Intermittent Lacunae

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:01:21 GMT

After a little hammering, four stretches bars fit together square. I trot the frame into my studio, and grab a large roll of linen from the corner. I won't actually start painting on the thing for a few weeks, but good to get it ready. My canvas pliers and staplegun are waiting, and I slit the tape holding the roll together. I bought this canvas a few days ago, thick Belgian linen quadruple-primed in oil-ground titanium white.

It spreads out with surprisingly little resistance, not the tough stiffness I expected. The scent of acrylic paint drifts up to my nose.

Acrylic paint?

I rub my fingers on the priming. Too smooth. Too white--oil gives a faint yellow tinge to the ground. And the floppiness of the linen? I picked a thick, rough weave. They sold me the wrong canvas.

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:27:23 GMT

Find below the cut my last long pose, a short painted sketch from Face Club, and... a lot of faces.

Out of curiosity, I made a document stretching from my first self-portrait to my last. All of these are drawn and painted from life. The first one was done just about five years ago, in a small circular mirror sitting on the teacher's work-desk in the Nishishiroi branch of MIL; I spent a lot of time in Nishishiroi, and for various reasons there, my schedule had a lot of downtime. So, I started drawing my face. My left hand. Boxes of tissues. The copy machine.

I wonder sometimes how I ended up here in Mölndal; it seems rather improbable. I talk to my peers and they say things like, "Oh, yes, I've been drawing all the time, since I was a little kid. I assume we all have, really." I haven't. I didn't draw at all til I was about eighteen, didn't draw at all from life til I was twenty-one, didn't draw seriously til I was twenty-two, and didn't take a real art class til I was twenty-three.

So I find it curious. I think of the people I did "art" for, atrocious drawings from their stories, and their encouragement. My parents buying anatomy textbooks for me. Long hours in Japan spent drawing in bars, and the encouragement of Japanese jazz quartets and bartenders. All those self portraits. It's obvious that I don't have any particular genius in the field--but on the other hand, each self-portrait is generally better than the one before. How do you eat an elephant?

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 15:04:08 GMT

The local museum is having a show of still-lifes. Somewhat bizarrely, they're using a photo of me & mine for promotional purposes. This still-life seems to be well-loved, but I guess everyone likes coffee.

I took it down to the framing shop a few days back. Another artist was there for some purpose or another, and she got so excited about the thing she immediately called her gallery in Stockholm. Apparently said gallery has been looking to find a more classical painter or two; before I left the framing shop, I found I had agreed to send three or four canvases to Stockholm by mid January.

I looked this place up later, and talked to some Swedish friends. It's pretty serious, and the woman I met is also well-known.

Just to complicate matters, the three or four paintings that are supposed to go to Stockholm in a month only partly exist, and I'm leaving the country for the next two weeks.

This may easily all fall through, and I have every opportunity to screw it all up--indeed, that seems the most likely outcome--but it's rather exciting.

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:49:34 GMT

The day after the last day of school. Friday night was a good one; a long evening hanging out at the sushi restaurant, a well-chewed chopstick hanging out of my mouth while a half-dozen students made plans to set up an art commune in Nepal or France, or a school in New York or Laguna Beach. Meanwhile, half-finished projects sit back in our studios, waiting our return from holiday; waiting for the day we know what we're doing; waiting for the end of studenthood.

The place closed, and a few of us peeled off for home. The rest walked up the hill to the Kråkans, where several of our teachers and colleagues were already well into their cups. Even if I had the spare cash to join them, and the desire, they had an intimidating head start. "If I... if I beat you arm wrestling," I heard, "You have to... uh... Have to... have to agree with me about their plans for the new world order."

Easier to just sit down at another table. The sketchbook came out, and I got a few decent pen-and-wash drawings of drunken Vikings propped up by wall and table-edge, before I headed home for the night.

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:35:01 GMT

Final critique day. The studio has a different mood. Some poor fools are still working, but many students are sitting around the kitchen chatting, or desperately preparing eleven weeks worth of work for display. My critique is right in the morning, so I attended to that detail the night before.

The teachers, Joakim, Andreas, Hege, and Nate help me haul my canvases and drawing-scales boards into Joakim's studio, then shut me out. Five or ten minutes later, I'm called in.

Consider overall focus. You've done a lot of work. Think about intelligent simpliications of value. "In some ways, it's hard to critique you. That's a good thing. Like with that Edifelt copy you're doing--you're attacking your weaknesses without having to be told."

