A Group of Flowers

I have made paintings and drawings of flowers periodically since I first started painting and drawing. Like most sentient beings, I am moved by the beauty of the color and variety of forms of various types of flowers. But, my initial motivation to make drawings of them came also from two of my favorite sources: Egon Schiele and Vincent Van Gogh. As an undergraduate student, I did a number of pictures of Black-Eyed Susans that are direct descendants of their sunflowers. As I learned more about other artists, there were many more who focused on flowers at various times in there careers. Charles Rennie McIntosh, Emil Nolde, Eduard Manet, Piet Mondrian and Jim Dine are only a few that made significant bodies of floral work, often on paper in pencil or charcoal along with watercolor or gouache. I found these intensely enjoyable and immensely inspiring. Jim Dine’s book of plant and flower drawings in mixed media has been tremendously valuable to me as a primer and refresher on drawing.

Black-Eyed Susan watercolor/gouache/charcoal 30×22” 1981

The group of drawings of peonies I recently finished is significant to me because they have consolidated the working momentum I wrote about in the last blog entry. As I said, I had a long fallow period in the garage and I only recently got back in gear. We had friends over for dinner and as often happens, one brought flowers as a gift. After looking at them for a couple of days, I got the urge to draw them so out to the garage they went. I started in pencil on some sheets of Bristol which is hard and smooth so pencil slides and moves easily across the surface. I favor Extra Smooth Ebony pencils which are relatively soft and responsive to pressure. I have a tendency to want to control my line quite a bit, maybe too much at times, so working with ebony pencil on Bristol tends to loosen things up a bit. The hard surface also resists absorption so watercolor tends to sit on the surface, taking more time to sink into the paper and producing unpredictable variations of color and value in washes. I have come to love this and court it, at times.

I really enjoyed sitting and looking hard at the flowers and letting go with the line a little bit. Being a little surprised with the line that can be achieved this way is lovely. I don’t always take pleasure in working. More often than not, painting and drawing is just hard work. I just don’t have that kind of “La-la land” attitude that making pictures is fun. Typically, it is difficult and frustrating. In any case, I don’t make work to enjoy myself, I’m compelled. I do it to try to communicate an idea of some sort. That does not necessarily involve fun. I don’t always like what I have done, either. But these peonies I enjoy, even if I think I can do better.

Another aspect of these pictures that I find interesting is that they are all watercolor. This is relatively rare for me. I have been much more involved with gouache rather than transparent watercolor. They are related, but quite different mediums. Straight watercolor is something I have been thinking about for a while. I taught watercolor every semester for the last five years of my teaching career so I did a lot of practice and demos for the classes and did deeper research into the history of the medium and the painters known for using it. I find it fascinating and the work of painters like Durer, Turner, Homer, Sargent, Burchfield and Hopper is just as complex and powerful as that of any painter in any medium.

Anyway, what I was doing with the peonies depended on using the white of the page, but also and especially on the toned sheets, Chinese white, which I never used before now. Its very different than white gouache and requires a subtlety of mixing and layering of application with which I am still becoming accustomed. Its a challenge, but one that is engaging and exciting even at this late date in my practice.

Peony watercolor/pencil 30×22” 2026

Flower watercolor/pencil 30×22” 2026

Peony watercolor/pencil 30×22” 2026

Peony watercolor/pencil 30×22” 2026

The Inevitable Slump

I would guess, fairly confidently, that everyone who pursues any kind of visual work with any seriousness hits those periods where things dry up in the studio and production drops off or stops altogether. If you’re lucky and that is not the case, I’m jealous.

For the rest of us, there are any number of reasons why this might happen. Times of transition are ripe for this kind of situation. I remember upon graduation from undergraduate school, being terrified that I would not work again. I had been very productive in college and felt good about where I was at with my work. None-the-less, once I was out of school and working, I had a hard time getting much done. I had no studio and was working in my shared apartment. I had to push myself to start new pictures. It was scary.

Over the years, there have been other times when I could not get on track in the studio. There were multiple reasons for it: other life transitions, depression, anxiety, work (which causes both). For the uninitiated, it might seem ironic that my (former) employment, teaching art, would get in the way of doing my own work, but it is it very true for dedicated teachers. Passions are divided and maintaining an active studio is a challenge. Class preparation and other faculty obligations take a lot of time and you can’t let the students down. After all, they pay an extraordinary amount of money to go to school. If you have a family, its tougher still. Squeezing in time to keep your own work moving along is difficult.

Another common factor in the development of a slump is again ironically, exhibitions. A one-person or two-person show that demands a larger body of work than a typical one or two-piece group show can interrupt the flow of one’s studio routine, especially if you do the framing and/or installation of the show yourself. Then there is the psychological aspect of a major show. It often feels like an ending or summing up. The result is a sense that when you get back to the studio, you’re starting anew. This may not actually be true, but it feels that way.

