{"id":422,"date":"2007-07-11T11:12:23","date_gmt":"2007-07-11T19:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/11\/painting-workshop\/"},"modified":"2007-07-11T11:17:58","modified_gmt":"2007-07-11T19:17:58","slug":"painting-workshop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/11\/painting-workshop\/","title":{"rendered":"Painting Workshop"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s so beautiful here in the south of France. Exquisite. Rocky and scrubby. The cypresses. The vineyards. Villages of piled yellow stones with red tile roofs. The real locals, like a guy who is the watchman at the marble quarry, they talk French so it sounds like Spanish. Languedoc.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been very windy the whole time, like the wind in Big Sur, it gets on your nerves. A steady fitful wind is, by its very essence, \u201cin your face.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019m fully off line here, which is great. I\u2019m hardly even keeping journal notes. Just letting the experiences mount up and flow by. I like the flow of time here. Shifting sand. All the others have jet-lag, which makes time even more vague. The one kind of writing I\u2019m doing is chipping away at the novel.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But really it\u2019s about painting these days. I wake up at night and think about what I\u2019ll paint the next day.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve finished four paintings now, working six or more hours a day for eight days in the studio, which is a big old building in a field by a river, it\u2019s a former saw mill for blocks of the local red marble from the Caunes quarry, \u201cLe Carri\u00c3\u00a8re du Roi.\u201d\u009d Only four more days to go here, I\u2019ll miss this life.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Glen gave me really good practical advice about the pictures. He never talks about the content, just about the composition. Tricks to push things forward, or to avoid \u201ctriple points\u201d\u009d (where too many lines come together).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I did a very nice final landscape, South of France<\/em>. I was working on it at night in the studio and then I went outside and it was still a little bit light even though it was 10 p.m. and I had my brush in my hand and I was reaching out towards the trees and clouds and the house, moving my brush in the air, \u201cpainting\u201d\u009d the things in place.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It was in the Wayne Thiebaud multiperspective style, a view of the vineyards with a pi\u00c3\u00b1on pine in the foreground. Glen like it, he said it was a very personal take on Thiebaud, a fantasy landscape, with a lot of rhythm. I suggested putting in a UFO, but got no encouragement on this front! I\u2019m happy to be doing a straight landscape. I never thought I could do that. Glen\u2019s brought me to a new level.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Riding my bike home after finishing my painting, Hylozoic<\/em>\u00b8 I was enthralled by the alternating shutters and doors in they yellow stone houses by the road. And on the porch, the wind feels like a paintbrush, a sweep of color.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the tub this morning, rubbing my back with a washcloth, it felt like I was painting on blue-white paint. Imagine everything becoming color and gesture.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all about painting these days. I wake up at night and think about what I\u2019ll paint the next day. I wake up sore from the painting. Today I did yoga and I was seeing my muscle pains as colors. Not intellectually imagining this, but viscerally feeling <\/em>washes of color in my brain. My forever-sore muscle along the right side of my spine oozed a pale cobalt blue as I squeezed it out. The sharp pain in my right shoulder a triangle of orange (made of vermillion and cadmium yellow). My legs a mixture of Mars black and cadmium red. The pain in my lower back is an acid green produced by mixing cobalt blue with cadmium yellow and white. Veins of thalo green creeping in.<\/p>\n


\n[A seven-sided church dome in a 12th C church near Caunes.]<\/p>\n

I was planning to do a triptych here: Postsingular<\/em>, Hylozoic<\/em>, and Infinite<\/em>. I got some canvas for it, and finished the middle one, a square meter.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the sky and in the foreground are circular blobs, representing the ubiquity of consciousness (every atom has a mind). It shows Thuy Nguyen with her pigtails in the lower right corner. You see her from behind, just the part and the pigtails and her bare neck. To the left stands a painter holding up a brush and looking towards her. He has a hat like Bosch wears in a drawing that\u2019s sometimes said to represent him. Also he has a halo. I think of him as Bosch, as me, as Jayjay.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The largest and brightest thing in the picture is a flying manta ray, a Hrull mothership. Her mouth is open and you can see someone inside her mouth, like the people inside the body of the tree-man in the hell panel of Garden of Earthly Delights<\/em>. This is Chu, who becomes a Hrull ship crew member. The manta ray\u2019s mouth is vaginal, so Chu also resembles a fetus. There\u2019s a logical flow from the pig-tailed young woman to the painter phallically displaying his brush to the small figure inside the manta ray. Woman seduced by magus becomes pregnant.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Doesn\u2019t quite fit the book, as in fact Thuy seduces the young Chu and gets pregnant from that. But when I paint from one of my novels before actually writing the material, I\u2019m using the painting to uncover possibilities. Maybe Bosch becomes besotted with Thuy, even though she\u2019s only one foot tall relative to him. Or maybe we\u2019re seeing Bosch steering the Hrull mothership (bearing Chu inside) to Thuy in the second to last chapter. Or, again, Jayjay could be the painter, and then the picture would make more sense. Thuy, Jayjay, and Chu.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So what I learned from the painting is that Jayjay does in fact become a painter like Bosch, maybe even a Bosch impersonator.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is a photo from an exhibit by the winegrowers\u2019 association that was up in the Caunes abbey before our group show. What we see here is a mob of enraged locals pulling down—a cautionary message about drinking and driving! They\u2019re going after it as if it were a statue of Stalin or Saddam Hussein. This really cracked me up; I totally can\u2019t imagine this demonstration happening in our puritanical US. Nobody would dare! Crimethink! Public safety is our scared cow. Not that I\u2019m advocating drunk driving, mind you—but it\u2019s interesting to see that societies can work from different sets of assumptions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Glen says that he dreams of making a \u201cbreakthrough\u201d\u009d and coming up with some new angle on painting. That set me to thinking about writing breakthroughs. In a way, I\u2019m just happy to be able to write at all, and to get my work published. Maybe I made my breakthrough some time ago and am now enjoying my mature style. But maybe I am <\/em>working for breakthrough too. <\/p>\n