"I... Out of the many things I've learned in the past few years, perhaps I'm most pleased that I... how to say it? That I am starting to understand the overall shape of the land. Even the things I totally can't do--I think I mostly understand what they are, and how they fit together. When I started, I couldn't solve these problems or know how to think about them. Now I just can't solve them, if that makes sense."

Choose objects with more form for your next still-life, and set it up with a less overstated contrast. Work on establishing an overall hierarchy of lights. Don't make your pencil studies about value.

"And look at this. One, two, three, four studies for this model painting. You're an example for the other students. In general--this isn't really the point of the critique, but in general, the way you treat others really contributes to the studio."

I'm getting complimented on my social skills? Well, I'll take it, though I usually think of myself as this irritable figure who rarely speaks at lunch because he's too busy reading, but not understanding, economics blogs. And the compliments on my work ethic pleased me so much that I skipped all my classes fr the day, and went to sit in a coffee shop and read Old Man's War at one sitting.

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 08:51:15 GMT

Some poor-quality photos of a few things I've done this past trimester. I have my final critique tomorrow morning; these, plus a few dozen pencil drawings, several painter portrait sketches, a still-life and model painting that are both in progress, and a few other incidental sketches and notes. I should take a detail shot of that still-life; it looks rather slick in this photo, but the paint gets pretty serious in some places.

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:47:50 GMT

For what did I rue
the passing of maple leaves?
Tonight the first sight
of the moonlight filtering
from between the trees

The Imperial Prince Kyoutomo Nakatsuka

The thing about falling down is that it offers the chance to stand up; many are strong afterwards in the broken places.

I am thinking of a friend of mine, arms a mass of scars, history the occassional vague allusion to heroin and meth and clinics. I admire her desperately; damned if she isn't talented--damned if she isn't always quietly at work, pleasant and calm to be around.

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:53:44 GMT

Outside my apartment is a tiny triangular yard, surrounded by high hedges. A few pink roses still cling tenaciously to a bush there, but they're not long for this world. Under the porch awning sits a table and chairs; when spring comes, when the sun comes back, it will be a fine place to have coffee in the morning. Now, it still pleases me to think of those warms mornings, sometime in the future, of coffee in a yard of my own, even if I live in the living room of a two-bedroom place.

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:48:29 GMT

The entire studio seems pretty emo these days. Breakups, squabbles, malaise. I'm feeling pretty emo myself this past week or so, for reasons unknown. My fiddle is collecting dust in a corner of the living room, and I'm convinced that I haven't done a bit of work this trimester (which, compared to the previous six trimesters, is not false.) It's a pretty large challenge I've set myself, this "painting" thing, and I wonder if I really have the ability, and the work ethic, required.

Ah well. Nothing to do but do it, eh?

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 07:54:46 GMT

What should I make of the fact that, when younger, I believed X for reason Y, and now believe X for reason Z?

This certainly doesn't prove X is false, but it suggests strongly that I may not believe X for reasons Y or Z at all; rather, it suggests to me that I consider Y or Z compelling arguments because they lead to X. Peculiarly, this means that my continuing belief in X, even as my reasons change, is a prime reason why I am highly uncertain that I (on a higher, or more abstract level) believe in X at all; authority is split on the topic, so in the end I must rely on myself, but I have cause to doubt my own sincerity.

Personally, though--take this as a statement of faith, I suppose--I expect the world would be a better place if we all looked on our own sincerity and righteousness with a more doubtful eye.

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:50:57 GMT

I had spent the afternoon out in town, collecting objects for my next still-life: a grimy tumbler, a bulky black rotary phone. I'd just walked out of a 7-11 where I picked up my last object for the day, a pack of Lucky Strikes, and sat down under a monumental equestrial statue of an armored man holding a war-pick. The Lucky Strikes had no interest for me--the first cigarettes I've ever bought, likely to be the only--but the pack of candy I got at the same time was calling me.

As equestrian statues tend to be, this one stands in the middle of a square. I was watching people go about their lives when a dreadlocked-man in his mid twenties stood up, hoisted a portable stereo, and pressed play.

"Beat it! Beat it!" shrilled Michael from the stereo, and the crowd suddenly coalesced into rows of sixteen year old dancers. They stepped, kicked, and clapped in rough unison for perhaps a minute, before the song gave out a last beat it, the dancers gave two mighty stomps, and then, as if a year of entropy crashed down in a moment, the flash mob dancers dissolved into a crowd.

