“And first of all,
whatever good work you begin to do,
beg of Him with most earnest prayer to perfect it.”
- St. Benedict's Rule for Monasteries, tr. by Leonard J. Doyle
“A movie is never finished, only abandoned.”
- George Lucas
Mercy. Where does the time go? Here it is, 2009. One year passes, another takes its place, and I am again hit with the realization that there are so many paintings in my head that I want to work on but only a finite number of hours in a week to put towards them. I want this to be a year of real development with my work and know that total dedication and single-mindedness is required. The creative act is an eternal optimism that one enters into. But it comes up against the reality of daily life and one is forced to make cuts here and there. It's where the want for perfection meets up with the need for compromise. It isn't nice at all.
But without the discipline of making a decision, putting down a color, and moving on, little is accomplished. All those paintings just stay in my head.
Drawing is an important discipline for a painter and is crucial in my work. Not only do I try to fully work out all aspects of an idea for a painting through drawings, I also draw as an end in itself and believe, in most situations, it should describe the total form. Not just the shape but also a sense of the object's weight - - - the physical center of the thing, not only its outer surface. I'm always working on getting better and always feel that I have a long way to go. Vernon Blake believed that sculpting helps a draftsman develop the understanding necessary to represent form, that creating an object in three dimensions helps in comprehending it. He may have something there. So much of drawing is mis-handled as outline and ignores the physical stuff that comprises the whole thing. But a painter has to know what to focus on and what to ignore. It's all about making decisions.
In The Art & Craft of Drawing (1926),Vernon Blake insists against using an eraser, whereas John Ruskin, in The Elements of Drawing (1857), assures the reader about "rubbing out and out again, never minding how much your paper is dirtied". Even my heroes contradict each other.
