Author: Dale

Art & Fear: 4

Posted on by Dale

…The first few brushstrokes to the blank canvas satisfy the requirements of many possible paintings, while the last few fit only that painting , they could go nowhere else. The development of an imagined piece into an actual piece is a progression of decreasing possibilities, as each step in the execution reduces future options by converting one , and only one , possibility into a reality.

That moment of completion is also, inevitably, a moment of loss , the loss of all the other forms the imagined piece might have taken. [p. 16]

This is a fearful thing, indeed, if you allow yourself to think that every brushstroke you lay down is in fact a closing off of infinite possibilities. It really means that every brushstroke is the “road not taken,” and the laws of statistics would seem to dictate that the majority of paths you take are the wrong one. You have doomed your work by that very brushstroke.

However, there is another way to look at it which might preserve your sanity. I figured this out after a couple of egregiously misapplied slaps of paint. To quote Big Sam, “It ain’t quittin’ time till I say it’s quittin’ time.”

The authors were talking about holding on to that vision you had when you started your work, and how difficult that is as the work begins to shape itself. Indeed, if you have actually made it to the endgame and have been able to force your materials to do your will, then every action you take has the potential to be ruinous. How sculptors do it I’ll never know.

But for me, and especially at this point in my painting, such fears are stupid. I’m not a master, nor am I particularly adept. I can do any damn thing I please with the painting in front of me. This was driven home one day when I was executing as series of figure paintings and one was just ugly, plain ugly.

“What the hell,” I thought, “it’s ruined. I can’t do anything to it that would make it less artistically valid.” And I just started messing with it: garish colors, shadows where there weren’t before, bold slashes of form and color. Somehow it began to pull together , and when I was done, no, it wasn’t successful. But it was provocative, and I immediately used the extreme measures I had just played to create another sketch that was rather pleasing to my sight.

If this were not a family-friendly blog, I’d post both for you to see.

The main thought I had here though was that a) you don’t have to see each action you take as necessarily limiting what you end up; and b) you’re really better off not seeing the completion , or abandonment , of a work as the death of its infinity of alternates. That’s what a series is for, after all. You think you could do it differently? Do it. Call it #2.

Summer Countdown: Day 37

Posted on by Dale

It seems as if I didn’t get a lot done today, but I did a great deal around the house that isn’t on my List. Niggling, yes. I actually sketched more than I’m showing, but this is a family-friendly blog, so you’ll just have to wait for the gallery exhibit to see the culmination.

One of those mouths is actually very accurate.

A strategy I’m going to try next is to trace the outline of the object that I’m working on and overlay that on my drawing , a way to tell where my eye/hand is missing it.

Can this be true?

Posted on by Dale

This is a conundrum. Every day I receive The Writer’s Almanac daily email, and usually I read the title of the poem and plunge straight into the poem without seeing the poet’s name.

If the poem is striking, even in part, I play a little game with myself: is the poet a man or a woman? Is it possible to tell the poet’s gender through his/her use of language, choice and treatment of topic, attitudes?

I’m not talking about gender-specific poems, just general life kinds of things that could rationally have been written by either sex. (And of course, as I always remind students, the voice of the poem is not necessarily the voice of the poet: Was dear Emily actually dead when she heard that fly buzz?)

It is astonishing to me how often I am correct in my guesswork. Is there a gender-based difference in poetics? Or is Garrison Keillor just drawn to poems that reflect the poet’s sex?

Art & Fear: 3

Posted on by Dale

Art & Fear does suggest a remedy for the problem of destination for your work:

A. Make friends with others who make art, and share your in-progress work with each other frequently.
B. Learn to think of [A], rather than the Museum of Modern Art, as the destination of your work. [p. 12]

And that exactly is what I have in the Lichtenbergian Society: a group of creative men who joke about their procrastinatory proclivities, but who are in fact a vibrant core of collaborators. The fact that we gather at the Winter Solstice to record our artistic goals for the following year, and to confess progress, or not, on the previous year’s goals is enough to make them my [A].

But of course we gather throughout the year, and many times the question arises, “What are you working on?” We don’t exactly trot out our work and pass it around like the Inklings did, although I do show some of my paintings, but just the opportunity to talk about our work is enough. We also have our blog to share on, and I usually post any music in progress on my blog.

I guess I’ve solved the [A]/[B] problem for my painting. After all, most of what I’m working on in that regard is for the Lichtenbergians anyway. It’s with my music that I haven’t solved the [B] aspect quite yet. It would help if the Lichtenbergians could play in a string quartet. Lousy slackers.

