Iconography / Eye-conography

by K.M.Vincent

Monday 28 March 2005

In the past few days, I've had some significant "eureka" moments about the development of my art over time, some of which some people might find interesting.

The weekend of the opening reception for my "featured artist" show at the Distractions Art Gallery (12 March 2005), the subject of the eyes in my paintings came up during the post-event supper with friends. My sister said, "I have Kathy's very first eye."

I knew what she was talking about. A student exercise I did in college. But I hadn't really thought about it's being my "first eye." The more I thought about that, the more that seemed, yes, significant.

So Saturday morning, not having anything pressing to do and waking with thoughts of that and the sun and the orange (from my first research trip to St. Petersburg, FL) and all in my head, and remembering a quilt I designed in the 1970s ... I started writing out some things related to my artwork.

It's amazing how you can develop an "eye-conography" and style without even realizing it ...

Saturday 26 March 2005

Sometimes other people have to explain your own artwork to you.

I knew eyes had been part of my art for a long time, but I didn't really realize how long until my sister said to someone the weekend of the opening reception that she had "the first one."

She was referring to something I did in college. My junior year, I think it was, the end-of-year assignment was to paint five works in five different styles. I remember the Pollock style because that painting has become part of family legend ... I remember the style of my own choosing because I still have that painting: a tree from a lacework of ink with acrylic glazing "stained glass" filling in the spaces. Two others, I don't remember at all. But the fifth was my attempt at pointillism: a close-up painting in acrylics of my own eye ...

Come to think of it, the ink and drip-drawing and bright colors and "stained-glass" effect are there, too, in the beginning. Well, not in the beginning, really, because I'd been painting and drawing long before college. But perhaps they were beginning to "fall out" of the solution by then and crystallize ...

The Man came along about that time, too. Maybe he was one of the five paintings. A sort of cubistic style. With the line-face I came to draw -- and still draw -- frequently over the years. He had those staring eyes, too.

I used more eyes in the quilt I designed in the '70s but never finished. A sun in a window (four patches in the center, with one quarter of the sun-circle in one corner of each and rays of reds/oranges/yellows running across each block), with an eye quilting pattern in the borders. And the same shapes used to make the eyes were "deconstructed" to make tulips brought to life in the light of the sun. Rather like Here Comes the Sun ...

In the '90s, during an unhappy shift at work, I drew a little stack of eye drawings -- one of few periods I spent much time doing anything with pencil. In those drawings, the eyes peered out of all kinds of things: segments of pumpkins in a pumpkin coach, a giant cabbage in a patch, peas in a pod, bird shapes, fish shapes, ears of corn, curves in the human body. I tacked all my drawings up on the wall of my cubicle -- until it occurred to me someone might start psychoanalyzing me, and not to my advantage, at which point I took them all down. My sister has copies of those, too, because I mailed copies to her.

The orange -- THE orange -- entered my life during a visit to the people in St. Petersburg, and that orange merged -- was folded -- into my developing eye/sun iconography. Eye-conography.

I have my own ideas about the eyes ...

* * *

Some eye-deas ended up in my Goof-eYe-Balls notecard designs as well as in the more Art art.

* * *

The drip-drawing technique, originally "borrowed" from Pollock's, is also a way I use to loosen up. So when I drip-draw one of my man-faces, for example, I'm drawing it that way as a way to avoid clutching tightly to "control" and detail.

Ink-a-Man | Man in a Muddle | Funny Face | Funny Face, No. 2

I've always admired people who can suggest worlds in a few gestures. I'd like to be able to do that, too. But I tend to focus in too soon on the little things and, in doing so, miss the larger picture -- which I am more interested in. Given my temperament, I think I can safely say that it's not any actual interest in details that draws me in (so to speak). It's a feeling that I "should" pay more attention to them, and, in dutifully doing that, I lose what _I really want to do in the process.

You can't really focus on details when you're drip- drawing. You pretty much have to stay loose and keep an eye (...) on where you're headed overall. So that technique works for me in a way that studied drawing does not.

Like quick-drawings of short-time poses forces you to do. What is the essence here, and how can I capture it?

