bright pop of winterberry (Ilex verticillata) color against monochromatic wetlands on my way home from the gym
• laughing out loud when the last of eleven November poster calendars I'd affixed to the family room walls as seasonal decoration fell to the floor because the masking tape had no sticking power
• feeling my just-sharpened chef's knife chop through bok choy at lunch time
• spreading black gesso onto card stock with a brush

Out of the Early Morning Darkness
3.5 x 5" postcard; acrylic and collage on card stock
abstract
2019

This Wild Summons

I didn't at all expect Lyanda Lynn Haupt's Mozart's Starling—a book characterized by Goodreads as "part natural history, part story, [that] will delight readers as they learn about language, music, and the secret world of starlings,"—to tap into my creative life the way it has.

But here Haupt is again, cheerleading me as I paint:

And what is this wild summons? What art is asked of us? The gift offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw, dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a violet on the sill; stitch a quilt; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air the beds, sweep clean the corners. To hold the child's hand, listen to the vagrant's story, paint the elder friend's fingernails a delightful shade of pink while wrapped in a blanket she knit with the deft young fingers of her past. To wander paths, nibble purslane, notice spiders. To be rained upon. To listen with changed ears and sing back what we hear.

And here I am again, listening with changed ears and singing back what I hear.

newest patch

new patch in the big picture
work in progress
working title: Core Values