Summer Countdown: Day 38

Posted on by Dale

Lichtenbergian goals:

  • filled some pages of the sketchbook with studies of eyes and noses, both generic/anatomical and specific. It was interesting to me that while I think I was able to capture the specific shapes of various Lichtenbergian eyes and noses, I don’t know that you could identify the Lichtenbergian from his isolated feature. Mike’s eyebrows might be a giveaway, maybe. Or maybe I’m just not accurate enough yet.
  • read some more Power of Now and Art & Fear.

Today I’m working on mouths, and I may try painting some details as well.

Lichtebergian procrastinations:

  • reset the clay pots at the cardinal points of the compass deeper into the ground, so that I can mow over them. (These are the pots I put the citronella candles in.) Having mowed over one of them and nicked it still, I may have to set them deeper.
  • stripped ivy from the trees where it had taken over. This was not as time-consuming as I had feared: all that foliage is produced by very few strands, although on the cherry laurel up by the table the stems were as thick as a sapling. Still, it’s a soft kind of wood and easily cut and easily removed.

Art & Fear: 2

Posted on by Dale

And artists quit when they lose the destination for their work, for the place their work belongs. [p. 9]

Longtime readers of this blog will remember the creative crisis precipitated by the decision of my friend Stephen Czarkowski’s not to return to GHP in the summer of 2008. He had asked me to try my hand at writing a symphony for the orchestra, and I had reached a point of having finished (i.e., stopped) the third movement and being stuck with the final movement when the news reached me. (The first two movements never got written.)

For most of my creative life, I have been guarded in my output. I am not a fast composer; I have to struggle for everything I write. And so it has almost never made sense for me to attempt to write something that I know will never be performed. A full-scale symphony? Who would play it?

So Stephen’s offer was a gift from the heavens. If I wrote it, they would perform it. I could write without holding back. In fact, having heard Stephen conduct GHP students in playing Strauss’s Death & Transfiguration, I figured there was nothing that came out of my head which would pose any difficulties whatsoever. The news that it would not be performed that summer was like hitting a brick wall. It meant that it would never be performed.

Whoever the new strings person was (and it turned out to be a former GHP student of mine), I would be his boss and not his friend: I could not ask him to devote so much class time to the performance of my piece without a very real appearance of impropriety.

It was more than a year before I wrote another note of music. The 24 Hour Challenge was an effort to move myself out of that dreadful stasis, and I think it succeeded in many ways. For one thing, I was able to take one of the pieces, “Club-Foot Waltz,” and turn it into the “Waltz for Bassoon & String Quartet,” which then became this spring’s “Pieces for Bassoon & String Quartet,” and which I printed out as soon as I got home on Tuesday and mailed to my former GHP student at GHP, since I am not his boss for the summer (and am in fact now his friend) and can ask him to read through a piece just as boldly as any other third-class first-rate composer.

The problem of destination is illustrated in my work by A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. As much trouble as I had finishing that, particularly the epic “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way”, thoroughly documented on this fine blog, I persevered to the astonishing conclusion, because I believed that it would be performed. I believed that it had a destination. If I had known that no one would have the slightest interest in it, I would have shelved it.

Now you would think that I would learn the lesson from these two episodes that Bayles and Orland try to teach in Art & Fear, that you have to aim your work at a destination that may not exist in your current universe, but I have not. Maybe as I progress through the summer and knock out the Ayshire Fiddle Orchestra piece in no time flat, and suddenly have the skills and inspiration to finish the Epic Lichtenbergian Portrait (not to mention the necessary reference photographs (ahem, Mike, Kevin, Matthew, et al.)), then perhaps I will look around me and decide, hey, why not? I can throw myself into projects that don’t have a light at the end of the tunnel: the Symphony in G, the mini-opera Simon’s Dad, and whatever else I can imagine.

But it’s going to take a lot of success with projects that do have a destination before I trust the universe to create things that don’t.

Summer Countdown: Day 39

Posted on by Dale

A slow start, but a start. I’m still in “getting down to business” mode, which includes running errands and tidying up my environment.

So for Thursday, June 17, I read and responded to Art & Fear, and did some reading in two new books, The Power of Now and Walking Meditation.

As for my creative goals for the summer, I did get three pages of sketches done: one line drawing, one gesture drawing, and some attempted details. No progress, really.

Thoughts on Art & Fear: 1

Posted on by Dale

I have begun rereading Art & Fear, by Bayles and Orland. If you have not read this book, stop reading this blog and do not rest until you have your own copy in your hands. Do not borrow it, do not check it out of a library. Buy it. You need it.

