Adele in the window - 2024 10 28
These small art-sized cards (or card-sized artworks) are starting to make sense in terms of supporting my growing philosophical value of caring.
I draw portraits from my surroundings. They reveal a sensibility, a felt-sense, that emerges, over time, through many layers, through the process of drawing. This felt sense is informed by my subject, in this case, my constant companion, Adele. It is also informed by my own state-of-mind, or state-of-being, an expression of the ineffable experience of being human, being female, being 68 years on earth. They express these experiences over many days of coming back to the drawing.
With each layer, a slightly different form emerges, a different expression, a variation on the original impulse and gesture. Each layer of mark-making and ink wash adds depth, but also broadens perspective. The additional layers don't lock my subject into a static pose. Instead, they suggest a hint of movement, something that was there but has moved, or something moving away, or toward, me, the artist, and also me, the viewer.
When I step away from the work, I look back over my shoulder and see something new, a new hint, or suggestion, of the underlying impulse, the spirit of the work.
I am fascinated by this emergence of a felt-sense of the work. I cannot predict how the work will turn out. I cannot imagine having, or wanting, that kind of control.
It is more like sitting still enough for the work to reveal itself to me, and in so doing, reveal something that I need to know about myself, and about the world I am living in today, about the people, the other living organisms, the landscape of architecture and nature that I walk through everyday. I may chuckle to myself or laugh out loud, I may touch a deep sense of loss and sadness. I never know what is needed until it appears.
To me, this is the essence of caring. I certainly do not know what is needed at any given moment by the people I love or the people I don't know yet. What I do know, is that if I am quiet, if I allow those needs to present themselves, to make themselves known to me, then I will know the next right thing to do. I don't need to know everything about what is unravelling or unfolding before me. I only need to be curious, inquisitive, and seek to broaden my understanding or deepen my knowledge about what is before me.
That is skillful know-how, and that is how I learn what is the next right thing to do. In that way, I am truly a caring human being.
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