Persistence and perseverance

—Creativity—

Early one Manhattan morning, I saw several men drag a big food cart from the parking space where it was hitched behind their vehicle. They pushed it into the intersection, stopped it from rolling, turned it around, and pushed it back onto the sidewalk at the crosswalk. This took some time; the cart was very heavy and I could see they were struggling at every step. They seemed to be fighting against the nature of the thing, and the physics of the planet that the wheels and the weight wanted to obey. But once the process had started, it had to be completed. Trying to put it in place, they knocked down the pedestrian crossing light, but they got the cart onto the sidewalk where they could sell food for the rest of the day.

"This is the highest wisdom that I own: freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew."
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every morning, these men do the same thing, with the same struggle. All over the city, in the summer heat, they push these miniature restaurants through the streets, some of them with hot coals already smoking. And it's not easy. To begin with, they must find two legal parking spaces beside each other to pull the vehicle and the trailer into. Then they have to unhitch the cart and push it where it needs to go. Sometimes they park close to that location. Sometimes, they can't.

The streets in Manhattan are not level. Particularly running east and west, there are hills that you barely notice until you are inside a building and have to take stairs between avenues. Pushing a food cart, or pushing anything, is work.

When I saw these men struggling, so physically, to make a living, I thought, this is what an artist must do. An artist has to persevere in the same way. We have to work extraordinarily hard like the vendors. For someone living in the suburbs or in the country, this might seem crazy. Why work so hard? In the city, however, this is life. Someone living like this might very well think, this is unbearable and I'm a fool for doing it. But this is what we do. In the suburbs and the country, we have different ordeals.

"I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen."
— Frank Lloyd Wright

Not long after watching the food vendors, I saw a woman load her children, baby carriage, and luggage onto the bus. She required the driver and a half-dozen passengers to help her and all her charges. Everyone seemed invested in her mission. She made several trips back and forth between six bus seats and the sidewalk getting everything in and out.

This is nothing unusual. You might see her determinedly leading her pack down the sidewalk with parcels on the roof of the carriage. She will take the children forty blocks, their little feet traveling twice as many steps as hers. When they arrive at their walk-up, it's just another episode in their daily adventure. On and off the subway, one sees people like her on an epic quest to get things from here to there and get things done.

This spirit of struggle, of perseverance, of persistence, of can-do-no-matter-what—this is the spirit of the artist. It's not workaholism or idle occupation. We are not bored. We are surviving.

The last I saw, the city still hadn't put up a new crossing light. The one the vendors damaged is gone. I would have felt very bad about breaking city property, and I would have been very uncomfortable parking my business under the damage. Maybe they felt this way, too. But in New York City, maybe not! The woman on the bus didn't express any discomfort at inconveniencing all the other passengers. She was assertive about the seats she wanted for her kids. She didn't try to carry too much at one time. Without any apparent damage to her pride, she let the others help her. She may have said I'm sorry and thank you, but she was in no hurry. She took her time and did what she needed to do.

And this is another part of the deal, I suppose.  We must accept that we are going to be a little nuisance from time to time, and that's part of being the artist too.

My woodblock printing process

—News from the studio—

In today's post, I show the ten-step process that I used to make one of my woodblock prints in 1996.

St. Mark's Cathedral During an
Organ and Choral Recital

The story starts in the early nineties when my friend Mike and I managed to get admission to an organ and choral performance at Saint Mark's Cathedral in Seattle with only enough money between the two of us for one ticket. We discovered that a party was short one attendee and had left their extra ticket at the door for a poor artist like one of us and we took it. I had a sketchbook and drawing board with me and I drew the audience, the choir, and the architecture. Most of the resulting sketch was influenced by one of the pieces on the program—a movement of Messiaen's L'Ascension. As I was listening and drawing, I thought of a passage from In Search of Lost Time in which Proust describes music from a violin, as I remember, filling the room visually.

I took the sketch home and began turning it into the woodblock print you see above and I titled it Saint Mark's Cathedral During an Organ and Choral Recital.

To make this print, I needed to carve blocks of wood to roll with ink and press into paper.