My Lichtenbergian nature will not let me plunge directly into the artmaking that I have promised to do. I must have something to distract, to postpone. Cras melior est. So here’s the first of personal responses to my reading.

Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue, or more precisely, have learned how to not quit. [p. 9]

That’s what I like about this book: it states what is obvious once it’s been stated. Learning “not to quit” seems like a truism, a statement so clearly true that it needs no explanation, like “the sun rises in the east,” or “Dick Cheney is the embodiment of evil.”

In my Arts Speech, I make the equally unassailable case that not only do all children in every culture constantly draw, sing, dance, and pretend without let, so did all of us. Why is it that some of us, most of us in our culture, stopped?

In my own case, I know that I never did. I never stopped creating. So why is learning “not to quit” an issue for me?

For me, the answer lies in a subsequent statement in the book: “Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail.” It’s not that I believe necessarily that the next painting is doomed, or the next composition, but I know that I am more than likely facing a series of small, unrelenting disasters. I know that when I’m finished, the painting or the music will work just fine and in fact will probably be better than I first thought. It’s just that all the successive approximation I am going to have to hack my way through is just another way of saying, “Oh look, another failure” over and over and over.

That’s tiresome, and it’s no wonder that I fear it. For one thing, I have to assure myself that I have time to hack my way through the mini-failures on the way to success. I am not, at this point, a person who can just drop into the Flow. It takes a while for me to unhook the split focus that comes from sitting down to work when I know that any minute I’m going to be called back into the Real World to Pay Attention to Something. If I don’t sense that I have a sufficient block of time to go past the boundaries of everyday life into what Dissanayake calls the “liminal phase,” then I hesitate, fearfully, even to start the process.

A part of this is not having a space permanently set up for my activities, so that if I choose to compose, I have to clear a space on the desk for the keyboard, get out the score paper, etc., etc. If I want to paint, I have to set up all my painting crap, and since I’ve started using the labyrinth as my studio, it means hauling it all to the back yard, and then saving enough time to break it all down.

I know, that’s foolish, and one of the good things about this Summer Off is that I will be able to set up a regular schedule and have my space set up for that schedule. I think probably that I will compose in the mornings, because I can do that with my coffee; and paint in the afternoons, despite the heat.

To be continued…

Musing & planning

Posted on by Dale

People have assumed, with reason, that my separation from GHP this summer must be emotionally trying for me.

It’s not. From the moment I decided last summer that I needed a break, I have not had second thoughts. I awoke one morning a couple of weeks ago from a dream about the opening meetings during preplanning that caused a twinge, but this past week, as I helped everyone get the program up and running, I had no regrets nor waves of bittersweet nostalgia.

On the contrary, it was a very good eight days, omitting always the glitches that recur every year no matter what we do to try to prevent them. I was happy to see all the returning staff and to meet the new ones. I discovered the pleasures of CJ’s Pub & Pool. The students arrived on Sunday, and it was as marvelous as always. “Good,” I thought, “the kids are here. But they’re not my kids.” And I was totally OK with that.

It was very odd driving out of the campus and passing West Hall as I left Tuesday morning. There was a sense that I was not supposed to be doing that, that strands of my being were being pulled back towards the campus. And of course being at GHP is like the best dramedy series ever, so I felt as if I were turning off the TV in the middle of an episode: you always want to know what happens next.

But that soon passed, and it wasn’t even a major twinge, to be honest. No, my decision to stay in my labyrinth this summer was the right one, and now I’m getting ready to do all those things I said I would do.

It was with some alarm, therefore, that I looked at the calendar in the kitchen this morning and realized that it seemed that many days were taken up with out-of-town duties (some back at GHP), which would preclude my getting any work done at all.

I have exactly seven weeks before I have to report for preplanning at school. Of those forty-nine days, ten are unavailable as work days. (Four more days I’m out of town, but I’m with my painting teacher from GHP: she’s going to teach me all those things I failed to learn forty years ago.)

That leaves thirty-nine days to do my work. I should probably do a daily post cataloging in boring detail what I accomplished each day. It won’t interest you, necessarily, but it will help keep me focused. We’ll call it Summer Countdown. Unless you can suggest a better name for the series in the comments.

I’ve already emailed the director of the Ayrshire Fiddle Orchestra to ask if it’s OK for me to include some solo work in our piece, and a piano if we provide the pianist, and he’s already responded affirmatively to both. My plan, in case I haven’t said, is to work up five fragmentary sketches so that he can choose which one would be most interesting and most playable, and then I’ll compose that piece.

