At The Arboretum

Cornell's Arboretum, on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The distant rages of the Shakespeareans echo faintly across the ponds. Up at the Overlook, someone takes hammer to bell.

From Phil McCray's blog Ulysses' Friezes:

At the end of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, the pugnacious urchin Linda rejects the promise of treasures she has inherited (stultification in a grim boarding school, and the possible flushing of the liberty of her own life down into the sewers of social respectability and security) and instead walks off into a more dangerous unknown, in the company of an even more pugnacious girl... let us say to rough out the years remaining to her in rowdy cities, with alcohol, jazz music, petty crimes, and a beat trail to Hollywood, where she writes stories and scripts for movies that will not be published or produced until their visionary truth is recognized, many years after she succumbs to the various ravages of life lived as misadventure.

Which is to say: independence. So difficult to muster.

The Nightingale's Garden

The Nightingale’s Garden
Charcoal, Graphite; 5” x 9”

No scanner handy over the weekend, so this scan represents two sessions, about eight hours’ work. Trying to follow, flesh out the bones of the trees I’d sketched earlier seemed an almost certainly dissatisfying path: I wanted to get out of their way and my own, let these trees to be a product of this session, today’s energy and direction. So I began again, fast and loose– Q-Tips loaded with soft charcoal dust, initial shapes and highlights lifted out with kneaded erasers. Details developed with 6B charcoal pencils, softened & sharpened with more kneaded eraser, Dixon Ticonderoga graphite pencils, grades 1-4.

The last session was a Fussing Day– Cleaning up, smoothing out background and mist with a gazillion or minute adjustments. Kneaded erasers shaped to a very fine point, and a Staedtler Mars Lumograph 6H graphite pencil. The Nightingale’s Garden was done in several sessions over 12 days; total working time was about 22 hours.

Contrast & Consistency

A brief session, with more values brought into line. I look for distractions, too-brights, too-darks, make adjustments with erasers, graphite pencils, Q-Tips. Get carried away, and softly-lit becomes muddy. I’m always looking for that ideal balance between contrast and consistency. Elusive, that one.

Where The Fun Waits

Last night I began with the remaining unfinished area above the middle pool, developing detail, bringing values into line. In these sessions when I’m resuming work on a drawing in progress, I look for the obvious, the first thing I see that clearly needs doing. A way of warming up, maybe: Small decisions before bigger.

The top pool was also unplanned. I’d do a few obvious, then see about the tree– Next thing I knew, there was another pool, and getting bigger, and and.

As usual, there are elements I’m not satisfied with- maybe never will be, not entirely, but I need to remember to leave well enough alone, sometimes- and that’s just what I can see, what seems obvious. What I can’t see yet, though, that’s where the fun waits.

Quick & Dirty

Last night, more cleanup: Brightly lit surfaces, reflections, mist, fades smoothed with graphite pencils, kneaded erasers; and a quick-and-dirty tree roughed in with one of my most indispensible tools, a Sanford Tuff Stuff Eraser Stick. I sharpen the point with a utility knife, emery board or sandpaper to draw out fine lines or refine highlights. If you work in charcoal or graphite, you need one.

In It Now

Fuck, she said, and something clattered in the darkness. A light came on, and Quail blinked at an overturned toolchest, drawers emptied onto the floor, sockets and screwdrivers and shit everywhere. Two drums of Wolf’s Head lay on their sides in a sullen pool of oil; the uneven hardpack was darkened in patches where some, not enough, had soaked in. I know, she said, they trashed me. I just. Quail nodded. He could understand why they’d torn down the pegboard, you could hide a lot behind there. But pulling aircraft cable off spools, dumping trays of flexcouplings, lockwashers, what was that. What I’m gonna do, she said, is try and get out from under this place, get what I can for it and get out. And what I need right now… She looked around the ruined shop, made a small all-inclusive gesture. Quail looking too, thinking he should say yeah, if he had a little more time, whatever. He’d come looking for a car was all, not to clean up some dead desperado’s mess, get tangled up in this woman’s troubles. They trashed me, she’d said: Not the place, but her, like she saw no difference, and maybe there wasn’t. Quail wondered if he’d ever had those kinds of ties to anyplace, taken this kind of hurt when it did. Maybe it was just as well he couldn’t remember.

Listen, he said, I’m in no hurry. She looked at him, and he remembered what he’d said about a job waiting. He shrugged. There’s always jobs, he said. If you want, I could pick up some, get things wiped off, put away– Couple hours, probably, and then you can see what’s what. The old fluorescent flickered; Quail couldn’t tell if she nodded, or what. Then she said, I’ll go tear up some rags, and she opened the bright door, went out. Quail looked around, thought well, I’m in it now. He wondered then what she’d make the rags from, if he’d be mopping up thirty-weight with a dead guy’s ZZ Top shirt. Maybe he’d start with the toolchest, get that stood back up, go from there.

Abandoned Flights

Not a lot to show for last night’s drawing time. Tried some things that went nowhere, but at least took awhile- Long day, or maybe I just wasn’t ready. Sometimes you know you’ve approached a new edge, something new, something. You don’t know what, exactly. A half-glimpsed dream you reach after, can’t grasp: The pools at the bottom of this drawing dissolving into a shuffle of architect’s sketches, layered transparencies, possibilities. Fragmented notes you intuit rather than read: Unresolved arcs. No conjoined returns. Eventually, you resign yourself that none of those will happen tonight, you don’t have the energy, clarity to allow them, and you clean up their thinning traces, contrails of those abandoned flights.