Twofer

Hello again after a short hiatus.  I took a wonderful trip to Portugal and France last month, and just before leaving, I wrote a newsletter about Showing and Telling.  I posted it to my website, but alas, I didn’t quite have time to send it out as an email. Read it here. It features a painting and a poem about Malibu.  In the poem, I tried to capture the ineffable quality of a place that will always be a part of me.

The reason for the Portugal trip was the wedding of our friends’ son Harry to his bride Luiza. It was a joyful, memorable day, with the ceremony in a Baroque basilica and the reception at a villa on the water.  Principle to live by -- never pass up an opportunity to celebrate life’s important moments with friends and family!  Every trip has to include art, too, of course.  So in Lisbon, we visited the MAC/CCB Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened less than a year ago.  Here’s me, joining in with Niki de Saint-Phalle’s “Les Baigneuses.”

This sculpture is just ASKING for a little interaction! At MAC/CCB Lisbon.

The museum is vast, and we spent the whole afternoon walking through it.  One of the exhibits was called “Or the Continuous Drawing,” and featured drawings in the broadest sense, from a tree branch as line, to precisely cut and rearranged paper pieces, to highly rendered figurative works like this beauty, by Scott Hunt, called “Bobbie and the Gazing Ball.”  

I loved a lot of the drawings in the show.  Some of them, though – if you took away the frame and the museum setting, you’d think they were just doodles from the recycle bin.  Such is the mystery of what is “art,” and what is “good.”

Thinking about this drawing show reminded me how freeing it can be to draw.  The process is such an idea-generator.  You can draw whatever or whomever is in front of you, or you can draw something out of your imagination.  You can draw fast and loose, and cover a lot of pages. Drawing is low stakes in the best way.  It’s (often) just erasable marks! It’s just paper, not a precious canvas!  Drawing feels like touching with your eyes and then translating that touch into your hand’s motion.  Magical.

Since I’m studying French - more on that obsession in a future newsletter - “à la prochaine!”

Showing and Telling

As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I have a show up at the Bozeman Public Library through the month of September, called “A Picture and a Thousand Words.  I partnered with my neighbor and plein air painting buddy Kim Epskamp to create the show, which features our artworks and our writing - my poetry and Kim’s nonfiction prose.

Standing beside my painting of Point Dume. Oil on canvas, 36” x 48”, 2024, $2500,

From August into September, I also had a show of my prints at the best coffeeshop in Bozeman, Wild Joe’s Coffee Spot on Main Street.  Next month, I’m hanging some pieces at another popular Main Street hangout.  Then I’m going back to the studio, and into the great outdoors, to find inspiration for the next body of work, and to recapture a sense of playfulness.  I want to find out what interests me right now.  I sense that it will involve people. I plan to try new things, both subject matter and materials.  I also plan to put my poetry out into the literary space and see where it takes hold. Here is my poem Malibu, from the show.

Malibu

Malleable blue

hue mer

(an ocean joke)

wavelets and libations

delineated by terra firma,

landslid from mountain wrinkle

to welling tidepools.

The irony of laying claim to

your restless molecules of silica and sea!

Some lawyer said

 “the mean high tide line” 

equals something like “mine.”

The Chumash would spin in their graves

at the idea of owning you.

Oh you overdetermined slice of land,

sashaying your azure wavelengths,

making my memories vibrate

with your golden light too actual.

I have to write around you,

in curling surf 

that touches and recedes,

touches and recedes,

because you’re too fraught

for any postcard.

-Elizabeth Anthony

At Wild Joe’s, in front of Phaeton’s Fall, Monotype, 11”  x 15” (framed 20” x 28), 2023, $275.

That’s the yin and yang of life as an artist.  You make work, then you show it.  And you have to promote it.  That’s the telling part.  Ideally you sell it.  But you have to maintain confidence in your work even if it doesn’t sell.  I like to remind myself that Van Gogh sold one painting – one! – during his lifetime.  In between the making and the showing, you also spend quite a few hours on non-creative tasks –  stretching and priming canvases, finding frames and mats, putting the pieces into those frames, attaching D-rings and and wires . . . phew.

