One of the many stories I recall having been told about Leonardo da Vinci is that during the last few decades of his life he hauled the unfinished portrait of Mona Lisa with him leaving it, still unfinished, when he died in his late 60s in May of 1519. One version of his life has him starting the painting 1503 - which would mean he was “fine tuning” the work for some 16 years! While most of the details of da Vinci’s life are - well, “fuzzy” to say the least, I am particularly fond of this one. As I once said in a faculty meeting, to the delight of my colleagues, “I love it when the data seem to support my theory!” My theory here, perhaps more honestly a bias, is that the “truth” of what any artwork “means” shifts every time the artist touches it.
It is certainly true of my own work that is at least partially created in a "studio" chock full of digital tools and techniques unavailable to da Vinci and the other great artists living and working during the Renaissance. But before addressing the unique aspects of my “studio” I need to talk a bit about the time involved in creating each image, a discussion that answers, in part, the oft repeated question, “What is taking you so long down there!?”
A few factors influence the time required to finish each image. First, where did the originate? There are 2 primary answers to that question. To be perfectly honest my earliest images were in a sense the result of deceptions that would be difficult to pull off today. They began back in 1961 when Dad took a temporary position through the American Friends Service Committee to serve as Director of Quaker House in Vienna, Austria. I was never actually quite sure what he did there, but the family spent 1959 through 1961 living in Vienna. We three kids attended The American International School, 5th and 6th grade for me. I quickly discovered that in that school one was expected to “take notes.” It also soon became clear that the teacher never checked what it was that covered the pages of my notebook. Doodles. Lots and lots of doodles. Having completed my formal education, up through my Ph.D, prior to Gates, Jobs and Wozniak birthing the personal computer, I filled hundreds and hundreds of notebooks with hand-drawn doodles. Increasingly, towards the end of that time period, actual academic content found its way into the notebooks. Many of my contemporary images reflect what happens when an addicted doodler gives free reign to that long suppressed inclination.
The next major source for my images grew from my equally long interest in photography. Many of my images started as digital photographs that I pulled into Photoshop, isolated and "erased" various portions of the photos which left a varying number of “holes” in the image. I then filled the holes with designs, many of which looked strikingly similar to various doodles I had created years before. The final step in finishing off images from both lineages was to add color to the doodle/designs.
Both types of designs gradually increased in both size and complexity, greatly increasing the “guesstimate answer” to the response to the question “What is taking you so long down there.” It is the images that take me so long. At least dozens of hours and - I am somewhat embarrassed to admit - sometimes hundreds of hours.
OK, on to the studio. It is a curved desk/counter with a roll around chair, maybe 15 feet in overall length. It holds a 36 x 24 drawing surface, a 24-inch graphics tablet and a similar-sized, high definition monitor hooked to a MacBook Pro, which is also hooked to an 8 gig hard drive that holds copies of 4 or 5 hard drives from "ancestral" computers - complete copies, images, texts - everything. Also the desk holds a few dozen 16-ounce canning jars that hold - roughly organized by color and shade - all my markers. I roll amongst the various stations depending on the stage of each project.
Now a few words about my “artistic style.” First, being a self-taught (read that as ‘untaught’ artist) my “skills” limit what I can draw and how long it takes me. You may notice that there are few, if any, quasi-realistic faces in my work. That is because I can’t draw them. Those that do exist owe both their place and appearance to old theater make-up courses and creating practice faces for the characters I played on stage. Second, I use “markers” almost exclusively when I draw. They work pretty well - for me anyhow - eliminating “blending” to change colors. A few of my marker sets do have markers labeled “blender” or words to that affect. I have yet to figure out how to use them. I’ll put that particular skill on my “to do” list.
And then there is the acoustic variable. I never work in silence. Sometimes I listen to audio versions of magazines, New Scientist, gets a lot of air play as does National Geographic. An occasional novel, maybe a short story. But music is far and away my most common audio stimulus. My choices are wildly eclectic from classical to early rock to folk to bluegrass - just about anything with the exception of rap or heavy metal. Remember the second tenet of Distilled Harmony is Enable Beauty. I think - no clear cut data here - but I strongly suspect that what I am listening to affects my art, possibly changing the overall look of the piece. The sounds reframe it’s story somehow.
OK, you get the idea. Every time I touch an image during the hours of its development, I may well change the look, the feel, the meaning, the truth of the image.
I do have a few “time-jumped” images. By that I mean images originally created a few years before I run them through Photoshop to create the contemporary “marker-based” images I am doing now. But it is much more common for me to spend 10 or a dozen days in bursts of 8 or 9 hours to finish an original work - so probably no radical changes from initial idea to finished image. But remember - and let’s give this sentence it’s own line:
Da Vinci hauled the Mona Lisa around with him for 15 or 16 years!
I would dearly love to have a stop frame version, say from every week, to see how his image of Mona changed over a decade and a half of Leo hauling, gazing, wondering and thinking of her. I cannot help but think that they wrote to each other, with each interaction perhaps shifting the narrative of the image. Maybe just a little. Maybe a radical reconstruction. Maybe an inclination to just throw the damn thing away, only to awake in a grateful cold sweat, rushing to the easel, to assure himself that he had not followed through on that brief flash of insanity. Then standing there thinking, “Maybe the background is too dark. Perhaps just a tiny touch of light on the river. Silver? Gold? Let me light a lamp. Just a few minutes. . .”
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