My Wee Brain Sampler

While doing research for my illustrated book on navigating the medical system, I came across an intriguing article about a phenomenon referred to as "expert blindness." This essentially mean that a strong, narrow focus can cause an expert to miss information that is might be highly visible and pertinent because it is outside of the search field. This problem was demonstrated in an experiment with radiologists who were given an x-ray to review. The x-ray included a small but clearly visible gorilla. A stunning 80% of them missed the gorilla! The reason given for this is that the specialists were instructed to look for a specific finding and tried so hard that they did not see something obvious.

I thought that this would make for a great illustration to add to my book. The illustration is a pencil drawing derived from an MRI of a human brain. The entire picture is redesigned to look like an early American embroidery sampler. Hence the title: My Wee Brain Sampler. The interior of the brain houses butterflies and the exterior features decorative designs that include two seahorses. The seahorses refer to an anatomical part of the brain called the hippocampus, so named for the Greek word for seahorses.

The elaborate composition would not be complete without my signature border design. In this case I used back to back images of dendrites arranged in a decorative pattern.

Gestural Dancers, Once Again

The box of dance sketches is almost finished. I have been finding creative ways of finishing these with inks and charcoals. The ink brush that I am using is the tradition mao bi that Chinese calligraphers use. Mine is a very fine hu kai brush, which makes a variety of marks in a broad range of thick and thin.  The drawing below was based upon a study of a modern dance with ordinary bed sheets.

The Chinese mao bi makes such fluid calligraphic marks so reminiscent of my days training as a Chinese calligrapher, I decided to paint some of my studies of dancers as if they were a page of characters. Hence the name for this piece below, Characters. The word "character," here can refer both to types of people and also Chinese words. (Chinese symbols are refered to as "characters"). In this piece, I have used familiar brush work found in zhuan, xing,grass, and kai styles. Even the arrangement of the figures on the page has a kinship with how some works of Chinese calligraphy alternate large, heavy forms, with lyrical, wispy ones. I often recall how some calligraphers made the first character very prominent, almost akin to the medieval capital that western artists might be familiar with in illuminated manuscripts.

Some of my work became increasingly abstract, with the dancers barely recognizable.

The last ink and charcoal drawing featured men dancing in tuxedos. I decided to add something just terrifying on this one - five nooses! I had been reading about the Salem witchcraft trial and the five "witches" that were hung. Interestingly, I did not get many "likes" when I posted this work on social media.  I wonder why?

What followed were ink drawings literally scraped from the bottom of the barrel, or in this case, the dregs of the box.  There were a number of tiny scraps of paper that I almost threw away but did not. I did not erase the accidental drop of ink that looks to be a projectile that the hapless man at left is futilely trying to stop.

Gestural Dancers, continued...More than one in the Picture

I created a number of gestural drawings in ink, charcoal and pastel of my dancers.  To begin with, most of these featured a single dancer, like the Big Man series, or this strange one of a modern dancer pretending to be a winged insect.

  After a while some of the dancers became twosomes.

I began to add some color to these, and environments.  The two isolated child ballerinas now had a setting like a riverside in the spring. 

The compositions became horizontal and began to include more than two dancers, like these three masked dancers on a road.

A study of several young dancers in a performance rehearsal.

Gestural Dancers, Continued

After finishing the series of drawings, Big Man Dancing, I began to revise other sketches of female dancers that I had observed.  For some of these, I began to dabble in color. 

In the pieces that remained black and white, I employed the Chinese ink and brush in traditional calligraphic ways. 

Dots, lines, and masses were embellished with textural details and tonal gradations using charcoal pencils, pastels and vine charcoal.

Some drawings evolved in to something almost magical, like this dancer on a tree stump whose hands appear to dispense something that unravels and becomes integrated in to the tree.

Other dancers seemed to become trees themselves...

Big Man Dances

Freedom.  It was the second concept that came to my mind after a change of commercial art venues caused me to wonder, “What next?”  My faithful agent had retired, and with that the freedom to basically paint, draw, or sculpt whatever I wanted, as she had a broad range of clients with a variety of tastes.  My remaining commercial venue served clients with a much more limited collecting range - mostly paintings of South Carolina architecture with some folks who swing a bit in to mosaic masks.   I don’t mind these subjects and these art forms.  I am truly grateful to have collectors interested in any of what I do.  But this is  just a small portion of what I do and where my interests lie. 

So what to do with all the drawings, works on paper, sculpture, musical instruments, paintings that are not South Carolina architecture, and mixed media works - stuff that now clutters my home and would be costly to store outside of this friendly abode?
Generally, when faced with an art bottleneck of this kind, I seek to continue to create art  but without generating more stuff to store until times change.  This can be accomplished by perusing my unfinished work of the past, or work that seemed to be finished but could be better.  By working over old sketches and old paintings I can continue to sharpen my skills without adding to my excess studio fat. 
To begin, I had a box of sketches of dancers that I made years ago during live performances.  Dance has always  been a favorite subject of mine for both drawing by observation and also as a participant.  Over the past few weeks, I have been embellishing these pencil sketches with brush and ink, charcoals, and pastels.  In fleshing these drawings out, they have acquired new meaning.  One figure kept returning.  I called him simply, “Big Man.”  Big Man wanted to dance.  He had a Herculean grace that belied his size.  A story line almost seemed to emerge.  I have yet to decide, however, who “Big Man” really is.