\n[Snail on a plane tree by the Canal du Midi.]<\/p>\n

I do try and break through to new ideas each time out, but my characters and incidentals are much the same. I have a sense that trying for a breakthrough isn\u2019t always a good idea, at least for me. It\u2019s hard enough to write at all. Going for a breakthrough is that \u201cknock it outta the park\u201d\u009d thing\u2014and you can end up whiffing. Saucer Wisdom <\/em>was a deliberate breakthrough book, and it didn\u2019t do too well in the marketplace. Maybe the trilogy I\u2019m working on is a breakthrough. Or maybe it\u2019s the same old sh*t. Like I say, the main thing is that I can do it. I love exercising my craft, making it funnier and vibbier and more gripping, step by step, tweak by tweak, polishing it like an icon. <\/p>\n


\n[Barbara Heffernan with one of her paintings, and her portrait by Kevin Brown]<\/p>\n

Today we hung a little show in a room at the local museum. Paintings by our workshop members. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I have two of my pictures up. Glen\u2019s picture wasn\u2019t finished yet. Last night he was going to do a big push, but he didn\u2019t get it together. He was tense. <\/p>\n


\n[Paul Fujii with his watercolors.]<\/p>\n

The students\u2019 mood and state of well being was very dependent on Glen\u2019s moods. Imagine this for Bosch\u2019s studio.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The opening of our group show was actually fun and the dinner was cheerful. Glen was in a good mood. On the night before the opening—after the rest of us had hung our pictures—Glen finished a piece about 8 ft by 4 ft, paper, an irregular pattern of black dots with white rings around them (acrylic) and then the paper laid on the floor and stained with a mug of black tea that stood on it and slowly dried overnight.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The effect was good, a kind of leopard skin quality. Glen called it Magellanic Clouds<\/em>. I like the way he looks in this picture, so proud. He\u2019s like, \u201cYaaar<\/em>, I caught the big fish!\u201d\u009d A little reminiscent of CA Turing spots as well, but funkier.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Glen was happy and we students were happy for him. We had dinner at a place in the tiny town of Citou on a back road. I don\u2019t think a single car went by while we ate for four hours.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I had a landscape called Minerve<\/em> in the show, which is the name of a town where I sketched the scene above, and painted the scene below.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I would have liked to see Hylozoic <\/em>in the show but it\u2019s not stretched, I painted it on a big square of canvas stapled to the wall. Now I\u2019m worrying about getting that home, also my South of France <\/em>painting, which is on a sheet of paper too big to fit in the suitcase. I rolled them up in foam. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Walking around the little medieval village of Caunes day after day. It\u2019s so tiny. And on most of the streets you can\u2019t see the horizon, or even any green. You just see the walls. It\u2019s like being inside a very high-walled maze. The village. And when you get out into the green fields it\u2019s such a relief. I see Thuy and Jayjay having this feeling in s\u2019Hertogenbosch.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Glen lent me a vibby book, What Painting Is<\/em>, by James Elkins. It\u2019s a sustained analogy between painting and the medieval practice of alchemy. Paint is water (the medium) and stone (the pigment), and you\u2019re trying to distill the fire of light. On the palette, the mixed paints are like excrement, the \u201cprima materia<\/em>\u201d\u009d of alchemists. They paints transform unexpectedly. You don\u2019t really know what you\u2019re doing, it\u2019s a somewhat magical and intuitive process.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I personally hate to try and think about the color wheel when I\u2019m mixing paints\u2014logical analysis feels wrong in this context. It\u2019s much more pleasant to just muddle the paints together and see what I get, and if it\u2019s not what I wanted, maybe I can use the \u201cwrong\u201d\u009d color somewhere else. This said, I am learning a few basics, like that cobalt blue and cadmium yellow make a nice green\u2014but still, and here\u2019s the alchemy of it, this mixture doesn\u2019t always seem to work. I have to throw in an unspecified amount of white. Or adjust the amount of yellow.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Would be nice to have an actual alchemist in the story. Maybe Thuy and Azaroth are hanging out with one. A guy like in Bruegel\u2019s drawing of a Nick Herbert or Phineas McWhinney type alchemist. \u201cAl gemischt<\/em>,\u201d\u009d it says in the Bruegel drawing, which means all mixed up.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019m planning to model my Infinite <\/em>wing of the triptych on Bosch\u2019s Venice painting of an ascent to heaven, where the image is (perhaps) inspired by the appearance of the water-mirrored round arches in the s\u2019Hertogenbosch town canal. I can have Bosch point this out to Jayjay.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We took a little ride in a boat on the Canal du Midi. Exquisite.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And then it was back to the big city.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s so beautiful here in the south of France. Exquisite. Rocky and scrubby. The cypresses. The vineyards. Villages of piled yellow stones with red tile roofs. The real locals, like a guy who is the watchman at the marble quarry, they talk French so it sounds like Spanish. Languedoc. It\u2019s been very windy the whole […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}