Aha!

Six years ago an artist friend mentioned an ‘Aha!’ moment that happens to people somewhere on their artistic journey, basically a sudden epiphany about what they really want to do. I think I may finally have had one of those this week.

For as long as I can remember, the human form has been an object of intense fascination for me. As a teenager, in a restrictive home environment, sketching figures and faces from magazines and from life was a triumphant release for me. I filled sketchbooks with my drawings. My sister was my ultimate muse. We shared a room, I would observe her as she sat on the floor with a novel on her knees, I studied her as she folded her little body into the rocking chair in our room, as she bent on her books, working hard at schoolwork on her desk. I enjoyed working with a pencil, I was partial to mechanical ones. The process of studying and producing accurate line drawings from life gave me the greatest joy. I did not have a teacher or a lot of artistic references to learn from. So I muddled along. I even tried achieving tonal values at times, through cross hatching, though most often by rubbing graphite into my work.

This week I have discovered a way to bring those earliest of artistic impulses into my paintings! Yes there is an exclamation point there! And again :) because this is so exciting. I was working on a painting in the midst of which I happened to pick up a black oil pastel lying on the table. The original idea was to draw a figure onto a wooden surface that had a few layers of paint on it and then to go forward with painting it in a manner I am more or less accustomed to. But the appearance of these black oil pastel lines shook everything up. I found I wasn’t inclined to cover them up with paint as I had been planning to. The more I stood in front of this work on successive mornings, the more it has grown on me. The lines have grown more numerous, some cross hatching has appeared as well. Simultaneously the paint has echoed the line-work through subtle tonal changes. It is making for a very interesting, raw visual experience. Drawing and painting have been pulled together onto a surface and it is making my heart sing! Aha!