{"id":6323,"date":"2015-10-31T17:35:45","date_gmt":"2015-10-31T17:35:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6323"},"modified":"2015-10-31T17:35:45","modified_gmt":"2015-10-31T17:35:45","slug":"inner-compass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6323","title":{"rendered":"Inner compass"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bowl\"<\/a><\/u>We\u2019ve had a couple killing frosts already here, which is typical: snowfall by Halloween. And then it\u2019s followed by a string of much warmer, Indian summer days, a temperate mix of sun and clouds, sometimes for weeks. One thing about Western New York, at least in my suburb, is that robins sing only into June, and then we hardly see them until the next spring. I have no idea where they go or why they don\u2019t keep plucking worms from the grass all summer long. They retreat to more wooded areas or maybe properties where the birdbaths get cleaned more often than ours does. Or they just don’t like me. That’s probably it.<\/p>\n

It makes me feel a little cheated. Every time I visit my cousin Brian in Laurel, Maryland, near Baltimore, I hear flocks of robins singing up and down his street, regardless of what month it is. I want to shout up into the branches,\u00a0hey what gives<\/em>? Yet, as the sun came out this morning, robins showed up again, way ahead of schedule, and started fighting for exclusive claim to the birdbath, and then half a dozen of them were hopping around in the front yard, tilting their heads to the side. Then, while I was sitting in my studio I heard one of them singing in a crabapple next door. This is something of an event around here for me\u2014which may be sad commentary on my particular suburban life. A little more birdsong and, let\u2019s be honest, three more blowout backyard parties per year\u2014which would be three more than I usually have\u2014and I\u2019d be a pretty happy camper. Maybe the robin was announcing that winter isn\u2019t coming after all, and we\u2019ll finally get a local windfall from global warming. As I understand it, we\u2019re one of two places on the globe where temperatures have been declining steadily as they rise everywhere else on the planet.<\/p>\n

Whatever inspired him to sing, I’ve decided to take that little avian tune as a good omen for breaking old patterns. Recently, I resolved to shift my painting more resolutely toward a new method I\u2019ve followed off and on for years, but without being able to stick with it. In the past, I\u2019ve borrowed Edwin Dickinson\u2019s term,\u00a0premier coup<\/em>\u2014letting the first strike stand without reworking, painting quickly\u2014to describe this method. But I\u2019ve misled myself by associating these paintings with the sense that I\u2019d have to finish them in only a day, or with some kind of stopwatch in mind, as I believe Dickinson may have done, as a discipline. I\u2019m perfectly capable of doing that. I\u2019ve done it many times, sometimes with great results. Many times, though, just the opposite. In both cases, the speed of execution is there, easy to see, in the brushwork, part talent and part luck, when it works. But what always gets in my way is thinking\u00a0first<\/em>\u00a0about how much time I\u2019m spending in the work. The amount of time invested in this sort of painting isn\u2019t the point. It\u2019s more about\u00a0the quality of the paint<\/em>, and keeping the level of detail at a certain level, with only a certain level of finish, regardless of how long it takes to apply the paint\u2014though these paintings will always take a fraction of the time my highly realistic work requires, if I\u2019m focusing on these things.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week, I took a series of photographs, hoping to put together a small collection of images that would set me up for a series of half a dozen smaller paintings over the next few months.\u00a0 Then other obligations began to eat into my week, so I wondered if I shouldn\u2019t try another\u00a0premier coup<\/em>, just to keep the rhythm of work going, as a bridge to next week, when I can do nothing but paint. Rather than be in the frame of mind for finishing something to include next year or the following year, why not just do something to please myself?<\/p>\n

So I went back and looked through this\u00a0file of photographs I\u2019d just taken of small ordinary household objects\u2014a vase, some little bowls we bought not too long ago\u2014and I found one that I\u2019d rejected as almost too simple. Just a bowl, nothing else, on the edge of our kitchen table, which has a blond-and-honey surface of poly-coated maple. It\u2019s a challenging surface to depict effectively which may be why I put it aside. Now the simplicity of the image seemed just what I needed, given my new intent\u2014to do something unassuming for its own sake, the way Manet painted a little bunch of asparagus tips as a gratuity, nothing at stake in it, for a collector who bought a larger painting.<\/p>\n

Now I can\u2019t wait to pick up a brush tomorrow morning. The key to this change in attitude\u2014which may help me stay on course with a series of paintings like it\u2014is that I\u2019m doing it simply to hold fast to a certain feeling in the application of the paint. Not how many days it takes. Not whether it will look like work I\u2019ve done before. Once I got my head organized around that feeling\u2014to make each spot of paint exactly the sort of\u00a0spot<\/em>\u00a0I want to see in order to evoke a certain level of verisimilitude, regardless of whether anyone else will recognize the quality of the results\u2014then the desire to push paint around sprang up on its own. But it was also partly that I saw, in the discarded shot of the bowl, patterns of color that hadn\u2019t struck me before and a certain way of composing a picture from it where the forms would work together, if I could do it properly. The inner compass is to keep feeling my way forward through a certain way of applying a certain consistency of paint. If I lose that, a sense of obligation begins to seep into the process, and an act of creation becomes a job. This is one of those \u201clessons\u201d I\u2019ve learned dozens of times, and keep having to relearn every time I start a new painting, and yet as often as it comes into focus, it just as often slips away, because time pressures seep in as you slip into wanting more from the act of painting than the act of painting itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019ve had a couple killing frosts already here, which is typical: snowfall by Halloween. And then it\u2019s followed by a string of much warmer, Indian summer days, a temperate mix of sun and clouds, sometimes for weeks. 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