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jaeleslie at 07:08pm on 20/08/2003
jaeleslie at 07:08pm on 20/08/2003At the calligraphy conference in Ohio my first design class was with Judy Melvin. She used to work in-house at American Greetings, particularly in collaboration with Mike Gold, and I have admired their works for some years. She still freelances for American Greetings, which employs a full-time staff of seven lettering artists. For two and half days she took us through a number of ways to design a surface or texture with color and gesso and common household products. (Well, bleach.) All of us were working on long-format papers, 8-1/2 x 20 inches or thereabouts, and after demonstrating each technique we went at it, in a mixed-media extravaganza. Judy circulated and offered individual critiques on the dozens of works that each of the eighteen students were developing. At the end of the first day she started suggesting that we might start finishing something now. Everything went up on the wall -- then sometimes came down for more work.
I have run into some artists, like my conference roommate Marcia who is a potter, with a preferred mode of function that is, like mine, more tactile than visual. My own calligraphic work is so gestural in impulse that it often takes me some time to work out what it is visually that I have just set down on the paper. Understanding this about myself made it possible for me to trust Judy's advice. She is clearly highly talented in the visual realm, and if she said a composition needed more contrast, or to be anchored to the page, or more bits of this color here, or a line extended there, I tried to do what she said. This was in itself a breakthrough for me in an area I have often resisted, doing what I am told. I don't always.
Judy told us, Don't Think. She described it as her way of getting past the fear of the blank page, a problem that painters and writers have in common. Yet I understood the first day that what Judy meant by Don't Think was that it is often hard to work past a creative block if one is over-intellectualizing the process. It is her way of getting past the difficulty of beginning something new, and approaching the playful Flow.
Me, I have learned to ruin any number of fine white pieces of expensive blank paper without turning a hair. I proceeded to demonstrate this more than once. But then what? Finishing is harder, and knowing when it is finished, and when I need to keep at it. Sometimes I need to just keep the hand moving, but sometimes I need to spend some time looking. Not thinking! To my teachers, this sometimes appears that I am spinning my wheels and getting nowhere, wasting time. Sometimes I need to move on to something else, multiprocessing, while the appearance of what I have just done settles in my mind a bit, as it needs to before I can see what it needs next.
After we played with gesso, and with sumi ink, and with bleach, and walnut ink, and then with acrylic inks, and then each of those things in a different order or on different colored papers, we got go the part where she demonstrated her use of pastels. What she showed us was, more literally than usual, child's play, that she finds completely absorbs her attention for uncounted time. She applies powdered soft pastels, with the application tool of a finger, wrapped in a torn-off bit of paper toweling. When one piece of paper towel gets worn, replace it with another. There are fancy stomps of wadded-up paper that pastel artists can buy for this purpose. (I preferred the intensity of color applied directly from the stick.) But sometimes more art supplies are not what you need to enter into the heartland of play.
Then we got onto collage, which for some of us is capable of consuming all time available for it. I put bits of things down, and move them around, and it takes me forever to see they look like in each new place. For once I didn't buy a lot of new art aupplies at the conference. But I came home with half-a-dozen new paintings, dozens more started, and some great pieces of color and marks that other people painted and offered to me when we were cleaning up. I did get a new pair of jaggedy scissors, to look at these things with.
I have run into some artists, like my conference roommate Marcia who is a potter, with a preferred mode of function that is, like mine, more tactile than visual. My own calligraphic work is so gestural in impulse that it often takes me some time to work out what it is visually that I have just set down on the paper. Understanding this about myself made it possible for me to trust Judy's advice. She is clearly highly talented in the visual realm, and if she said a composition needed more contrast, or to be anchored to the page, or more bits of this color here, or a line extended there, I tried to do what she said. This was in itself a breakthrough for me in an area I have often resisted, doing what I am told. I don't always.
Judy told us, Don't Think. She described it as her way of getting past the fear of the blank page, a problem that painters and writers have in common. Yet I understood the first day that what Judy meant by Don't Think was that it is often hard to work past a creative block if one is over-intellectualizing the process. It is her way of getting past the difficulty of beginning something new, and approaching the playful Flow.
Me, I have learned to ruin any number of fine white pieces of expensive blank paper without turning a hair. I proceeded to demonstrate this more than once. But then what? Finishing is harder, and knowing when it is finished, and when I need to keep at it. Sometimes I need to just keep the hand moving, but sometimes I need to spend some time looking. Not thinking! To my teachers, this sometimes appears that I am spinning my wheels and getting nowhere, wasting time. Sometimes I need to move on to something else, multiprocessing, while the appearance of what I have just done settles in my mind a bit, as it needs to before I can see what it needs next.
After we played with gesso, and with sumi ink, and with bleach, and walnut ink, and then with acrylic inks, and then each of those things in a different order or on different colored papers, we got go the part where she demonstrated her use of pastels. What she showed us was, more literally than usual, child's play, that she finds completely absorbs her attention for uncounted time. She applies powdered soft pastels, with the application tool of a finger, wrapped in a torn-off bit of paper toweling. When one piece of paper towel gets worn, replace it with another. There are fancy stomps of wadded-up paper that pastel artists can buy for this purpose. (I preferred the intensity of color applied directly from the stick.) But sometimes more art supplies are not what you need to enter into the heartland of play.
Then we got onto collage, which for some of us is capable of consuming all time available for it. I put bits of things down, and move them around, and it takes me forever to see they look like in each new place. For once I didn't buy a lot of new art aupplies at the conference. But I came home with half-a-dozen new paintings, dozens more started, and some great pieces of color and marks that other people painted and offered to me when we were cleaning up. I did get a new pair of jaggedy scissors, to look at these things with.