One of the tasks I have is to “narrate my work” with posts or tweets of about 100 words. I’m kind of working this out here and probably overthinking all of it as usual. I did manage to scribble down some notes about each day in physical notebooks. I write in notebooks a lot, and I am one of those people who ends up with a whole hoard of them. I keep cheap composition books as the designated space for when I don’t know how to begin or what I’m doing.
It seemed as though each time I picked up the pen a flood of writing would occur. The entries below are the shortened versions. For years I thought I would run out of words, writing was such an uphill task. It is important to me to keep these narrative entries short because I am really trying to focus my attention more on doing what I do than on explaining what I do. But some inquiry does happen, because that’s how I sometimes make little discoveries.
So here are some observations drawn from the past week:
Saturday Jan 29 This week I had my first assignment to do for the landscape painting class I’m taking online. It’s absurd that I’m taking an online landscape painting class in winter in Washington DC. But it also seemed like the exact challenge I needed. My courage for painting outside alone ebbs and flows–mostly over just small social worries like “People are going to look at what I’m doing and wonder how I can be making such an ass of myself.” In the warm weather the past couple of years I’ve gone out with a group that I like a lot, but none of them want to go out in the cold. Meanwhile I look at all these art groups on FB and I keep seeing pictures of this handsome happy older Italian man–clearly some sort of maniac–with his easel set up out in a snowy mountain forest, and I think, enviously, “I really need to try harder to figure out how to get out.” The whole point of landscape painting in my mind has been you get to be outside. I just go out and paint hopefully. I had zero confidence in my ability to turn a sketch (or a sketch with notes) into a painting, and almost no interest in turning a photo into a painting. But it was either these or dress for standing around, not walking, in the cold. Was I going to need to buy another coat? (Dither for days, looking at online outdoor clothing stores.) I went out to some places along the Anacostia River, did one sketch, took photos, and in the evenings when I was at home I looked at the photos and couldn’t see how I could have thought there were paintings in them somewhere. On Tuesday I had a tiny sketch:
I had to sneak up on the task in small bites, basically just doing as much as I would not mind walking away from or starting over. I did some things I’d never done before, always thinking, “Well, at this point you’ve got nothing to lose by trying this,” and about an hour before the class I was surprised to find I’d finished it, really quickly, when I at last got to the point of putting brush to paper.
Sunday Jan 30 It’s true that I did a landscape painting without being in the landscape. But the alternative option was still there. It’s like the Chinese restaurant menu option I apply when I can’t make up my mind: I tell myself I can keep coming back until I’ve had everything on the menu. Near the end of last winter I had bought a pair of fleece-lined snow pants because I thought they might be good for painting, but then I convinced myself that they wouldn’t work, they were too tight, they looked silly. Each time I tried them on I wore two layers under them, which explains the tightness and the silliness. But more layers is warmer, right? Today, though, having given myself the outdoor painting challenge, I tried them on again. This time I only tried one layer underneath them, and they didn’t look as if I had stuffed myself into them in a hurry, so I kept them on long enough to notice that they were warm. I wore them for a walk along the riverfront this afternoon and when I got home I felt like I didn’t want to wear anything else till April.
Monday Jan 31 I started building this blog in 2018 or 2019, but my dog Sweetie was slowly dying and I was dealing at the same time with the horrible job and it seemed to me that I could only do very simple things. I practiced drawing from one of the Dover reprints of collections of ornament, using the composition notebooks. That was all the ambition I could manage for a while. I didn’t look at the blog again till I enrolled in this PKM workshop. It took me a day to get it almost to where I wanted and at the end of the day I hadn’t posted anything on it and I was tired., but I told myself, “This counts as work, this counts as work.” I tell myself this when I’m painting, too. I want to get to where when people ask me what I do, I don’t just tell them whatever happens to be the current job.
At one point when I was working on the homepage I thought of calling the blog “The Glass-Bottomed Boat,” because the image on the page is, as you can see, a boat, not a tree. Then I experienced a great surge of remembering an altogether different life. I’ve got the image of an actual halfway tree arriving in the mail in a couple of days.
Halfway Tree 