Some way back...

“Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” Pablo Picasso

“I was 19, I was happy, wasn’t sure where I was going. Not much has changed in 30 years.” 

Those were the first lines written on this blog, Touches of sense…

Here I am in 2022, starting a new adventure, a web site, to be entitled: 

Some way back… 

Simon.Ensor.Art

I have always known that I was an artist.

My father used to ask me to illustrate his sermons. 

My mother told the school I painted like Lowry (I didn’t).

"I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit."

John Steinbeck.

My art teacher was a great teacher, he would give me excellent marks and then fail to convince me to do some work. 

Others told me to concentrate on more serious subjects.

Below is a drawing I knocked off for homework when I was 16 years old. 

The art teacher’s comments have been nagging me ever since.

I am writing now as a 60 year old Anglo-French artist, driven by a single question:

“What happens when I really put my mind to developing a body of visual art?” 

Some way back…

is a means to document and share responses to that question. 

“An artist without faith is like a painter who was born blind.”

Andrei Tarkovsky

As an artist, I have been working passionately for the past 34 years as an English teacher with thousands of students, exploring the medium and discovering the desire and the means to transform it. I have spent years studying and adapting my actions to the complexity and unpredictability of human interactions and learning. Faith and hard work has enabled this artist to see further…

Art has always been a way to lose myself and to find myself elsewhere.

Along the way, 

I have developed my voice as a blogger in Touches of sense…, connected and collaborated as an educator and as an artist with kindred creative spirits from around the world and employed more or less academic genres to communicate and to publish radical educational messages. The 482 blog posts that I have written since 2010 have become progressively more and more concerned with visual art. The last one, Touches of light, preciously preserved marked some sort of epiphany.

“A page escapes to leafy paths[...]Ephemera rendered eternal.Taking a moment to contemplate. Pause, gaze, breathe in, remember. Moving, losing sight, feeling loss.”

Ever since I was born, I have been acutely aware of the ephemeral nature of life and the infinite value of artistic expression. My father’s work was rhythmed by life’s passing seasons and the rituals of baptism, marriage,and death. My mother shared her love for music, poetry, gardening and nature,and an eye for beauty to be found in driftwood, pebbles, and bric-à-brac. 

Some way back…

Is made up of moments of figurative and abstract meaning making. I find flow and express emotions by letting myself be moved by the moment, the media, making marks intentionally or serendipitously. I am drawn to gaze at distant horizons and to investigate universes glimpsed through close focus. At times, images emerge organically with no apparent source. Certain motifs are  recurrent: nature, landscape, seascapes, mountains, rocks, trees, paths…the objective is always to discover new lands to be able to perceive what lies beyond the self, the subject, the page.

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

Marcel Proust

Touches of sense… has been a means to map out areas I want to explore and to excavate and to study the reasons why they are important.

Each collection, each image has its back story. Some way back will build upon these foundations. 

Between 2014, and 2018 much of my artistic work was multi-media,collaborative and digital, combining poetry, spoken voice and images in assemblages. I owe much to my friends of #clmooc.

 

Since 2018, starting with “A vine branches wildly…”  I have concentrated my art practice predominantly on watercolor painting, ink, charcoal and graphite drawing. 

The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know and how much you need to learn.

When I speak to those who I consider to be master artists, I am comforted when they agree with this quote of George Leonard:

“We fail to realise that mastery is not about perfection. It’s about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to fail, and try again. For as long as he or she lives.”

I have stayed true to my path day after day, year after year. 

To my surprise it appears that this is its latest twist. 

I am working now on some way forward.

Simon Ensor

Artist exploring the ephemeral nature of life via figuration & abstraction, flow & scribble, intention & serendipity.

P.S.

I have no idea whether this will be the last post in Touches of sense...

It has been quite a while since I felt moved to write here.

The words just wouldn't come...

Feldgang Ceyrat.

Casting off moorings.

I had spent a little less than a month working on portraits, drawn or painted from photos, and then, unannounced, this face emerged.

He stares out of the page, an unsettling presence.

There are stories to imagine, none to tell.

Well as far as I am concerned he was a piece of recreation.

I simply played with colours and forms until it said stop.

I stopped to contemplate what he or it might mean for future acts.

I find working purposefully, in a concentrated manner on study , on technique, tiring but valuable.  I realise that this will be a constant source of frustration but also a challenge and a potential source of satisfaction.

I am not really sure how the idea of completing 30 portraits came about, it just did.