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:46:12 GMT

A tap on the spacebar, and my laptop picked a song. Sinatra singing "As Time Goes By". The recording is fuzzy and hollow, as if voice and orchestra are coming from a great distance.

Out from a surface of thick, ropey paint, an old man stares with eyes both haunted and empty. In his hand, he holds a bunch of forget-me-nots, dead.

I know from previous visits to the cafe that he mountain of whipped cream will taste amazing--fresh, with no hint of chemical or sugar--but it's already dissolving into my hot chocolate, sending rivers down the side of my mug. Outside the cafe, a comedy troupe dressed as a marching band gone terribly wrong plays that one bit from the 1812.

There is a joy that bubbles up at times unexpected, when you've gone to bed tired, having dragged a few more minutes out of the day for some cause, when you stand in front of an easle and find your weight shifting from foot to foot in time with a reel that sounds only in your mind.

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:17:59 GMT

My--rather messy--corner of the studio. I spend the morning here, painting pears or still-lifes or whatever. The afternoon, I go just down the hall to the model room. Fourteen people behind easels, one on the stand. The fourteen march back and forth for three hours: observe, paint, observe, paint, observe...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:42:05 GMT

Robbie, wearing a coyote-skin cap he purchased at a gun show in Fort Worth.
This is a three-hour portrait sketch from Face Club, wherein students take turns posing for each other.

Formerly a medevac chopper pilot in Afghanistan, Robbie's ambition is to be a portrait painter. Merely by being what he is, a conservative-libertarian Texan in Sweden, he regularly forces the world into revealing that--although Americans may well be as provincial as they are said to be--provincialism is a disease of the human race, not restricted by nationality.

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:55:00 GMT

Well, you can stake that claim --
Good work is the key to good fortune
Winners take that praise
Losers seldom take that blame
If they don't take that game
And sometimes the winner takes nothing
We draw our own designs
But fortune has to make that frame.

Out of the most able people I've known, I can't think of any who didn't work their balls off. Necessary, but not sufficient. Where would any of us be, had we been, say, born in Carthage in 148 BC?

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:32:59 GMT

"Well, should we dress up for the opening?" asked Amelia.

"You guys are artists," said Joakim, a jolly Viking, head of the studio, and a driving force behind and major contributer to the show, Immortal Works. "Wear whatever you want. And give invitations to a bunch of rich people."

The evening of the show came--Friday night. The end of the week; we've all just finished our five-week model paintings, and I, at least, am feeling punchy. Dressed up, in a certain version of dressed up--grey houndstooth slacks, blue-and-white shirt with Mandarin collar, sloppy grey cravat, and an overcoat I bought in Japan a thousand years ago. We waited in the rain, under a bus awning, a half-dozen would-be painters.

"Youre supposed to be meeting Michael?" asked Birgitta.

"Yeah, he should be here now."

Per Elev, pale and elvish: "Hey, is that that special umbrella?"

"You have no idea. Not just special, but magic. It's a homosexual detector." I point the umbrella at Dhiman, Tor Petter, then click a button on the handle as I pass it over Per Elev. The tip lights up flashing pink, in perhaps the most useless umbrella-feature imaginable. "Oh, burn!"

The bus arrives. Looking for still-absent Michael, I line up to board with the others. Before I have a foot on the steps, a car abruptly stops behind me, and Mikey leans out the window. "We're running late!". His girlfriend Cecilia is in the passenger seat. She should already be at the show, pouring wine. "Get in the car!" We're off.

Three hours later, the real guests of the opening have gone, and the odd scent of people with money has left the gallery. Those who remain are painters, students, models, most drunk on the gallery's wine.

"It was a strong show, such a strong show."

"I'm just glad people sent good works. When we decided what to name the show, and realized it would be a pretty big deal, I was starting to be afraid people would just send in leftover crap."

"What happened to that one sculpture? Christ on the Cross? It's in the catalogue..."

"Oh, the artist's a... what's the English? A fuckup. First he couldn't get the bronze made, so he was going to send a plaster, but that didn't work either."

"That's a shame. But still... Such a strong show. I feel like we've really raised our own bar."

"It was good. I'm on the record saying that I can draw better than Nerdrum's students with a piece of charcoal stuck in my ass, but it was good to have such a range of work there."

"Definitely. From that big allegory in the manner of Reubens to Dan's abstract value-arrangement masquerading as terracotta and garlic. We've all got a lot of work to be doing."

