Yesterday, my German friend and fellow artist, Elke, and I went to the bookstore to search for a yoga book. Before we left, we had discovered that we both love Rilke’s poetry. I bought Rilke’s Book of Hours and then when I got home, I saw that I already had it so I will give it to someone who will love it. I started reading The Book of  Hours and did not stop until I had finished the entire book. One short poem I love is:

I would describe myself
like a landscape I’ve studied
at length, in detail;
like a word I’m coming to understand;
like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime;
like my mother’s face;
like a ship that carried me
when the waters raged.

If you have not read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet  and Letters on Cezanne, go to the bookstore immediately. They are filled with life’s lessons for all persons who are pursuing a dream. Surely they are required reading for writers and artists.

Each time I return home from southern New Mexico, I have the urge to clean and declutter. It must be that wide open space that makes me feel cramped when I return to my home environment. That enticing wide open space contains only what is needed to make it beautiful: endless sky, vast horizon, blue mountains, immeasurable desert interrupted only by gorgeous sunrises and sunsets. The vast empty space makes me want to get rid of all the stuff I never needed anyway. It makes me want to simplify my life, get back to the basics. I will use four colors of paint for a painting instead of a bunch. I will make simple drawings. I will clean and organize all the drawers and closets. And as the old proverb states-I will chop wood, carry water, and clean my rice bowl.

 I think back to my childhood in New Mexico and the houses my family lived in. Simple. That is the best word to describe them and our lives. We had what we needed, but we did not have so much stuff there was no place  to put it all. I have visual memories of some of the rooms. They contained the basic pieces of furniture and a few accessories. The one thing we had almost too much of was reading material. We had books, magazines, encyclopedias, dictionaries. But, that was a good thing.  Yes, I need to declutter my house, my Art Room, and my life. I want to paint, to read, to write poetry, to work in the yard, to meditate-to simplify. I may straighten the books on the shelves or put some back on the shelves, but I will not rid myself of many books. Books are not STUFF.

In an earlier blog, I wrote about the stack of  ”unfinished” paintings I had accumulated and vowed to resolve or throw away. That is exactly what I did and in the process, I learned what Picasso and other artist have said. There is no such thing as an “unfinished” painting  because a painting is never finished. The artist decides when to stop painting; but he or she could start painting on any piece of work again the next day or even the next year. We find our own comfort level as to what we consider “finished.” I learned a valuable lesson from my stack of  ”unfinished”  paintings. Most of them were not even paintings. They were merely beginnings of paintings that I had not developed. The ones that I could not develop successfully, I happily threw away.

I work in four basic stages: 1) texturizing  a gessoed support, 2) applying an abstract underpainting,  3) adding graphite or colored lines and/or applying pieces of collage materials, and 4) developing the painting.  Only through my mind’s eye can I determine when to stop and sign my name.

I hope I have not lost all my readers by taking so long to update my blog. I promise to do better. I plan to include some of my poetry and maybe even a short story in future blogs. Until next time…

Please leave a comment.

To honor my Mother who died this week in October, 1980, I am posting a poem I wrote about her in 1995.

                                                       A Pot of Red Beans

                                 Sweaty,
                                       smelly,
                                              steam-filled
                                disappearing drops of opulence
                                 rising above the heated cast iron pot
                                 signal the diurnal ritual.

                                  Hard,
                                         small beans
                                            striped like pebbles
                                  dancing in bubbling juice
                                   transform into soft, 
                                            succulent, red morsels.

                                    And then I see her.
                                           Her back toward me.
                                     I know it’s her-
                                                thin cotton dress and
                                                       Saturday’s hair-do
                                                            falling on small shoulders
                                       as she stirs,
                                          as she stirs.

                                       I look down at my hands
                                           and see her hands.
                                        I get up to stir a pot of red beans,
                                                                      a pot of red beans.

                                                                                                 Susan Cox Davis

I have been painting, and painting, and painting. Three weeks ago, I gathered my unfinished paintings and put them in a stack-the oldest attempts at the bottom. Then I made a plan to finish, reconstruct, or throw away each painting. One by one, I began to attach the stack. Happily, I have not had to throw any paintings away. I have completed four paintings that were unfinished because I began the paintings and left them unfinished before starting another one. Bad, bad! I used to never do that and I resolve NOT to do it again. Once a painting is put aside into a stack, the passion from which it was born is lost and may not be rekindled. Some of the paintings in the stack are fraught with design problems and if I can resolve  these problems, I will have learned valuable lessons.

I have been painting EVERY day. That is the key to the success I am having. I am on a roll. I have put aside unnecessary tasks and have gotten into my right brain. This process has not been a struggle as of today; it has been a productive learning exercise. I have taken care of necessary responsibilities, but I have spent time before my easel each day focused only on painting.