It is this path which arouses my curiosity, which begs me to retrace my steps.  

Taking bearings.

Why, I ask myself, does one image attract at a particular moment? 

There are people who have an eye that I treasure.

There are people who have a way with words that inspire.

There are those photos that come back to me that I go to search for years after.

What determines this toing and froing from, repetitive technical exercise to recreation?

Instinctively, intrinscially motivated moments of studied effort, concentration, intermingle with instintively motivated moments of freely formed, instinctive creativity.

The monster can't appear without the work on portraiture, the monster can't appear without the freedom to create.

Mapping not tracing.

Mapping most often involves taking knowledge of the lines of others inorder to trace one's own steps....

I suppose what I find so wrong about much of classical education is that teachers don't wait for students to naturally and instinctively search for answers, for mastery, to their own personal questions, to map out their own personal paths.

Most of the time creativity is not called for, only unthinking tracing.

I find myself taking screen shots of the artwork of others, as reference, as inspiration.

I find myself watching documentaries retracing the artistic paths of others. 

Moments of serenity, moments of despair....

I think again how objects, images, memories become markers on our maps, moorings for our lives.

I think again how motifs model meaning.

I think about the challenges to accepted motifs and the creation of new forms of art.

I think of how loss of attachment, mooring, meaning, leads us to fearful despair, confusion or outrage.

Tides, waves, lunar movements...

I leave people and portraits and find refuge in landscape.

As I draw, I branch off, my eye drawn around the room.

I glance over at my bookcase and see the  mountaineering section, the aikido section, the Stanislavski and Chekov books on acting, the various tomes concerning educational  research from the past ten years.  Each section represents moments, hours, years of attention, enthusiasm, passion, and its waning.

There are seasons, tides, reverberations, which somehow connect in my thoughts, memories, writing, drawing, painting....

Living for many years on the coast, moving backwards and forwards between two countries separated by the sea, looking at photos from series of annual trips across the channel, the sea is a constant motif in my existence.

“There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?” 
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

Casting off moorings.

Strangely, time appears for this work, when time before appeared absent.

How is it that after so many years, I find this time to paint? 

Maybe, I have cast off those moorings that were holding me back.

I find a poem on the Mooring image from Wendy Taleo. It finds its place somehow here.

I don't really know why it is that I am pausing here to write a few notes in this "ship's log". 

I had become fed up with words.

They appear here to punctuate the flow.

Moments of despair, Glimmers of hope.

I had no words, I could not speak.

"If you don't know what to play, play nothing."
Miles Davis

I glanced darkly at serious sounding tweaks...to those familiar choruses.

Tweaks, to serious sounding choruses.

Hurrah! 

Blah!

Dada dada...

Tweets, so many characters... that said it all.

They...that... said it all.

They...that...didn't speak to me.

They...that...didn't speak for them.

I heard not a jot.

Nothing but...

Serious, sounding, tweets.

Tweaks, to serious sounding choruses.

Hurrah!
Blah!
Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah!

Tweaks, to serious sounding choruses.

To a Skylark

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! 

Bird thou never wert, 

That from Heaven, or near it, 

Pourest thy full heart 

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 

Higher still and higher 

From the earth thou springest 

Like a cloud of fire; 

The blue deep thou wingest, 

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. 

In the golden lightning 

Of the sunken sun, 

O'er which clouds are bright'ning, 

Thou dost float and run; 

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. 

The pale purple even 

Melts around thy flight; 

Like a star of Heaven, 

In the broad day-light 

Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, 

Keen as are the arrows 

Of that silver sphere, 

Whose intense lamp narrows 

In the white dawn clear 

Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. 

All the earth and air 

With thy voice is loud, 

As, when night is bare, 

From one lonely cloud 

The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflow'd. 

What thou art we know not; 

What is most like thee? 

From rainbow clouds there flow not 

Drops so bright to see 

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. 

Like a Poet hidden 

In the light of thought, 

Singing hymns unbidden, 

Till the world is wrought 

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: 

Like a high-born maiden 

In a palace-tower, 

Soothing her love-laden 

Soul in secret hour 

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower: 

Like a glow-worm golden 

In a dell of dew, 

Scattering unbeholden 

Its a{:e}real hue 

Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view: 

Like a rose embower'd 

In its own green leaves, 

By warm winds deflower'd, 

Till the scent it gives 

Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves: 

Sound of vernal showers 

On the twinkling grass, 

Rain-awaken'd flowers, 

All that ever was 

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass. 