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:38:36 GMT

I leave my apartment for school, then run back in, pointing excitedly out the door. My gesticulations pull my roommates away from The Last Airbender to look out the door. Snow, fat lazy flakes drifting down from a lavender sky.

On the way to school, flakes collect and, melted, glitter on my blazer. One hand, shoved into my pocket is warm, the other doing duty holding my lunch. Did I really not see snow in England and Sweden last year, or was I too distracted to notice? If not, not since Japan Each brush against my nose or lips seems to come from a memory. Or perhaps not a memory, but a haiku--something that invokes something large, but is silent when the time comes to explain itself.

I laugh, a little, and think about skipping school. Hello, friend. Hello hello hello.. But no; perhaps at some fuure date, if it lies thick on the ground. Right now, it's already coming down wetter and wetter, less snowlike by the moment.

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:34:52 GMT

I really can't get any more fussed about Maine than I did about California. I'd suppose marriage is a human institution, and if so, it's up to people to define. If we go with, I don't know, it's for something, I guess. Love, right?, it implies one answer about who is eligible. If we presume the institution has some function beyond conveying that a relationship is serious, though, it implies other eligible candidate-pools. I really have no strong opinions on the way to maximize social utility, except to say that I suspect heterosexual relations are in some sense fundamentally different from homosexual.

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:06:01 GMT

In the skeleton of an unfinished building, an arc welder throws a fan of flickering shadows on the cement roof, bright and beautiful against the dark-at-16:30 sky. The train rolls on, and leaves the light behind.

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:16:36 GMT

Looking at my still-life, which foregoes the customary dusty terracotta & onions for glass, steel, and plastic, and listening to myself talk about my project of dissolving the figure into abstract designs, and noticing the fact I do my composition homework on my laptop, I am wondering how the dude who thinks about throwing over painting to run off and be a Chaucerian became the closest thing we have to a token member of the modern world. *

* Everyone should read Dr. Johnston, again and again and again, but I never should have let myself start idly toying with his methods of structuring a sentence.

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:34:05 GMT

Glob by glob, paint goes down on the canvas--thick here, thin there, wet here, dry there. As I build up texture, try to make important things come out and other things recede, I keep thinking of violin lessons--where to crescendo, where to keep a regular rythm and where to add a little swing. Somehow, in a way I can't explain, it's all the same thing.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:39:45 GMT

Perhaps one should go into the arts, if one should go into the arts, to understand that living hard may be the easy choice--is it harder to start your day with a belt of whisky and a fistful of analgesics, or an alarm before dawn and a bowl of oatmeal? One is banal, the other romantic--but perhaps we are far enough past the romantics to be cynical about their idealistic cynicism; in other words, was there more Byron could have done for Greece than die for it?

An interesting temporal ordering of events

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:10:27 GMT

1. I brush my head on something
2. I jerk my head back
3. I become aware of jerking my head back
4. I become aware of something brushing my head

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:03:21 GMT

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W.H. Auden

If memory holds from a few years back, the critics read this poem as a parody; a joking display of bathos; one, I remember, said it was a mockery of then-popular songs, which is no doubt true. Can you not laugh at the exaspirated demand to shut up that damn dog?

If to read the poem straight, though, is to commit a sin of adolescent obviousness, to stop at calling it a parody is to miss the point from the other direction. Surely a core of genuine sorrow runs through the poem, clad in parody the same way adults hide their own sorrow in overstatement and jokes, in an alienated and cynical world where one cannot just cry "I grieve!" The sorrow of loyalty to something gone, in a world stripped of the pathetic fallacy and indifferent, where the dog still barks and all things carry on, even when all things have crumbled to their end.

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:40:55 GMT

In the model room. The model is long gone. Some students finish a few details, others pack up, others set up for evening drawing

Academician 1: Can you believe respected members of the Swedish art establishment are literally calling us Nazis, just because we're representational painters?

Academician 2: We should change the school logo to a stylized version of the SS insignia and only let in Aryans, just to spite them.

Aca. 1: Well, we're almost all Scandinavians to begin with. We're pretty white. Except for Dhiman.

Aca. 2: Technically, Dhiman is the most Aryan of all of us!

Aca. 3: Technically, /I'm/ the most Arian of all of us! I believe Christ was a created entity!

All: ...

Aca. 4: Technically, they came from over the mountains. Why are you calling me a barbarian?