This is common enough that I have often tried to prepare myself ahead of time for a stoppage or tried to trick myself into maintain -ing working momentum. It never works. My last big show in 2024 (with my great friend Joe Morzuch) at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens is a case in point. The work I showed came from an ongoing group of pictures of a local creek that I had painted over the past year. I was still deeply involved with more of these paintings as the show started and I thought I had outsmarted myself. I kept right on working and some of the pictures I did during and after the show, I thought were better than those included. Then, about six months later, it all dried up. I had drawings for several more creek paintings completed, but I couldn’t even put color on them.

This ended a streak of years of uninterrupted work stretching back to 2017, one of the most productive periods of my life. Half of 2024 was bad, but 2025 was a total bust. I produced almost nothing. It wasn’t for lack of trying, either. I don’t take this stuff lying down. My philosophy is that you have to try to make something happen. Over the years, people have said to me, ‘Just let it go, relax, take a break’. I can’t do it. I make myself go in the garage even if I know nothing is going to happen. I sometimes sit there for a while looking around the room unable to even make a mark on a page. I know nothing is going to happen, but I’m terrified that if I don’t make an effort, I’ll never work again.

Eventually, for whatever reason, things start to happen again. I like to believe its because I’m pushing myself to get in there, but who knows? Slowly, I pick up steam and suddenly, I don’t have to try, I’m just in the garage without thinking about it. That’s what its like now: too many pieces started and tacked to the walls and laying on the floor, stuff all over the place. Just the way it should be.

A Return to the Blog

It has been eight years since I last posted an entry on this blog. The main reason I stopped had to do with joining Instagram and the amount of time I spent posting on that account which was considerable. The reason I joined IG was because I understood it was image-oriented and a lot of painters posted their work on it as opposed to Facebook or other social media. I saw a great deal of excellent work and corresponded with some very fine painters/draughtspersons. But, eventually, I became disillusioned with IG because I began to see less and less painting and drawing and more and more posts about member’s personal lives including those inexplicable pictures of people’s food! That is not why I joined. And, I must say, I have also come to question the value of social media, in general.

So, I’m back to the blog and a lot has changed in eight years.

One aspect of my work that has changed recently involves the idea of unfinishedness. This has been important in my drawings, watercolors, and gouaches for many years. I inherited it from Old Master drawings, Egon Schiele, and many other Modern painters, principle among them, Cezanne. It has been a predominant aspect of my work on paper, especially in the past decade. However, with the pictures of Scott’s Creek, that began to change. The reason for a more complete treatment of the picture surface had to do with a pursuit of the illusion of the transparency of water. I found that any sense of transparency was much more difficult to achieve in pictures with areas of blank paper. So naturally, I began to cover the entire surface of the creek pictures. What I did not expect was that this would extend into other imagery. I became fully aware of it in the self portrait below.

Self Portrait, charcoal, gouache, 30×22”, 2026

This drawing went through many changes over the course of months. At one point, I was so irritated that I erased out most of it and started back in.

Eventually he became his very dour self, but with a level of modeling and finish that is very unusual for me and not what I intended. For whatever reason, I could not make myself stop working on it. The only good result of this is the surface of the drawing. There was so much erasing and re-drawing that it tore up the skin of the paper which then mixed with eraser debris to create a very rich surface that can seen better in the details below.

The urge to finish or refine has extended across imagery and media which is reflected in the gouache/pastel landscape below from Bristol, Maine. Why this has happened is one of the many mysteries of picture-making; you slowly realize you are doing things that you neither wanted nor intended and yet, you feel compelled to continue. Very strange.

Bristol. Maine, gouache/pastel/charcoal, 30×22” 2026

Goodbye MCA

For thirty years we loved being a part of MCA, a piece of the history of something that was truly good and meaningful. To all the faculty and students that made the college what it was, what has happened is a hard and bitter thing.  But, MCA is really the people and the relationships and the work that we did together. Sometimes, the past is more important than the future.   

"Caroline No (for MCA)" 10 Nov 17

Horn Island (part six)

While it is understandable that a lot of people going out to the island start thinking of man vs. nature, I think that is a function of humans being humans: everything revolves around them. The thing that impressed me was that everything, animate or inanimate seemed to be hanging on for dear life or trying to take over.  The dunes seem to want to overrun anything that gets in their way. The trees and other plant life are clinging to what little solid ground there is and trying to turn sand into solid ground.  The wind is driving and pushing everything in its prevailing direction. The water wants to wipe out everything.  It is invading and trying to change everything in its path.  Some of the inlets leading into lagoons and ponds are altered dramatically on a daily basis.  Its not man against nature, its nature against nature, everything for itself.  I felt that while I was out there and thought about it in almost all of the Horn Island-related work I have done since.

Horn Island (part five)

There are many different goals for those going on the Horn Island trip.  For me, the most important thing was to have an opportunity to work directly from the landscape and I wanted to maintain the working momentum that I had going into the trip. Since last fall I have been working a lot and have been encouraged with what I have done.  I didn't want to reduce the scale of what I was doing so I determined that I would bring 22x30" sheets out to the island. This was a pain.  Getting paper that size out there and back through the open boat rides and keeping it dry in the rain was an accomplishment. Heck, just keeping the wind from creasing it or ripping it up when I was working wasn't easy.  I had a cardboard box in which watercolor paper was shipped to me and so I coated it with several layers of acrylic medium. This sealed the surface and allowed me to keep the paper flat.  The box also served as a good drawing board as you can see in the photos below.  The photos were taken by James Carey, an MCA alum and another Horn Island veteran.  The drawing that I was working on in the photos was the most complete of those that I started on the island.  I only had to touch up a few things in the studio. A picture of the finished drawing on my studio wall is at the bottom of this blog entry.