Much creating ahead.  But for the next couple of weeks, I’m off to Lisbon, Porto and Paris.  More later on the art scenes in those splendid places.

Art Begets Art

As my family knows, I’m a big logophile – a person who loves words.  Scrabble, anyone?  I’ll play at the drop of a hat.  Wordle, Spelling Bee, I’m obsessed.  The word on my mind lately is “ekphrasis,” which is Greek for “description.” More specifically, I’ve been thinking about “ekphrastic” poetry, which, according to the Poetry Foundation, is a vivid description of a work of art, such as a painting or sculpture, which amplifies and expands that artwork’s meaning.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a workshop on ekphrastic poetry at Tippet Rise, an art center set on a sheep and cattle ranch in Fishtail, Montana.  https://tippetrise.org/about  The golden rolling hills of Tippet Rise, unfolding to vistas of the Beartooth Mountains, are studded with monumental sculptures by famous artists such as Ai Wei Wei, Louise Nevelson and Mark di Suvero.  It’s a landscape that truly inspires awe.

The night before the workshop, I asked myself why I had signed up for this thing - a three-hour class that would require four hours of driving.  But I had a hunch that it would be worth the effort.  I was right.  The workshop was led by poet-in-residence Jenny Xie http://www.jennymxie.com/, who made it feel natural to talk passionately and learnedly about poetry among a group of strangers.  We discussed several ephrastic poems, including Albert Goldbarth’s 1400 (wow!), and then we disbursed into the landscape to write about a sculpture that spoke to us.  In the last half hour, we read our drafts aloud.  I was moved by the vulnerability of those willing to share, and the creativity of the poetic voices.  It confirmed for me that art begets more art, and that all art fosters community and connection.

Here is my piece, written about the newest addition to Tippet Rise, Wendy Red Star’s sculpture called The Soil You See.

Wendy Red Star’s sculpture The Soil You See, at Tippet Rise Art Center

On Wendy Red Star’s The Soil You See

Monument to earth furls

and clouds turbulent,

to time and leagues

grasping and loosing,

Blood dusted disk

insisting with your whorl words

that we feel a thumb

impressed on a neck,

You inhabit this slant

And dare us to chant your lament.

Yet we stutter, the chant

stuck to our tongues,

our bloodied hands seeming to stain

no matter the ablution.

• Elizabeth Anthony

In September, I’m presenting a show of paintings and poems at the Bozeman Public Library, in collaboration with my neighbor Kim Epskamp.  Ekphrastic poetry will naturally be a part of it.  More on that in my next newsletter.

Sketchbooks

My dear friends Sharon and Ted gave me a gorgeous hand-made, leather-bound sketchbook for my birthday in January.  They know that I am a Big Sketchbook Person.  I’ve been keeping sketchbooks for decades, and I have a boxful in my studio.  Anyone who browsed through them would see inside my mind - what catches my attention, what I find beautiful, what makes me laugh, what random thoughts I feel the need to download from brain to paper.  My sketchbooks also contain the odd grocery and to-do list, or notes about books or artists I wanted to read or research later.  I’ve never had rules about what can or can’t go into a sketchbook.

Some days just lend themselves to sketchbook art - like days of torrential rain in LA, of all places.

I’ve had a mental block getting this latest post written, and it relates to sketchbooks.  I have been imagining the perfect essay, capturing all of the nuances of sketchbook practice, flowing in amusing and effortless prose.  And so I have spent days without writing anything.  The paralysis of perfectionism is hard to shake.  That’s where sketchbooks come in.  I keep my sketchbooks for my own amusement and creative expression. They are, at best, about process instead of product.  Sometimes I draw fast, and leave things unfinished, maybe because the person I’ve been drawing got up and left.  Sometimes I carefully compose the page, blocking a draft in pencil, adding ink, and then painting with watercolors.  Often I include collage elements - an excerpt of an art show program, a metro ticket, a bit of a perfume box.  Paper memorabilia of all sorts.  

