Found Drawings...

One winter afternoon, I was feeling at loose ends and decided to walk downtown to my favourite cafe to sit in front of the big plate-glass window with a coffee and my journal/sketchbook and look out at the busy suburban world passing by outside.

I was busily engaged in listing where within my limited view's purview there were "found drawings" to be had. A bakery helper was busy drawing icing sugar squiggles onto some cinnamon buns. A dog being walked by on the dry pavement outside walked through a sidewalk puddle and left a pattern oh his gait in passing on the dry sidewalk. The paw-prints gradually diminished and then ceased. I stirred cream into my coffee - its swirls made an elaborate spiral of light into dark, then disappeared as the light overtook the dark and changed it's tone to a mocha colouration..

A young man came into the cafe. He made his rounds of all the cafe patrons sitting at tables, made eye contact and pressed a small card into hands. He then nodded and made his way out the door. I held up the card and looked at it. It had the deaf alphabet drawn on one side. On the other, was the legend describing the services to be had from the CNIB - the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. I scanned the different hand signals for the alphabet, drawn in clear line drawings on the other side. It struck me that here was a sudden gift of a found drawing. Drawings provide information, help codify visually what is thought, seen, or symbolized. I was suddenly excited by the coded visual language provided by this little card. Hand positioning to suggest sound. What a brilliant concept someone had come up with in this!.

At supper, later in the evening, my husband came home after his visit with the physiotherapist. He had been given a series of hand exercises to help ameliorate a condition in his arms and hands - these exercises were illustrated with cursory line drawings to show how exercise was to be sequenced. I showed him my CNIB card and we looked at the hand drawings to see commonalities in hand gestures and positionings. There were some. Both sheets of illustrations shared a stylistic simplification in drawing - generic hands, no mistaking them at all. After dinner I

withdrew into my studio room to mull over these illustrations.

How to make use of found drawings? It came to me that my sister and i had used the game "Rock, Paper, Scissors" to solve arguments- who was to start first in a game, who got the slightly broader slice of pie for dessert, who got up at bedtime on a cold night to shut off the lights, and so forth. So I toyed with the idea in the simplest way, using the simplest of means - borrow from the "vocabulary" of hand gestures, use only graphite powder and matte acrylic medium, one brush, a pencil and canvasses, 11 by 14 inches and text using my handwriting to give the word to each motion. I went for it and played with the simple materials. Found out how to work the wet medium suspending graphite powder into wet, how to add more powdered graphite to make darker washes. Not an earthshaking discovery, by any means, but so exciting to find out about as a way to use simple materials.

The little drawing/paintings are a beginning to show me how to begin an exploration of simple ways and simple means. Using "found drawings" as a departure point releases one from the self-conscious pressure to make "masterpieces". I enjoyed the process so much!

From a walk in winter

This photographic fragment is of an image I 'caught' thirty two years ago during a walk through our Langford neighbourhood on a cold, overcast winter afternoon. My husband had bought me a Pentax single-lens reflex camera for Christmas, and on this walkabout I was learning the settings. One neighbour's fence had a mass of fluffy clematis seedheads spilling through the weathered fence slats - this is a section I cropped out of the photo which I printed myself in our home dark-room.

I have always had difficulty in making photographs, especially with focus, due to my extreme shortsightedness and thick-lensed glasses. Yet, there was something compelling about this poorly focussed fragment that approximated my mood and feelings about this situation I had come upon and which caused me to linger, consider and soak in the particular nature of the masses of soft seedheads supported by a scaffolding of fencing.

Twenty-five years later, I was poking about in my box of photos, wondering about the compulsion to 'take' certain images and to store them for future refrence. This photo prompted me to translate a small segment of this fragment into the painted diptych below.

This diptych, oil on canvas, each panel 11 by 14 inches, was one of the first paintings I had attempted to make using oil paints. It is not particularly skillful handling of paintbrushes, but did satisfy my urge to play about with mixing together a limited number of colours and to explore some things that could be done with the paint and brushes. It is the activity of mixing colour, creating light and dark pattern, experimenting with blending some marks and leaving others as direct strokes which convinced me to persist with painting.

I found myself looking at how other painters handled the material and noted some of the decisions they had made in achieving particular character in their works. I think it is possible to spend a lifetime using limited materials and exploring their potential as image-making tools. That is what excites me about painting and drawing - the seemingly inexhaustible possibilities.

I realize that it has been declared by some contemporary art practitioners that 'painting is dead'. But, is it really? I think not. As long as people have eyes to see with and tools at hand with which to make marks, the desire to create images, even with the humblest of tools, is an innate and persisting human trait. What do you think?