This is what one of the carved blocks looked like. The blocks were destroyed long ago because they were too large and heavy to keep.

This block happens to be the fourth block in the sequence of runs using, as you can see, violet ink. If you look closely, you can see an arrow that tells me which way is up and a number four that tells me when to print the block (after the third block). You might notice that the image in the block is a mirror image of the final print.

In the following ten pictures, the print evolves through successive impressions from each of ten different woodblocks. Each run is a different color ink rolled onto a hand-carved block of pine and transferred to the rice paper by rubbing the back of the paper with barrens and wooden spoons.

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

The color is not entirely accurate, due to the fact that the value changed with each run so the auto-exposure on the camera shifted. Or maybe it's my cheap scanning equipment. Nonetheless, you should be able to see the transformation.

If you are very observant, you might have noticed my use of wood grain. Some of the blocks were topped with strategically placed pieces of 1/4 inch plywood before carving. In this way, I was able to orient the wood grain in various directions, even on one block—a trick that owes a lot to Paul Klee's ideas about visual polyphony.

Detail

But all this work does not give the whole story of the process involved. Before making the print, I had to make test prints to find the formulas for the colors because most of the colors, as we can see, exist only after two or more inks combine.

The final print has scores of different colors in it. In order to know the formulas for each color in the final print, I had to make some test prints first. Using these test prints, I could tell which area to leave raised on which blocks in order to get the inks to combine into a particular color in a particular spot on the print.

Test Prints

If you look closely, you will see that the first ten color swatches from the left in the top row are the colors of the inks I used for each of the woodblocks. Those ten colors combine to make the rest of the colors you see in the test prints. I had made a cheat-sheet noting the formulas for each swatch.

At one point, I hauled all twenty test blocks fifteen miles by foot and buses across town to a printing press. I pulled my tests and got kicked out of the art center only minutes after finishing because of an auction I hadn't been told about. After two more bus rides and a lot of walking, I made it the fifteen miles back home in time for my canvas bags to finally start ripping apart from the weight.

Printmaking is hard work. After all this preparation, only two prints were made in the laborious process of inking and hand-rubbing the ten blocks that combine to make the final image. It was the last printmaking I did before turning to painting. I had never made a print like this before. Previously, my woodblock prints involved just a few blocks and I had pulled the prints on presses. But I'd seen hand-rubbed woodcuts made with many blocks and I knew I could do something similar.  I had only an idea what the print might look like, though, and until the last few runs, it didn't look like much at all. One of the joys of printmaking—like photography or ceramics—is seeing the art for the first time when the process is complete.

One of the two final prints was exhibited in a show at the University of Washington and they are both now in private collections. There are slight differences between the two, so they are considered an edition of two unique prints. Because of the weight and size of the blocks, as I mentioned, I had to destroy them; I can't carry such things around with me in life. That means someday these two prints may be considered rare examples of my early work.


Here, again, is the finished print:

P.S. I completely lost this whole post due to either a computer glitch or user error, depending on how you might want to look at what I did! But I was able to completely redo the post with minimal variation from the original in only about 20 minutes because I back up things. Always back up things manually! It's actually the auto-save that destroyed the original post, so you can't rely on the computer to do it for you. And, as always, my new post is an improvement over the crashed one!

Building an easel

—News from the studio—

It's very common for an artist to build something to solve a problem or meet a need in the studio. Many times, I stop everything and construct a solution. It may take an hour or it may take longer. I've found that it is always worth the work to customize my shop. Here's the story of one solution.

Coming back from the art supply store a few years ago, I met my brother-in-law on the road, going the opposite direction. I discovered he was heading to the woodworking store, so we went together. I had just looked at an easel and had decided I could build the same thing myself.

We came home with a couple sticks of quarter-sawn oak and went to work. In a day, we'd made an easel that is stronger and taller than the model I was looking at. In the end, I spent about the same amount of money as it would have cost to buy the easel. But I made it my own, and it works great.

The easel, newly built

Here's the process we followed to create the easel.

The wood

To begin with, quarter-sawn wood is cut straight from the tree without additional milling. The easel model in the art store would have used wood that was thinner. Also, my wood was cut with the grain running across the thickness to aid against warping. I don't know how the wood in the store model was milled.