I’m creating an illustrated personal history.

I don’t feel any pressure to make my sketchbook entries “good,” if “good” means art that a theoretical gallery would show, or art that a theoretical person would buy.  (Who can predict either of those things anyway?  That’s fodder for another post.)  Rather, I can say honestly that I make my sketchbook entries to please myself.  They are “good” when they make me smile, or better yet, laugh as I remember some absurdity that I chronicled. I show my sketchbook scenarios to my family, because they often relate to an incident we experienced or a place we visited together.  

I crack up every time i see this page. I drew this after my daughter and niece and I spent the day at a hot spring in Italy.

I love when artists’ sketchbooks are included in museum shows.  No matter how famous and successful the artists are, I feel a personal connection to them when I see what they created for themselves, to work out their ideas and interact with the visual world.  Among many others that stand out in my memory are Betye Saar’s sketchbooks at her LACMA show Call and Response https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/betye-saar-call-and-response, and those of the French painter Jean-Baptiste Corot (1769-1875), which I saw at an exhibit somewhere in Europe a few years ago. https://www.themorgan.org/drawings/item/246991

I hope you enjoy this peek into my sketchbooks.  Some day I may find a way to scan my favorite pages and print a compilation, as my wonderful kids have suggested.  In the meantime, I’ll savor the process.

Figuratively Speaking: Thoughts on Life Drawing

For most of my adult artistic life, I have practiced life drawing.  I started about 25 years ago, with life drawing classes at the Brentwood Art Center in Los Angeles.  I credit my great teacher Ken Bracken with instilling in me the most fundamental skill — how to see.  How does a body distribute its weight in different positions?  What are the proportions of the human body, and of a particular model?  How does the unique geometry of a person’s face make her or him recognizable as themselves?

I understand why drawing the human figure has been a mainstay of artistic training since the Renaissance.  What is more wondrous and beautiful than the body?  We are all embodied creatures.  The intangible part of our human selves — mind, consciousness, soul — is manifested in and inseparable from our physical selves.  

Now I regularly attend a Friday afternoon life-drawing session here in Bozeman.  It’s a group of women drawing women, hosted by my friend Selisa Rausch, a gifted and inspiring artist.  The encouragement and pursuit of excellence in this community makes my heart happy.  We draw with intensity but, on the breaks, we talk and laugh and eat homemade baked goods.

Conte crayon on newsprint. From a recent Friday life drawing session.

I think about the position of women as artists and women as models when I view art featuring the figure.  A couple of weeks ago, I saw a breathtaking show of the French painter Pierre Bonnard’s work at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.  Some of the most beautiful paintings depict his wife Marthe in the bath.  Look at this one, called Nude in the Bath with Small Dog.  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bonnard#/media/File%3APierre_Bonnard%2C_c.1940-1946%2C_Nude_in_Bathtub%2C_oil_on_canvas%2C_122.56_%C3%97_150.50_cm%2C_Carnegie_Museum_of_Art.jpg.  Marthe was Bonnard’s muse for over 50 years.  I wonder how she felt about being the object of his gaze and the subject of his art for her whole life.  I can’t think of a female artist who rgularly featured a male muse in her work, especially a nude male.

Pastel on newsprint. Another image from our Friday women’s life drawing session.

I also recently checked out an exhibit of figure paintings at a local gallery.  Some of the pieces displayed something I see with frustrating frequency— women without heads.  Are the artists so distracted by breasts that they can see no further?  Or, are faces too difficult to master, and so leaving off the head seems like a workable solution?  Regardless, the effect is to literally objectify the woman, reducing her personhood to a bodily segment, a collection of curved forms. A headless woman has neither ideas nor volition.  What a false concept.  I don‘t notice this headless phenomenon in the depiction of the male form.  But I‘ll keep my eye out to be sure.  

Meanwhile, I take it as a personal challenge to draw the figure, female or male, in its wholeness.  Head attached to torso, mind and body one inseparable whole.