Of course, I’ll also have four other sketches that I can eventually turn into full pieces, so that’s all to the good.

Also yesterday I did a couple of sketches, just to keep going with that project. Mike will be glad to know that they actually look like him. Either I’m getting better or Mike is just easier to draw.

So there we are.

Nostalgia

Posted on by Dale

[Note: I wrote this a week ago. I just now got internet access.]

Today I bought an expensive bottle of Champagne and at the end of the day gathered my friends Marcie, Daniel, and Mike around me in the lobby of Brown Hall to make a toast to commemorate my first day at Governor’s Honors, forty years ago today.

I asked them to salute with me the program that for nearly fifty years has changed so many lives, and to honor all those who have come before us who have sustained it, as well as those who will come after us, come what may.

On the way down to Valdosta, Mike and I stopped by Wesleyan College in Macon, where the seventh GHP occurred. I asked his indulgence as we parked and walked all around the campus. I took photos everywhere — the main building with its arcade, the fountain, the long walk — my dorm down by the lake — the faculty dorm — the dining hall — the infirmary — the auditorium — the art building.

All those ghosts of memories, so many lost to my fading brain, but so many that still remain–and above all, the conviction that what happened there on that campus during those eight weeks altered who I am forever, and for the better.

I remember people: Forrest, Jason, Melissa — what an impact they had on me, letting me see that I was not a freak, or that if I was, there were other, wonderful, exciting freaks out there with me. The hours we spent walking around our summer city, or lying on the grass and talking talking talking laughing and talking.

The boy on my hall who was the fantastic flutist, better than I had ever dreamed of being and certainly better than anyone I had ever heard before. The girl in painting class who was so good at everything we did. The boy who played the organ in the auditorium during breakfast before classes started — and we would sneak in to listen to him practice.

The music students that composed incidental music for the three theatre productions, including a rock musical version of Antigone for which I painted the signs of the Zodiac on the stage floor. My fellow theatre minors, working on improvised scenes that veered between surreal and maudlin and witty. Playing last chair flute in the band as we hurtled through the Overture to Candide.

Donovan’s “Atlantis” on the jukebox in the snack bar and the resonance it suddenly had for us. The awful food in the dining hall. My science major roommate who for some reason sneered at the size of my family–how would we pay for college for so many children — but then had the good manners to apologize when we received our test scores on the Ohio Psych and I outclassed him by seven percentile points.

The hippie-dippie creativity assignments from Dianne Mize, our painting teacher, mimeographed epistles of instructions which I dutifully tried to do, although without any real grasp of the tools she was handing me. The day she looked at my sketch book and forbade me to “design” anything else for the rest of the summer. The battle over the nude, which she was smart enough to realize that the way to win was to give me back that dreadful painting and make me realize how bad it was.

The late night walk Forrest and I took with Mize, talking about art and life and the universe — God knows what nonsense he and I were spouting or what wisdom she tried to impart to us — and realizing that we were out past curfew. Ms. Mize had to escort us to the dorm and try to explain our absence to the dragon lady dorm mother.

The French major who played flute next to me and who I showed the musical score collection in the library. She and I were playing through the 4th Brandenburg together when I seized the opportunity at a page turn to kiss her, my first.

The concert at which the string players were playing the 3rd Brandenburg and I was gobsmacked to realize that they were leaving out the third violin part — because I was following along with the score in the audience. (Years later, at a GHP planning weekend, I told that story at lunch with fellow teachers. Buddy Huthmaker said, “That was me. I was the string teacher.” Then he told a story from that same year about the weird kid who was such a gifted physical comic in the last night skits, and I got to say right back at him, “That was me.”)

Running up the aisle of the auditorium that last night, pumped at the huge audience response to my theatre minor team’s collection of gags and puns, searching for Dianne Mize, and feeling a little hurt when she said, “Have you considered pursuing theatre?” (Six years later, in the bookstore at UGA, one week before I graduated with a BFA in theatre, I was able to tell Dianne Mize, whom I had not seen in five years, that I had taken her advice.)

Not being able to get into the car the next morning to go home, but running here and there to make one last goodbye, to people, to places, to that world we had created and which now was vanishing before my eyes. And being unable to uncurl from a racked, sobbing knot in the back seat of the car all the way home, unable to bear that pain.

Awakening, later, truly awakening, and realizing that I was now seeing the world with different eyes. The world was different because I was different, and that all of who I was or ever would be was because of the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program. It is more than I can comprehend, and certainly more than I deserve.