The main rail

This easel has two legs. The back support is a simple plank of wood. The post in the front is cut with angled sides for the top and bottom sliders to run on.

The front post with angled sides

The base

The front rail has another piece of wood attached at a tee on the bottom with four stove-bolts. We screwed rubber feet on the bottom of the base, and another rubber foot on the bottom of the rear leg.

Base from the rear with lock nuts on the stove bolts

The base has two rubber feet

The hinge and chain

The two legs of the easel are connected with a simple gate hinge and a chain to keep it from unfolding. The front post extends up past the hinge.

Hinge at top

Chain

The top slider

The top slider is built of four pieces of wood. It's what holds the top of the canvas or panel in place. It rides on the front post with two beveled clips on the back that form a groove for the front post to ride in. The positioning knob tightens to create tension and hold the slider in place anywhere on the post.

The top slider with rear clips and positioning knob.

Here, we can see the channel in the back of the slider that matches the shape of the front post.

Top slider from above

The position knob

The position knob is the crucial part of the easel design I saw at the art store. Above, you can see we've used a knob we found at the home-remodeling store. We drilled from the back with bits that matched the diameters of the pronged tee nut that sits between the knob and the bushing.

Pronged tee nut

Initially we glued the tee nut as well as hammering it. But I discovered that the threads only lasted about three years, so the new ones are just tamped into place.

The slider bushing

We found a furniture glider to use as a bushing between the slider and the post. The small ones are the perfect fit. It is recessed into the back so that all the surfaces are flush.

The top slider from the back with clips and bushing

Bill came up with a great solution for tightening the knob against the bushing. He inserted a nickel coin into the glider for the post on the knob to hit.

Furniture gliders. One has a nickel inserted.

We inserted a metal washer in the front to protect the thread opening and give it a finished look.

The bottom slider

The bottom slider works in an identical fashion, except it is bigger and the canvas support is on the top of the slider instead of the bottom. Both the sliders have notches and grooves to accommodate hardboard panels or canvas boards.

The bottom slider

The bottom and top sliders use the same clip design

And that's all there is to it. The whole project came together quickly with just a table saw and drill.

And here's the easel after three years of painting.

Click any image to open a gallery of larger images, and hit escape to return to the blog.

Teaching children to miss the point

—Art education—

Yesterday, I saw a museum lesson plan directing children to study a famous artist. It was filled with rubrics and schema and handouts and directions for implementation. But, for all the effort that went into constructing this recipe for learning, the lesson completely missed the point of the artist's work. Similarly, the day before, I saw a lesson plan that asked students to make art in the "style" of a famous artist, but the students only copied the subject matter and maybe the angle of view which is important but is not the most crucial component of the artist's style.

When I guide students to study an established artist, I help them determine what the artist was up to. There are two kinds of art. Many artists do both. One kind of art is timeless in terms of design principles. We might need some context to understand some of it, but don't require any specific knowledge to appreciate the aesthetics. If artists of a time period challenged each other with opposing concepts and approaches, then it helps to know this.  But that isn't required.

The other kind of art is mostly contextual. The point of the work has to do with something that was happening at the time. There are some design qualities we can talk about, but mostly what is timeless is the provocative nature of the art—the response it demanded at the time. Artists always do something like this. But, in this case, we need more information.

So, it is very important that students are encouraged to learn as much as possible about an artist. That means going deeper than the surface. If, for sake of example,  I decide to have my students explore Rauschenberg, I'm not going to have each student bring in a stuffed animal to shove into a tire (apologies if you've done this—I only just dreamed up the idea as an example and hopefully not too much of a straw man). I'm sure that some art lovers would look at such projects approvingly. But we'd all be missing the point and teaching the kids to miss it too if we only copied or explored the immediate content.

I once had a student show me something she made on her own and she said, "that's how Maya Lin would have done it." This is learning: when a student has a deep enough understanding of an artist's style that she can make the knowledge her own and later apply it to a completely new situation. My student understood qualities of Lin's style that transcended the immediate context and specific design of the art we had examined.

That's what I want them to do.