Friday's time on the deck was vintage. Perfect weather, low humidity, few biting insects. And I got my first clearwing hummingbird moth sighting of the year, working on the butterfly bush. Also a chickadee, a first this year. And a monarch butterfly. These are all less common than in earlier years, likewise fireflies, just the occasional one, but still welcome.
Saturday's walk to the pond, cool and cloudy, great walking weather, is now no longer a stretch goal but routine. While I was there I pulled off a dead branch which was dragging a big bough down, and the bough sprang up gratefully, about fifteen feet up.
Already some leaves are falling, mostly wild cherry. You'll see beechnuts developing, and brambles growing in a planter, such temptation. I expect birds and squirrels will see them off before they're ripe.
And back home I added in a couple of garden stakes to give the morning glories something to climb up. A couple of hours later, the tendrils are already establishing themselves. Warp speed.
I "pruned" the bird-planted butterfly bush by treating it rough. I'm not a careful snippity gardener, at least not with this guy.
I just tore off lower branches full of dead foliage and tossed them into the trees on my walk.
When you consider the savage cutting and hacking and poisonous tools and materials used in suburban gardens, you wonder if many a murder has been averted by people rushing to take out their deadly aggression in the garden. All that slashing and dragging about. I do wonder.
Indoors the rescued orchid is getting near to flowering
Anyway on to art.
Here's a little ink drawing from today
And a bit tired, later I did a doodle while I listened to The Foundling, a favorite Georgette Heyer.
A couple of people have put a really good question about the drawings, not doodles, I've been doing lately, viz., how long does it take. The answer is twofold, pour a cup of tea and sit a minute.
One is that to an artist every piece of work, for better or worse, comes out of every mark they've ever made. That's because your eye sees based on all the years of practice it's had. Your drawing hand, too, has a lot of stored knowledge. Your brain knows to permit the seeing without naming that's vital to drawing.
Your experience tells you what tool or approach will work for this subject or idea -- you don't only draw stuff you can see, you may be drawing a concept, see Odilon Redon, early O'Keefe, and more. Here I drew my perception of what I was seeing, both object and idea.
The lightness and movement of the subject suggested fine-point ink, my pilot pen, the humbleness needed a small scale, here a page smaller than my hand. And the fineness of the line needed a bright white, slightly rough, paper for contrast.
So these little drawings took well over eighty years. And literally thousands of drawings and paintings and walking and looking and seeing and musing.
But what you probably really wanted to know was how long this particular one took as seen by an observer. In each case, a few minutes.
The other thing that's not evident to an observer is that the focus needed is so total that, for me, one drawing is about it for the day. If I drew more, the focus would blur, the eye would flag, the drawing wouldn't be worth keeping, and certainly not worth showing you, and signing.
And I think you know I'm a true believer in drawing from life or memory, creating the composition there and then. I don't work from photos, even my own, where I created the composition. To me it feels dead on arrival. The photo did it already.
I also work alla prima, meaning straight onto the blank page, no blocking or drafting or preliminary marks. That takes place in the mind's eye.
None of this is meant to pass judgment on different ways of drawing. It's just how I work.
More than you wanted to know, probably! Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Happy day everyone, it's happy somewhere for someone, if not everywhere for everyone.
