Just the drawing please

Never mind the commentary that gives you too much information. I'll keep it to myself tonight. Instead, here is a Charatan freehand Dublin that I bought several years ago from the venerable Iwan Ries & Company, near the Art Institute in Chicago, after finishing a custom bookcase installation in a rare book shop on Printers Row. In fact, it's the pipe that I had clamped between my teeth in the photo on the "about me" page of this website. The Saab keys are to the gray 99GLE that I'm trying to sell, and the disc-like object is a circa 1937 bakelite Wunup Baccyflap tobacco container from England. I did this drawing using a new set of water soluble colored pencils, softer and more intense than what I've been drawing with, also from England. They're a little messy, and not very subtle. That worked just fine, since a carefully detailed exercise was not in the cards.

Art therapy

What is art about if it isn't about emotion? The other night, I told my daughter Noble when she was feeling desperate because she couldn't think of anything to draw, simply to draw how she felt. Her results were compellingly real. Not realistic in a photographic sense, but real in their powerful emotional content.

Some of us are buffeted by wild swings of mood. In a doctors' offices last week, I looked closely at some Van Gogh reproductions from his late career that hung framed on the walls, and felt the pain and rage boiling through the glass that covered them, and wondered how he felt, what he endured, and how painting was a vehicle, perhaps the only effective one, by which he was able to find release from his terrible emotional isolation without harming himself.

Medications work for some people with mood disorders. For others, either distrust or bad experience rule them out. For some of us, colors on paper or canvas seem, at times, all that there is between the unbearable and the abyss.

Talberts and Rads with GLP Lagonda, 8 1/4 x 11 9/16, Derwent watercolor pencils

Update on Sunday, November 6, 2011 at 2:43PM by Scott A. Stultz

farm on a Mt. Joy back road, 11 9/16 x 8 1/4, Derwent Inktense pencils

Black bag

Ever since I started drawing, I've carried around a shoulder bag of some kind or another with at least a sketchbook, pencils, pens, and hand sharpener in it. I used them all the time. When I was in my earlier teen years, it was an army surplus canvas bag, and often as not, I also carried an old fishing tackle box with crayons, charcoal sticks, kneaded erasers, and other stuff that made me feel like I was an artist. It didn't matter much when I was out in the fields behind our house, but it must have looked geeky as hell when I was walking around in public. When I visited my grandfather in Japan for the first time as a sixteen year old, I bought a larger vivid dark olive green bag with imitation leather straps and a front pocket, and used it until I was most of the way through my first stint in college. Then came a succession of day packs, and they followed me through later sporadic episodes in design and architecture school, as well as serving as my substitute for a briefcase when I was Director of Design for a Lancaster county cabinet manufacturer. That one was a neat black ballistic nylon bag with some really cool compartments, stowable straps, and a zippered flap sleeve. When the zippers failed and I started feeling like I'd stretched the college kid image as far into my thirties as I could, I finally broke down and took a trip to an upscale leather shop with my son Gabe, who was four years old at the time. He still remembers the occasion, twelve years later. I paid an outrageous $400 for a supple black leather shoulder bag from Coach with a front flap compartment and a single large zippered cavity with a few leather pockets sewn into it. It was a real extravagance - elegant and sophisticated, and meant to be pampered. But I didn't do that. I beat the daylights out of it, never once used any of the leather conditioner, and it has gradually worn into a pleasantly battered state of appearance. For years, I used it to tote a laptop computer that barely would fit, but now I have a more purpose built bag for that. Since it has been retired from daily business duty though, I once again keep a sketchbook, pencils, a nifty hand sharpener from Staedler, and a pipe or two inside it. I think it's happier this way. And once again, I'm back to using that sketchbook all the time.

my old black bag with a Rad Davis zulu, 11 9/16 x 8 1/4, 9B graphite and watercolor pencils

Seeing the future

I’ve heard and read accounts by artists and designers who tell of knowing before they even put brush to canvas or pencil to paper exactly what the result of their efforts will look like. Colleagues in design studios would say similar things. Architects who completely understand every detail of construction and every nuance of the spaces that they create, before they see them built. Painters who plan their major works and have a clear picture in their minds of what they will create. For the longest time, I felt like my arrival as an artist and designer would only occur when I too could have such inner vision at my command. And I’ve felt embarrassed, insecure, jealous and inferior because it never happened for me. At 55, I’m pretty sure it won't. But I've stopped wanting it.

 Tina's old cello case sitting in the front entry hall.

Nothing is revealed to me until the moment of creation. Pacing around my studio, lighting another pipeful of tobacco, drinking another cup of coffee, I’m really just gathering up the nerve to begin. To commit to some unknown goal and to risk the crushing disappointment of not finding my way there, to take the leap of faith that just never seems to get any easier. Sometimes I fight anxiety all the way through a drawing or design exercise, my whole body tense, my stomach muscles knotted, barely able to appreciate the experience. But, more often than not after years of doing it this way, something good happens. And sometimes I even get to enjoy the process as is unfolds, moment by moment. As for knowing what’s going to happen, no thank you. I can wait.

The studio worktable waiting for the week to begin.

Childhood reinspired by children

Most of the drawings that I've posted on this blog were done from life, but sometimes I draw purely from my imagination. I mean, besides the drawing that I do when I'm designing furniture. This one happened one evening around this time of the year several years ago, when my children were still in elementary school, and when they still thought it was fun to sit around the coffee table in our living room doing drawings with their dad. I was really just doodling and not thinking about drawing anything in particular, but I had streamline era car grilles on the brain, as old cars were an obsession of mine. Somehow, a doodle of a 30s automobile grille started me thinking about spaceships, but at the same time memories of my childhood fascination with fireflies got triggered. These guys just kind of happened. I wish that I had the skill and software to translate them into full animations. It would be good for me to get back to this kind of fanciful play again. It is one of the many things that I am grateful to my children for.