While I work on some larger paintings, I continue to walk the woods with my sketchbook. The top is from the hill behind the Clark Art Institute. The snow hid some ice. I fell down at one point leaving a complete impression of my 9x12 sketchbook in the path, not to mention some other whirling impressions. The bottom is from the Caves Trail at Field Farm. Today all the snow is gone.
One of the attractions to the poet Charles Wright is his love for the paintings of Morandi and Cezanne. In a short essay on Morandi, he wrote: "If you look hard... you will see that lucidity, permanence of idea and expression, attention to detail and vision, calm and beauty continue to be the true virtues of any art... Art is slow, as Hughes says, and propaganda is fast, and choice is what propaganda erases. As Morandi did in his paintings, we should stake our art on the persistence of continuous inspection. As Cezanne did as well, we should have a "tenderness toward the mundane," a gathering to us of the quotidien. By concentrating on things that are, we can put meaning where it should be--in direct reconstruction, in the picture itself, in the world as it is when we look at it."
2 comments:
I've always admired the quality of line and the energy in your sketches. After years of observation of many artists, drawings in sketch books say a great deal about the artist. These are great!
Doug, Thank you. I'm not sure what they say, but hopefully it's something good.
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