A Month of Tiny Dots

Nocturne Series, no.1

Hello friends!!!  Thanks for all your wonderful support during my month-long absence....I could feel the energy in my studio in Wyoming. What a wonderful experience I had at Jentel!  I shared an amazing 6-bedroom house with a group of very engaging writers and artists in a spectacular setting in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains.  It was very hard to tear myself away!  

I took a lot of newly purchased Japanese printmaking paper, a handful of my husband's homemade handmade paper, plenty of paint, ink, etc.  My plan was to work on exploring the map ideas, but you know how these things go....nothing goes according to plan.  The lessons we have to learn all over again!!  I know my creative process and yet many times I find myself fighting it, wanting to be able to work in ways that don't suit my nature.  Needless to say, my attempts at making map inspired work went nowhere, because I was trying too hard....but by the end of the first week I had settled in to make a new series of work on the handmade paper that I came to think of as nocturnes....inspired by that last little piece I shared with you before I left in the post here.  As you can see from this first finished piece from the series, there are a LOT of tiny dots in white ink.  From across the room they look like little jewels dotting the page, but no, just row after row of tiny white dots.  What can I say, except that I am never happier in the studio than when making repetitive marks such as this, watching the magical transformation as the marks coalesce into a meaningful whole.  So far, there are eight of these pieces I believe....the lower sections are finished....thousands of white dots later, but am adding the night sky roof sections to them, so the rest are still in process.  I'll be adding these to my website at www.robertspizzuto.com, so check back in the near future.

Time in the studio is interrupted (who can complain having just had a month of nothing but time in the studio!) by visiting family and travel plans for the Thanksgiving holiday.  Soon I'll be back though, getting those other Nocturnes finished and posted on the website.  

Hope you all have a fine weekend ahead and enjoy the many treasures life has to offer!  Thank you again for all your support!

Your Marks Are Your Fingerprint

So I just have to share this discovery I made in the studio the other day.  I found one of the hardbound sketchbooks that I have sometimes used....I'm not actually one to make good use of a sketchbook, since I work so intuitively most of the time.  This one had hardly been touched...in fact, the few pages that had been used dated back to 1997!  I leafed through those initial pages and was astonished to discover this page...it's like I made it yesterday!  I can't quite say why I found it so odd, except that I saw that my mark making language is so consistent....as much as I like to think I've changed and moved in other directions, there it is...I'm the same me that I always was.  This is a comfort in some ways, because it's like a fingerprint...your language is always a part of you and probably always has been, even before you knew how to "speak" it.  It's all there...the book page, the whimsical drawings, the intuitive marks.  And on an adjacent page, a short list (always a list maker!) with these words....flight, ritual, intimacy, self, place...I might have written that list a moment ago...all those same concerns and ideas.  They are big ideas...it takes a lifetime.

The One Thing

I'm having a great day in the studio, which isn't always the case!  I'm working to resolve my part of a collaborative exhibition with my husband and the deadline is looming...August 24th.  We've been working on this for most of the summer, but somehow I haven't been able to make anything that feels right.  Now, I understand what I'm to do. This morning I started drawing in white ink onto of the blackboard painted paper and before I knew it...the channel opened and I was right there in the flow, drawing those tiny circles that connect endlessly...like seeds or cells.  I realized that it's always about getting to the essence, the "one" thing, that gets at the core of something.  I knew in the middle of the first drawing, that all 36 drawings would each be an exploration of the one thing...the way the those interlocking little circles in white ink laid on top of the black chalkboard paint and interacted with the pencil.  It was a time of meditation as I connected tiny circle after tiny circle, stopping on each one when the shape declared itself and then moving on to the next piece.  When this kind of thing happens for me, this moment of recognition, I feel it in the pit of my stomach....I am in a flow where my hand is making the thing I am longing to see.  Simplicity, simplicity itself.

There are a couple of images in of the pieces in progress above...more will happen on the black chalkboard paint, but the drawing in the white ink is what the pieces are about....in a way I can't describe in words.

A Fork in the Road

A Fork in the Road...is now finished and this one is posted in my Etsy shop.  This may be the first in a series about the fork in the road.  I definitely have other chalkboard drawings in the works, but I am really interested in this idea of the fork in the road...visually and and metaphorically.   It felt odd to work with no color on this piece.  As you can see, I couldn't quite do it, so the edges of the paper are painted with a copper acrylic and I added some tiny dots of color on those branches.   I do love the way the chalkboard paint surface takes the pencil marks...sort of subtle and shimmery...there is a lot for me to explore with these materials!

Enjoy the weekend!