I remember once saying to someone that I was "good with details." "No you're not," she said; "You don't control details. Details control you." A light came on when she said that. She was right. I get bogged down in details and lose my way.

And so it is with my painting/drawing/etc.

The poet Byron said something once about being like the lion: He pounced once, but if he missed his prey he didn't try that one again. I think I'm a little like that myself ... I belabor and agonize over enough things in my life ... I'd like not to do that in my artwork ...

Sunday 27 March 2005

MORE realization set in during the wee hours of THIS morning ...

For 5 years, I have been trying to paint an orange in a bowl. I finally did it. Without realizing it. Furthermore, I painted it 5 times ...

Back to that junior year in college ... and that tree painting I still have. I'm not sure what style this was supposed to be, but one of the five paintings I was trying to do for that 5 paintings, 5 styles assignment was a tree that formed the silhouette of a person's face/head in the negative sky-space next to it. I tried doing that very literally and tried painting my tree very literally. Very literal bark. Very literal branches. Very literal. I agonized over that stupid tree, and the more I agonized, the worse it got. I finally abandoned that project. Fortunately, I have no idea what happened to that painting.

After abandoning that painting, I went back to something I'd been having a lot of fun with, a technique I have since seen done in similar fashion by someone using an airbrush. That was a little depressing because I'd been doing it with my own lungs and, occasionally, a straw, and hyperventillating in the process. An airbrush was a lot less taxing on the lung power, if rather considerably more taxing on the pocketbook. Personally, I preferred my results, too, but ...

I would drop little bits of ink on a page (I was using scrap matboard at the time) and, angling the matboard this way and that, I'd blow on the ink and "draw" with it. It was fun, it was only marginally predictable while being often surprising and delightful in its results, and I enjoyed sometimes treating the spaces among the shapes like bits of brightly colored stained glass.

I've always been fascinated by interesting and beautiful lines, and these lines had a lot of character.

In the end, I fashioned an abstract little "stained glass" tree on a piece of canvas board. It ended up hanging in a student exhibit in the art/English building.

One day, as I was headed up to the stairs to the art studio, the professor, who, by the way, thought I should have majored in art, said, "I see you finally got your faces in the tree." "I did?" Sure, he said. And he pointed them out to me ... Sure enough, on the one side of the tree was an odd little man with a bulbous nose and on the other side of the tree was an odd little woman: Old Tree

Back to the present and that orange.

After being introduced to and fascinated by that orange in that wonderful porcelain bowl on the dining table of the people in Florida, I took a lot of pictures of it from various angles, thinking it would be fun to paint it.

And I tried painting it. Not too literally, but, still, an orange in a porcelain bowl. None of the ideas looked anything like what I wanted to do, though I could not have told you at the time what I wanted it to look like. Something not like what it was looking like.

So I abandoned the idea and went on to painting spiral-faced figures formed by the gnarly coils of the giant fig/whatever trees (omigosh) all over St. Petersburg, FL, another fascination. All those splendid sinuous lines ... Eventually, I ended up with two paintings, one of which the people bought: Walking in the Woods.

But the orange -- now The Orange -- was still there, lurking ...

When it finally appeared, it appeared as the sun ... In many, many paintings. A new gamboge, deep yellow sun ...

I knew the orange/sun was in the panels of Slightly Different Whorl'd Views, and I knew it was the orange from that bowl on the table _rather _like an orange in a bowl. But what I did not FULLY and COMPLETELY realize until this morning in the wee hours was that it was THE orange in THE bowl, THE bowl formed by those swirls of drip-ink lines ... Just as the two little people were in my blown-ink painting in college.

In all five panels, that orange is peeking out of that bowl ... It is the iris in five eyes and the sun in five skies. It is part of a merging, emerging iconography/eye-conography. But it is also THE orange in THE bowl.

I finally did exactly what I wanted to do 5 years ago ...

Some things take longer than others.

Interiors Precursors

It also occurred to me before the opening that at least two paintings were precursors of my "Interiors" paintings:

Hibernation | Underground
Interiors

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