My Plan and God's Laughter

I suppose it is because I spend so much time making little marks on paper that I wonder what the famous great artists of history thought about when they worked. I mean were they always focused on color, shading, pressure on the brush and all that? I mean consider Vermeer. [And I really recommend a video called Tim's Vermeer, Google it and give it a look.]

Anyway, look at that drapery in the lower right-hand corner. Got to be a lot of "dot, dot, dot" going on there. What's going through his mind while doing all those dots? Sure, he had to get the colors right - but he did that on his palette before dotting. What was he thinking while dotting?

I suppose I think about this issue because I spend so much time, as I said, making marks on paper. And my mind wanders into many different places when drawing. Some are stranger than others. Sometimes it has to do with the music that I always listen to while drawing. We all have a soundtrack to our lives, and if I am listening to music from a particular era of my soundtrack I find myself wandering around in those places with those spaces and faces. However, when I listen to classical music which is not firmly embedded in any specific part of the soundtrack - things get different. I suppose it harkens back to my lifelong history of doodling. Sort of letting the marking device - pencil, pen, whatever - wander around wherever it wanted.

Let's look at a contemporary example from the Loggia and Lights piece I am working on now. This is from the background - which has a lot of real estate to cover since the whole image is about 36x48:

Those little guys are somewhere between a quarter and a half an inch long and are - in my mind - randomly spaced around the paper. So that image is maybe 2x3 inches of the whole drawing. But when I begin to add color to the little rectangle-ish spaces something very different starts to appear. So this image is maybe 3x4:

Those little random spaces begin to take on a life of their own. Here's another look:

It is sort of like looking at an ocean with currents, and swirls, and whirlpools - that I don't really plan. I do create a palette, with a range of colors that I think would be appropriate for that area of the image. This is part of the background sky - I'll share the whole image in a few days? weeks? when it's done. But once the palette is selected the colors pretty much take over. I'll pick a starting point, but then the colors seem to take on their own weight, mobility, momentum and they move along.

Being so fond of metaphors I had to come up with one to explain this ouija board kind of artistic phenomenon. And it struck me that the old saw "we plan and god laughs" might apply. The "plan" is the monochrome version of the little squiggles version that I decide is "finished" - when it is right.  My plan. God's laughter echoes in the application of color.

Makes sense to me 😁