Outside the main lodge stood a bed of blue irises in full
riot, begging to be drawn; the art supply cabinet held a fabulous cache of
watercolor pencils. For the next two days, I couldn't keep myself away from the
flowers, or my hands off my sketchbook. I fell into the out-of-myself absorption
I've experienced so little of for months: the kind of state that reminds me I'm not
so much an artist as somebody who needs to make art in order to stay alive.
The longer you look at, and into, a bearded iris, the more
seductively complex you realize it is. Unruly petals define convoluted inner spaces. Light plays across diaphanous
surfaces. The scent is one of the underappreciated wonders of the floral world.
The flower will utterly defeat you as you try to translate all this into lines
on the page and variations of colour to suggest depth. And the defeat is the best part of the experience, the
"hook" that will bring you back again and again in happy obsession to
try to get it the next time.
I spent more time drawing than I have the last six months--and
still had time for the sauna, for the erotic massage exchange that was the centrepiece
activity one afternoon, for reading Tarot two or three times with friends. I
came away with four drawings that pleased me more or less, and with
a resolve that I'd take my obsession into the studio course I'd booked for
afternoons the following week.
Being a student in the studio is always a challenge for me.
I don't like producing drek in front of even the most supportive of
instructors. I want success and praise on the first brushstroke. Given an
exercise, I'm headstrong and want to strike out with it in my own direction.
I'm too invested in what I produce and in how others see it. Showing a teacher
what I've thrown myself into, only to have him take it as the starting point
from which he'll encourage me to depart, is a tall order. So opening my
sketchbook on Monday afternoon to say, here's where I'm at, was probably the
toughest moment of the whole week.
I didn't go further into the irises as I'd planned. Instead,
I spent the week pulling back from them, thinking hard about the backgrounds
behind them, learning how to scumble color into the negative contours along
their edge, coming back to the challenge of mixing the color I saw, then letting
it go in favor of the color that pleased me on the palate; practicing the dance
of knowing when to press forward with a line or patch of color that wasn't
working, knowing when to leave a shape as it was, knowing when simply to move
on. Trips back to the flower were starting points, not the place of repose I'd
imagined they'd be. The flower into which I dove turned out to be the flower
within.
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