While looking for insect illustrations as reference for a project, I discovered Graphics Fairy (at blogspot.com). It is a great source for Victorian era illustrations, scanned at high resolution from antique papers. Because laws change, and are different from place to place, the images are not absolutely guaranteed to be in the public domain, but are perfect to print out on acid free paper to include in collages and sketchbook pages.
I saw Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko in Red (a play by John Logan) at the Golden on 45th Street. It was very moving, intense. I thought Rothko’s work was a lot about light, luminosity–like Turner. But the play showed a different Rothko–troubled, haunted– crazily, ecstatically erudite–solipsistic.
“I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”
It has got me wondering what drove the making of those paintings–or any paintings by anyone, ever–and if Rothko’s pain is ancillary to our experience of his work.
It is a wonderful play.
Inkblots are not altogether random. You can coax the ink to go where you’d like it to go–into a butterfly shape, a bird, a diamond, a circle.
To make a circular inkblot (a planet, a mandala, a beetle’s back), fold a piece of paper in half (this pinkish inkblot is a 22 x 30 piece of Rives BFK), place the point of your compass in the middle of the fold line. Draw a pale pencil circle on your paper.
With the dropper from your ink (or a brush if you do not have a dropper), make a bead of ink around the edge of your pencilled circle, drip some water into the center, some other ink colors if you like.
Fold the paper, gently smushing the ink and water to the center line. Some ink will escape the circle, but that will just make your blot more interesting!
Instead of a bead of ink, you can make a series of curlicues all around the edge with ink and water to get a more varied edge, as in the inkblot to the left.
Consider messing up your art materials as the first mark you make.
My mother took a watercolor class (I was a teenager) where the teacher told the students to flick a little paint and water across the page before they started, and that would get them over this idea that they were going to make a mistake. This is a great idea! Of course, with watercolor, you want to maintain the white of the page and try not to add opaque white, so perhaps it wouldn’t work in every case.
But if you have purchased a sketchbook to record your ideas, and put in on your shelf untouched instead, why not start by messing up all the pages? You can stain them with strong tea, sepia ink mixed with water, raw umber acrylic paint mixed with water. You can splat the color, splash it, smear it on with a paper towel, brush it on. You can do a few pages at a time and prop your sketchbook open in front of a fan so it doesn’t get mildewy. I knew a guy who would buy a sketchbook and throw it in the tub before (and sometimes after) working in it. The pages would fuse and morph, wrinkle and stain. Wonderful!
After you have done this, you will be intimately acquainted with every page of your sketchbook—it is YOURS. Now you can make the second mark!
Cave Painting, Lascaux, Dordogne, France. Photo by Ralph Morse for Life Magazine, 1947
The person who drew this did not have an art degree. Despite the gorgeous mark, cultural and historic relevance, and absolute domination of the art making timeline of the Paleolithic era, this person does not have a degree to back them up.
Who drew this? No one really knows. Some anthropologists suggest that the paintings had a ceremonial purpose, rather than a decorative one. This might suggest that the drawings were made by a spiritual leader of a group, or perhaps the person who did the best drawings (just as there is always a person in most communities who gets asked to do the art things—paint the backdrop for the school musical, design the t-shirt, etc) got to go with the spiritual leader and participate in the ceremony by drawing and painting. Or maybe everyone in the culture got to make art.
Art-making was an important part of this person’s life—maybe a crucial one—the act of his painting might have reassured everyone that the hunting was going to be successful that year, or that everyone would have fruitful dreaming, or that no one would come to smite them. This person probably did not have a fear of making the first mark unless, of course, they were ritually sacrificed after doing their afternoon of cave painting, and then that would be fear of making the last mark.
We know Leonardo da Vinci the best, I think, through his sketchbooks. He was a voracious learner and thinker, interested in everything. His sketchbooks are not merely studies for paintings, but a record of ideas, the appearance of people and things around him, inventions, anatomical studies.
The marks he makes are all dauntingly lovely (Leonardo did not seem to make any ugly marks as far as I have been able to tell). But the variety of marks is reassuringly workmanlike. In this sketchbook page, the marks describing the horse and rider feel different than the ones honing the man’s head. You can almost feel how fast the horse is moving—soon he will be off the page. These marks are an exploration of that, I think. But the man’s head is carefully worked out, and gridded for easy transferral to a work that is outside the pages of the sketchbook.
What is it we are thinking about when we make the first mark on a page? What impels a person to commit a creative idea to paper with a mark? What is our intent?
First marks are often not beautiful, not elegant, often not saved, are drawn over, honed, made finer. Often they are private. They can quickly record an idea to develop later. They are filled with possibilities, are fecund, contain memories and ideas. They are not art in and of themselves, though they can be the start of art making. They are satisfying.
They are hard to make sometimes, and paper is more often than not left blank out of fear.
A first mark is a commitment to an exploration. In this blog I hope to explore how we make the first mark and how we can avoid those blocks that prevent all of us from having an artistic exploration in our lives.
