Blue flowers

2/24/26

Picking up old scraps of paper again to watercolor half-drawn figures, ghostings built on a wobbly armature of graphite contours.

I never got into life drawing; reproducing the visible isn’t that interesting to me, I guess.

Chasing forms suggested by automatic-drawing (loose lines, scribbles to nowhere) or recreating forms in the mind is interesting. Searching for some kind of Platonic ideal sealed in memory after lots of staring, lots of practice. Not staring at live bodies though. I stared at the drawings of Ingres for so many years—studied the little pale blue book published by Dover. I replicated the doe-eye women in their empire waists and the doe-eye men in their stiff starch collar with sidelong looks. (They all look either suspicious or guilty, probably because they know their fabrics and status were built on the corrosive back of empire.)

Limbs are traced from vague memory of what limbs look like. The suggestion of limbs trumps the anatomy of limbs. This proves problematic because memory is squishy and often the drawn joint doesn’t sit quite right in the socket at such-and-such an oblique angle. Then comes the vinyl eraser, fierce scrubbing out, then another stab at another angle, and another, till the tracings pile up and a many-limbered ghost emerges—something like if goddess Kali had a babe with Bellmer.

The flower is always Blaue Blume—a throwback to Novalis—something that’s stuck with me from a lit class. One of those random things from college that lingers in the mind…