I write this particular blog because I cannot stop painting long enough to write a more informative blog and I want my readers to know that I am alive and well and painting. Soon I will have  paintings made anew from my stack of unfinished work to add to my gallery of paintings and a blog about the symbols that I use in my work will be posted soon.

So, the two main ideas of this story that you may find beneficial are 1) finish what you start and 2) don’t give up, keep working until you resolve your problems.

A Thought about Nourishment

Yesterday when I looked out the window, I was reminded that nourishment sustains us and makes us grow. Just two weeks ago, I was lamenting that many of my flowers and plants had been damaged by the extreme heat and lack of rain even though I had been watering often. The blooms were droopy, the leaves were wilted, and some vegetation had turned brown. Just when I feared the flowers were doomed, the heat relinquished its hold and the rain fell. After several days of rain, the flowers are now perky, pretty, and proud. Not only did the flowers and plants survive, they are flourishing.

My thought, as I looked out the window, was that I had become wilted. My concentration had been poor. I had struggled with everyday issues. I had let the challenges of everyday life and grief get me down and get in the way of my creative spirit. I blamed these recent problems on the heat; then I quickly admitted that excuse was faulty because I live comfortably in an air-conditioned house.

So, I told myself that, like the flowers, I need nourishment. I need rain. I need to do those things that I have always done to nourish my creative spirit. I need to spend more time meditating. I need silence. I need to return to my usual habits of reading and studying. I need to make a commitment to draw more. I need to write poetry. I need to journal. I need to work in my yard-till the soil, plant, and pull weeds. And, I need to paint.

I had struggled with one painting for two weeks until yesteday when I looked out the window and saw renewal and perseverance in my backyard. Then I knew I could look within and make the simple changes needed to nourish my creative spirit.

Line, Line Work, and Lines

I love line. As one of the elements of design, line work can lead our eyes through a painting or simply form the edges of shapes and colors in a painting. Lines can be straight or curved, long or short, wide or thin, broken or continuous. Lines can be  gestural marks or textural.

The way in which I use line to begin a painting determines how I react literally and emotionally to the surface of the canvas, paper, or board. Straight lines drawn on the golden mean usually develop into less abstract paintings while loose, gestural lines almost always end in more abstract and expressionistic paintings. Either way, my personal expression is a result of the lines I draw at the start of a painting. Also, what I use to make the initial marks influences the outcome of the paintings. In my “Shades of Gray” series (#s 30, 31,32, and 33 in my Gallery of Paintings), I draw with black India ink to start the paintings. Pencil marks and lines made by scraping acrylic gel medium take me down a different path. Collage pieces also form both lines and textures for some of my work.

When I look at the painting on my easel today, I see straight lines, curved lines, crosshatching, red and dark brown lines, lines that form shapes, and impasto lines formed by a palette knife. The impasto lines are long, short, thin, and thick-all forming interesting textures that give the painting a tactile feeling.

Look at paintings by artist Cy Twombly, Jackson Pollock, and Anselm Kiefer to see very good examples of line work in paintings. What artist’s line work do you like best?

June 18, 2009

Because I was asked about the name of one of my paintings, Loess Quilt, I will explain the meaning. Loess is a type of soil. It was made from glacial activity grounding rocks into fine flour, so-called rock flour. In the United States, loess is found along the border of Iowa and Nebraska and in Mississippi east of the Mississippi River where Port Gibson is located. The beautiful buff colored sunken roads carved into the loess and lined by exposed tree roots near Port Gibson intrigue me. I see layers of meaning in the people, vegetation, and even non-living things of the area. Port Gibson is also known for its quilts and the history there is filled with stories about quilts…….so my “Layers of Loess” series emerged from my emotional response to the loess and the quilts of Port Gibson.

I have given a lot of thought, perhaps too much, to what my first blog should say. In the middle of the night I made a mental list of what intrigues me most about art: mark making, line, spirituality in art, painting intuitively, and symbols in art.

So today I will tell you how I use mark making in my art. All I need is a #2 pencil and paper large enough for me to get a lot of movement. Sometimes I use newsprint and sometimes I use good paper. I place my pencil or whatever marking tool I want to use on the surface of a piece of large paper and begin to draw, scribble, mark…….filling up several sheets of paper. My right brain takes over and soon I am making MY marks and something wonderful may happen. I soon start to think “painting” and then I move to watercolor paper, canvas, or illustration board and “draw”  some more. Soon I am ready to start painting. Isn’t it amazing that we all have our own individual marks and aren’t our paintings better when we let our creative juices flow?

Think about it…we have our own signatures, our own brush strokes, our own marks….no one can duplicate our individual marks.