Teach us, Sprite or Bird, 

What sweet thoughts are thine: 

I have never heard 

Praise of love or wine 

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. 

Chorus Hymeneal, 

Or triumphal chant, 

Match'd with thine would be all 

But an empty vaunt, 

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. 

What objects are the fountains 

Of thy happy strain? 

What fields, or waves, or mountains? 

What shapes of sky or plain? 

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? 

With thy clear keen joyance 

Languor cannot be: 

Shadow of annoyance 

Never came near thee: 

Thou lovest: but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. 

Waking or asleep, 

Thou of death must deem 

Things more true and deep 

Than we mortals dream, 

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? 

We look before and after, 

And pine for what is not: 

Our sincerest laughter 

With some pain is fraught; 

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 

Yet if we could scorn 

Hate, and pride, and fear; 

If we were things born 

Not to shed a tear, 

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. 

Better than all measures 

Of delightful sound, 

Better than all treasures 

That in books are found, 

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! 

Teach me half the gladness 

That thy brain must know, 

Such harmonious madness 

From my lips would flow 

The world should listen then, as I am listening now. 

Tweaks, to serious sounding choruses.

Oh, tweets, I regret.

I had no interest in reading them.

Keybored.

The thought of opening up the computer was an anathema to me.

Associated as it is with marks, tables, charts and mail.

Blogging every day? 

I had no words, nothing to write.

Hurrah!

Blah!

Blah!

Drawing energy from somewhere.

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." Pablo Picasso.

Drawing everyday, drawing everyday?  Not if it becomes a bind.

I will not be a slave to what brings me freedom.

Drawing prompts can become a bind.

Drawing encouragement?  Yes, gratefully accepted.

Drawing for likes? Not if it becomes a bind.

Drawing commissions? Not if it becomes a bind.

Drawing free-hand.

"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser." - John W. Gardner.

I took to drawing in ink, portraits - fast - one false move of the hand and I ruined everything.

That beautiful child, I stole her image, I destroyed her here.

I am thoughtlessly privileged, she is a distant disposable soul.

I look up at the rough sketch above and I see only its faults when what I was striving to express was beauty.

I feel despair at my clumsiness.

Ugliness, crude ragged strokes, often depressingly scribbled expressionism, always seemed easier.

I am less forgiving now of the child who didn't always hold onto his dreams.  

Dreams drawn...

Dreams are resistant fifty years on...

"This art is still alive to me.

Resistant to academic form, I make do with child-informed imagery.  It has a keen edge."

Now 57, I discover that drawing aged, wrinkled, lined faces is more forgiving.

I have become wrongly or rightly, more forgiving.

I still play with digital filtering, I don't see that as an easy option, years of messing has widened my artistic palette. 

If I am concentrating on ink drawing, or water color, or training my eye, expertise only comes from days and days of practice.

"As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward." Vincent van Gogh 

I return to the challenge of beauty, I find an unlined face.

I see faults in my translation, there are so many aspects to work on.

I remember my mother's hopeless despair at her art:

"Oh it's just useless."

I treasure her drawing.

I find myself becoming more and more aware of the subtlety of touch, of weight, of respecting minimalism, of space, of the blank page. 

I remember a quote about mastery 

I am reminded of a variously attributed quote on music.

"The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them."

I find sense in what I am doing here and now in writing. 

Taking time to pause, to reflect, to share that reflection with whoever may find meaning in it.

Quiet, Slow, Solitary, Study.

A comment of Gardner Campbell on a post here -  Are we not content ?  comes back to me.

"I want to emphasize....the value and necessity of study."

I go back and study tutorials of Alphonso Dunn and others on Youtube concerning portraiture.

I am reminded of a post here, years back - Stillness in Frenesy.

I take the portrait of the Korean girl, recognised in passing, by my teenage daughter (expert in Korean youth culture) and seek to add color to her bare lines.

The digital palette takes her elsewhere, towards, what I feel I need to express...beauty.

It is no coincidence that I looked to beauty in "nature" for a rest from human ugliness....

Landscape may become a refuge.

“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.” 

Vincent Van Gogh

A single image of  Amy Burvall sparks an afternoon of water play.

Tangled roots inspired by photo of @amyburvall #marchdoodle #clmooc #watercolorpainting #landscapepainting #doodlewashmarch2019 pic.twitter.com/7qzh6gRG6G

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) March 24, 2019

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” Pablo Picasso 

Taking a few steps back, redrawing ones lines.

