Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Thoughts from Monday

So. Since two weeks ago Monday, I have been doing JoKata in the mornings, and that's been good. Kate had me "get back on the horse" - fast painting; I was scared of it. In my mind I said, but I hit my head last time - really hard. It was traumatic. So that was on Wednesday, the 18th, and after some resistance I said I'd do it that day - 1 hour. But I didn't do it Wednesday, but I DID do it the next day, Thursday. I did a fast painting, from a photo of Molly, including tracing, enlarging, transfering, and painting. At one point I looked at my timer, thinking, isn't my time up yet? (Or was that the next time I painted?) I liked the results, and... but... I felt kinda flat, unable to celebrate actually doing it, unable to enjoy what I'd done. Just flat.

Next day when I talked to Shrimpy, she said, You PAINTED? You DID it? How about celebrating that? And I started crying.

I still don't feel like I know what that's all about; and maybe I never will. When I went to Kate's last week, for S Coaching, she had me do a very fast painting, about 15 minutes. Everything I had to work with was a bit crude: paper: the inside of some used wrapping paper; pencil: one common yellow #2 pencil, not very sharp; brushes: a few various ones of quite moderate quality; color: a bottle of writing ink, blue or blue-black; and my reference: a dog-eared photo of a - BLACK - puppy, and it looked like it was actually a worn and dog-eared XEROX of a photo. Little detail, hard to make out. But as I was working, I realized it was probably Kiwi, and I was right.

As crude as that was, there were things I liked a lot about it. With only one color, no water for diluting. Not much subtlety. And yet Kate and I both felt I had captured Kiwi. After that, and some energy work, I felt kind of calm. Sometimes it's hard to tell calm and numb apart. And while I'm scared of the excitement and the trauma, when they're not there I also miss them...

On Kate's assignment I did one more 15-minute painting, last Thursday. (But I actually set the timer for 20 minutes, and also, because Shipply called and I was working on it part of the time we were talking, I figured it was really 25 minutes.) This time I did a direct sketch and painting in my big spiral sketchbook, of Starr. Black, again - this year's Raffle winner. And when I got to her eye, when I was going back into it, edging it with black, I got suddenly excited, for a moment at least, and thought, that's IT!

I am thinking I'd like to give Ruth her set of the photos I took, and consult with her about which one she'd like me to use.

That's it for today...

1 comment:

Eileen Hale said...

Annotations:
Jo Kata (I wrote it JoKata, and may sometimes write JK): aikido moves, done with a Jo (a pole or stick), with a commitment spoken out loud at the beginning.
Molly: a tricolor dog whose portrait is one of the next commissions I'm working on.
Shrimpy = Shari Elf, an artist friend and art buddy; we talk almost every day, supporting each other in our art actions and other aspects of life. We started playing around with each other's names, and hers evolved into Shipply or Shrimpy; mine into Orlando. I never had a nickname before, and I love having this one.
S Coaching = Somatic Coaching, a multilevel, multimedia, multi-everything coaching approach that uses, in addition to discussion, bodywork, movement practices, action practices, and other approaches, to help break up set patterns. This (as I understand it, and as I experience it) impacts not only intellectual or even emotional, but also patterns in the body and the nervous system. It also uses some very intuitive and inventive problem-solving. I love this approach! Kate is my coach.
BLACK: I complain a lot about getting so many solid black cats and dogs to do (portraits of). This is because in watercolor or charcoal, the dark color tends to take me a long time to build up (I don't mind nearly so much when it's an oil portait); because, even though black has a lot of color in it, and I can use different colors, in watercolor or oil, it's still, in some way, a narrower color and less shaded or varied than other colors; and because the photos I'm working from are much harder to see - which is probably why I get so many of them to do, and I can make a beautiful, seeable, Present portrait from some very difficult photos...
Kiwi: Kate's labradoodle (Labrador/standard poodle), bred to be hypoallergenic. Kiwi is very sweet.
Shipply: see Shrimpy, above.
Starr: a Labrador mix, I think.
Raffle winner: I donated a portrait commission to last year's Adoptathon raffle at the shelter, and again this year. The money raised goes to Sammie's Friends, which funds non-emergency medical care for the animals, which helps them get adopted, as well as feel better.
Ruth: Starr's person...