Gesture and Layering

If you want to paint fast and in layers, acrylic is your best medium. One layer of gestural splashes, as in this painting by Keren Vishny, can dry in about ten minutes. This is quite an exciting way to paint. Though it may seem careless and easy, it is neither. Working like this takes a lot of concentration. It’s like doing a dance step with the same expression but allowing slight variations as long as they fit into the expressive range. Theme and variation.
Above is the finished painting. Here on the right, the almost finished painting, where the vertical drips in the middle were felt to be too insistent, too demanding on the eye because they were uninterrupted. (Enlarge and compare to the finished work.)
The painting can fall into the category “Abstract Expressionism” and also in “All-Over Painting.” When working in this “all-over” mode, patters tend to emerge with one element assuming a starring role. As soon as one element stands out, the all-over feeling is destroyed. The artist must always stand back and see the whole.  It’s  not easy to paint this way.
Painting by Keren Vishny, acrylic on canvas, 40”x30”
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Hubbart Street Dance Chicago—“Walking Mad “

“Walking Mad” is choreographed by Johan Inger to Ravel’s Bolero.  You know Bolero and now that you’ve been reminded of it you’ve started humming it and you will be humming it til you leave the house to hear Dashing Through the Snow from every street corner, you hear.  Bolero starts like a march, like an accompaniment to a Medieval processional straight to hell in a tableau from Hieronymus Bosch and it repeats at ever increasing insistence and volume til it falls apart in blaring discord and exhaustion.   It’s usually associated with sexual frenzy.  But Johan Inger takes a less lascivious view of the old chestnut.  There are pelvises, thighs  and groins to relate to and there’s a wall.  The dancers interact with a wall.  They hit the wall, they are slammed against the wall, they jump at the wall, they hang from the wall, they try to climb the wall;  the wall folds, opens and lies down flat and gets walked on.  Plenty of frenzy here–sexual, violent  and existential.

I saw this performance by  Hubbart Street Dance Chicago two months ago.  Two months.  It was such a knock-out, that I didn’t think I could come up with a drawing associated to it.  I watched clips on You Tube of other dance companies performing passages from this piece and kept being overwhelmed.  No way  could I do justice to this piece, as a concept and as theater.  A couple of days ago, on a sunny Sunday afternoon,  I just decided to watch the clip again and I started to draw.

The agony I had put myself through for two months was the same as the agony my students experience when they draw from life.   It’s the feeling that you can’t do justice to the grandeur and complexity of the model and the model will judge you,  implicitly.  So, I speak from fresh memory and insight, when I say, that’s not what it’s about.  It’s not about the model, it’s about you finding a new perception.  Yes, the drawing will refer to the model, but it will not be dominated by the model.  The drawing will be something new, will exist in its own right as a new object , never been seen before and full of surprises—most importantly to YOU.

Johan Inger was not paralyzed by the history of Bolero, not by its clichéd currency nor by any torture about what Ravel “really” meant to say. He did not hit a wall.  Well, yes, he did and then he put it into the work and worked with it.

We need to get back to this.  In the meantime, take a piece of paper and some pencil or marker, whatever is lying around, and draw. Draw something, the celery on the counter, the mug on your desk, the cover you just pulled off your printer.

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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Hubbard Street Dance: 27’52” by Jirí Kilyán

The Hubbard Street Dancers make me crazy in the best way possible.  While I’m watching the performance, my mind is blank.  They allow no breathing time in which to be “smart” or to think metaphorically.  Instead, I am completely IN the dance.  My only sense of self-awareness comes from the occasional reminder to myself to… breathe.  When a piece is over, I momentarily don’t know where I am and I feel wiped out.

Then I go home and I’m sure I can’t possibly make a drawing from what I saw.  It takes me about four weeks to get up the courage to attempt a drawing.  Then I work from the videos on YouTube and my memory of the actual experience in the Harris Theater.

The piece I chose for the drawing is called 27’52” by the choreographer Jirí Kilyán.  The human body appears to be whipped about by forces that are not connected to any mythic notion of selfhood or poeticized emotion.  What these dancers do is a long way from the pretty feet and ankles that Louis XIV and his courtiers enjoyed.  The work of the Hubbard Street Dance Company is truthful to a painful degree.   It inspires me and nourishes me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8t1DFs0qVM&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC1VY93-oh8

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

http://facefame.wordpress.com

http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com

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