I decide to take a larger format, risk wasting a more expensive paper, and sharpen my pencils.

I draw fairly quickly a portrait outline from a vintage hand-colored photo, chosen deliberately for its clear tonal range and limited color.

I improvise a means to correct my first draft, using an app to superimpose the drawing with the original image.

The problems of proportion, of angle, of position are immediately brought to light. 

I use the digitally composed image to correct my drawing.

This time, I have decided to challenge myself with a water color portrait. 

After all, doing the same old thing is dull!  

An old photo becomes seen in a new light.

I start to wonder about the story, the soul, behind the anonymity of the Googled object.

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” Pablo Picasso 

What is behind her expression? What is bound in her tight bow? 

Is there life beyond the dust soiling our net curtains?

No words so much to express...

If I had no time for words, I needed time to express my feelings clearly.

Even silence is too loud a word, being a word.

“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” Edward Hopper 

I needed water, pigment, line, page, flow, peace.

This act which I had considered an escape, I find myself sharing with students in my work.

This art, far from being irrelevant to scholarship, is intimately connected to my research.

This is what I come back to time and time again here.

It is to care enough for oneself, one's becoming that one is fully present in the here and now.

This, I discover is what "Les maux des mots..." was all about.

It is about freedom.

Freedom from definition, from category, from measure, from market, from seductive hits of likes, friends, impact rating, elite validation.

“I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.” 
Vincent van Gogh

So many words in a struggle to express...

I felt so much for Paul Prinsloo recently.

"Despite my broken compass, I walk, questioning. Like Sandra de la Loza and Eduardo Molinari, I am overwhelmed by the complexities of the world I live, work and breathe in. I am looking for ways to consciously inhabit my situation, to find a language to speak about, but also speak to my situation. I craft daily ‘to do’ lists and scribbles on serviettes in an attempt to archive my history, my situation.

In an act of archivist witchcraft I dance naked in this blog, to “unlock and reveal obscured narratives and hidden ghosts” in my life as scholar as archival material. The opening of the archive to my scholarly identity, despair and praxis, is an intentional ritual of scholarly witchcraft, of ‘cruel optimism’ as I shake my compass, and keep walking.

Fear is a broken compass.

Fear is medication that does not work anymore.

Fear is convulsions at night.

Fear is not-knowing and to continue walking"

"And yet, despite the unraveling, and the smell of drowning,  I have to figure a way out of being attached to the very situation or life that is causing the drowning."

We have lost our bearings. There is hope in that. https://t.co/XF6N6NzM1q

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) April 4, 2019

This is hope Paul:

“Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck, your profession is what you're put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.” 
Vincent van Gogh

Spinning yarns, following twine.

Now I come to think about it, I see hope everywhere, when not many days ago all I saw was despair.

I see hope in Paul's despair.

How can you not despair when confronted by the ugliness of human cruelty, the avarice of market stall holders, the insanity of  masters of war, the measurement of "learning", the simplification of the wonder and complexity of nature,  the idiocracy of academia, the kleptocracy of those few who seek power over the many?

If forgiveness is all the hope we can cling to, my rage remains for what is done, will be done, to what is being done to those who deserve better.

Anger is an energy.

No Future? Rise UP!

I see hope, beauty and nature in small acts of kindness, the eyes of children, in the generous comments, small stories and images shared freely by my friends and mentors.

Snow squall inspired by @ggevalt #clmooc #marchdoodle #doodlewashmarch2019 #watercolorpainting #landscapepainting pic.twitter.com/2WU7gz1sCq

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) March 21, 2019

"A picture is a poem without words." Horace

I see hope in those who seek escape, in those who demonstrate, who remonstrate, who weep.

If I have been silent here, it means that I am, like Paul,

"overwhelmed by the complexities of the world I live, work and breathe in. I am looking for ways to consciously inhabit my situation, to find a language to speak about, but also speak to my situation."

Words just won't do.

I am present in silence, but I refuse to be a by-stander.

I people a painting of a deserted beach with my children looking out to sea.

While just across the channel, over the page, I draw the children of others drowning.

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” Pablo Picasso 

I put together a collage of this, my silent diary.

There, in a struggle for meaning, for forgiveness, for grace, are clumsy touches of sense: feelings of joy, of sadness, loss and despair, glimpses of fleeting beauty....glimmers of hope.