Conte crayon on newsprint. From a local community life drawing session Yes, men model, too.

Mastery

I have been burnishing an etching plate and perfection is eluding me.  At times I feel that even basic competence is eluding me.  The plate is a piece of zinc on which I have created a toned image, and the object of burnishing is to create lighter areas by rubbing the plate with a metal tool called, aptly, a burnisher.  The burnisher, as a Japanese printmaking website describes it, is “like the strip of cartilage in a squid with an oval cross section.”  (MAU Art and Design) So poetic! Working with a burnishing tool feels like trying to sign your name on a line using the back of a spoon.  Unless you have X-ray vision, you can’t tell exactly where the back of the spoon is meeting the paper. Getting a feel for where the mark will occur takes practice, patience, and frequent testing, done by smudging ink across the burnished area.  If you don’t work slowly, and check frequently, you can over-burnish, and erase the tone entirely.

Part of the Flow: zinc plate with etched lines and aquatint tones

Burnishing makes me think about mastery. It involves learning a new skill, and taking the time required rather than rushing, and finding some inner accommodation with disappointing results despite best efforts.   Etching, in general, can be a perfectionist’s art form.  I am gobsmacked by detailed etchings that must have taken untold hours of work.  Part of me wants to work hard and long enough to attain something approaching mastery at this process.  And part of me wants to hold onto the spontaneous aspect of art-making.  The spontaneous gesture can be the most beautiful.  Yet a spontaneous gesture, such as a gorgeous brushstroke, may be possible largely because of the hours spent attaining the mastery that preceded it. Take one of my favorite painters, John Singer Sargent.  Look at the just-right brushstrokes in his famous piece The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit – the girls’ eyes, the doll, their pinafores, the vases! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daughters_of_Edward_Darley_Boit#/media/File:The_Daughters_of_Edward_Darley_Boit,_John_Singer_Sargent,_1882_(unfree_frame_crop).jpg That spontaneity must have been possible because he painted all the time.  All. The. Time.

Test print of Part of the Flow. I overburnished the water. But, a plate can always be reworked and improved.

Mastery also has to compete with everyday obligations, and with temptations that divert your attention because they’re pleasurable and they’re passive, like binge-watching a good streamer, or getting absorbed in a novel.  If you have a lot of interests, and hope to attain mastery in all of them, it can get frustrating. It can take the fun out of trying things.  It can keep you from the spontaneous yes.  I guess the trick is knowing when to practice burnishing and when to, say play beach volleyball.  Our family did that over Christmas, and it was a blast. I hadn’t touched a volleyball in years, and I’ll never attain mastery at the sport.  I might never even get  good at it.  But I want to play more of it.  And I’ll keep etching.

Why paint a sunset?

Welcome to my blog! I recently turned the corner on a new decade, and I’ve stored up a lot of thoughts and observations during my years on this earth. It feels like now’s the time to start sharing them. If not now, when?

Lately I’ve been painting sky scenes. Often, I paint the sky at sunset. I resisted doing this for a long time. I thought sunset paintings were too kitschy, too obvious, too much out of the Thomas Kinkade playbook. But my thinking has changed. The reason for the change has to do with my reflections on some fundamental human tendencies. We seek beauty. We are awed by beauty. When we observe something beautiful that speaks to our soul, we want to capture it. We want to savor it and interact with it and try to hold onto its magic for the future.

As a breathtaking sunset fills the sky, we stop and we turn our faces to the sky and we look. It’s a universal impulse. We also pull out our phones and take photos. Here’s where the desire to interact with and capture something beautiful comes in. I do it, too. Phones are easy and the results are satisfying. But I also try to put the phone away and just absorb the sunset, the second-to-second changes, the colors as they glow and morph and fade.

Taking the next step, and creating a painting about a sunset, feels like swimming in beauty. It’s challenging and frustrating, because what I put on canvas never seems to convey the magnificence or subtle glory of the actual event. But the process of attempting to reach that ideal in my mind’s eye feels like the essence of art-making. And that’s why I paint sunsets.