Working on the island.  (Photograph by James Carey)

(Photograph by James Carey)

Horn Island (part four)

The Horn Island trip occurs in May of each year and encompasses about ten days. This year we left Memphis on the 17th, got to the island on the 18th, returned to the mainland on the 27th and drove back to Memphis on the 28th.  The first day consisted of driving to Pascagoula, checking into a hotel for the first night and then attending the opening of the Horn Island exhibition at the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs.  This is the second year that WAMA has mounted shows of work produced for the annual Horn Island exhibition at Memphis College of Art.  These shows are put together by Don DuMont and it is his work and relationship with WAMA that has made them possible. 

The next day everybody was at the boat launch at Pascagoula Point by 6:30AM to take the boat ride out to the island. There were forty-one participants this year so it took several trips back and forth to the island to get everyone and all the equipment out there. As I mentioned, Horn Island is uninhabited.  All water, food, tents, cooking equipment, etc. for the entire ten days has to be brought out to the island.  The boats are small so they can get right up on the beach to unload. That's great, but it makes for some spine-jarring rides to the island when the water is as rough as it was this year.  

Everyone was on the island by noon and then had to find a camp site.  The main camp is on the north side of the island.  It is the central point for dinner, water, camaraderie and a little bit of shade. The old guys tend to camp near the main camp on the north side. Students generally head for the south side of the island which faces the Gulf and is buffeted by wind and more extreme weather.  I'm an old guy, so I found a good spot about ten minutes west of the main tent.  That made it possible to get to the main tent to have coffee and watch the sun come up with Richard Prillaman, Faculty Emeritus, Metals and sometimes Marc Rouillard, Painting/Foundations faculty.  I am not an experienced camper, but I did a pretty good job with my brand new tent (Don helped) and I had no problems the whole trip.  

Horn Island (part three)

It took thirty years for me to join the Horn Island trip.  In the end, it was my good friend Don DuMont, the Director of the program and leader of the trip for the last twelve years (Foundations/Graphic Design faculty) who convinced me I should go.  Don took over the Horn Island program after Bob Riseling gave it up (with one year in between under Clay/Sculpture faculty member, Leandra Urrutia). Don is equally committed to the Horn Island experience and is as passionate an advocate of the trip as Bob. In the picture below, that is Don on the left, Adam Hawk, Metals faculty and long-time HI vet in the middle, and Joe Morzuch, Painting faculty and HI rookie, like myself.  We're on the Gulf (south) side of the island. Don and Adam were leading us along a trail that Walter Anderson used to get back and forth across the middle of the island.  Below that is a picture of one of those iconic trees that have been immortalized by so many faculty, students and alums in the annual Horn Island exhibitions. This one we came upon as we crossed over to the north side of the island following Anderson's trail.

Horn Island (part two)

Horn Island is located off the Mississippi coast roughly ten miles from Pascagoula.  It has mostly been uninhabited and is now part of the National Seashore system with its only regular residents being park rangers.  It has gained notoriety mainly because of the artist Walter Inglis Anderson (1903-1965) for whom it became his muse.  Anderson would row out to the island (which is unbelievable) and stay for extended periods living rough, writing and making work. There is a lovely little museum in Ocean Springs (www.walterandersonmuseum.org) dedicated to Anderson and his brothers with a great collection of his work and artifacts like the row boat he used to get out to the island as well as the Ocean Springs Community Center, the interior of which he covered with a mural.  Anderson created a distinctive and varied body of work, much of it focused on subjects from or inspired by Horn Island.  For Bob Riseling and many of the MCA Horn Island program veterans, he remains an inspirational figure.

Walter Anderson "Self Portrait" watercolor Walter Anderson Museum of Art

Horn Island (part one)

In 1987, when I first arrived at Memphis College of Art to teach, I was accosted at the front desk by some guy who started talking to me about camping on a deserted island off the coast of Mississippi!!  I had barely acclimated to my new surroundings and being from the northeast, had a serious case of culture shock, so I thought the guy was a nut. For those of you who don't have history with MCA, that guy was Bob Riseling, a Painting/Foundations faculty member and founder of the Horn Island program which has now run for thirty-three years.  Bob is since retired and is a member of the Emeritus faculty. Besides his teaching, Bob is best remembered for Horn Island and other college sponsored trips. He passionately believed students needed to get out of the classroom and expand their view of the world through travel and and he did his best to make it happen.  It is no exaggeration to say that Bob made Horn Island a unique feature of the MCA curriculum through sheer force of will and hard work.  Amongst those who followed him to the island he is legend.  It is again, no exaggeration to say that he changed many people's lives. Cheers, Bob!

Bob Riseling in front of "Palmetto" acrylic on canvas (one of his many Horn Island paintings)