StudIES for Pine Grove (2005)

Commercial cottons

#1, Pine Grove, 19 x 12 inches

#2, Camp activities, 17 x 12 inches

#3, Pine Grove, 12 x 12 inches

I include these small class exercises for the sake of a record: the day I learned to make abstract art.

On the first day of Design Camp in 2005, we were given an exercise:  to do a maquette about a place that has been important to us. I chose a quiet, peaceful place at the summer camp I went to for years as a child—a pine grove, by the lake, away from the cabins and activities, a place you could go to be by yourself.

I got to work, but all I could come up with was a kind of child-like abstracted representation of trees and lake (#1). I was disappointed--even disgusted. I wanted to do something that was totally abstract, that conveyed the peace and quiet of the place without reference to specific objects like the trees, shore, and water. But I had no idea how to do it. When Bill came by to see how things were going, I was so upset with the inadequacy of what I had done that I could barely speak, and I sent him away. Once I composed myself, he came around again, and got me to talk about the place, about what it was I wanted to convey. He then asked me, "What was the opposite of that place?" I answered that it was the hustle and bustle of all the group activities of the camp--lots of things going on with lots of people. "Make a maquette of that," he said. So I did (#2). This one I was happy with. I felt that I had captured in color and line some sense of what I was aiming for--the liveliness of the usual camp day. "OK," said Bill, "Now go back to the pine grove." And so I made a final piece (#3). Yes, here it was, the feeling of the pine grove. Being able to get to this abstract expression through the process of the exercise, in one afternoon--this was amazing to me. I felt that something was unlocked, that I could now do something I hadn't been able to do before--or that I had reached into some well inside myself that I hadn't known was there.

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