this knowing “you are on to something good” is exactly where the artist meets the scientist. only that in general the scientist will be patient and disciplined enough to acquire the skills necessary to actually explore and eventually understand that unfounded suspicion and the artist will just take a cursory inventory of the idea’s implications and then take to the type writer (or the canvas) like the monkey, ready to blindly shell out the sequence of letters to actually and surprisingly eloquently prove that “it” was always known.
She had been busy herself lately, working on an oversized, unstretched canvas that was spread over the floor in the room that in other houses would have been the living room but in our house was an art space and a library. Right now you couldn’t even enter it without risking to step into wet paint. Plinius had learned to avoid the canvas, just like everybody else he balanced around it on the outer edges.
When he was a kitten still he had managed to get his fur and his paws coated with oil paint a couple of times, some of the paintings dating back to his childhood show his then tiny paw prints (the adult Plinius left raccoon-foot sized prints in the garden). He had been thoroughly disgusted by the experience, furiously licking the Tyrian Purple and Cadmium Red spots on his ginger tabby fur. Strangely enough, as a grown cat he enjoyed finding a place as close to the wet paint as possible.
English: pigment red 108 cadmium (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There he sat down, often on the stretch of canvas that wasn’t actually part of the painting, but that my mother uses to clean brushes and that she calls the “annotative margin”. He purred his fat Plinius purr while he was watching the loaded brushes rush over the canvas. Cats like to live their lives in the margins and on the edges, I guess.
If I was to choose one drawing that I liked particularly in the flood of drawings of those nights it would have to be this pretty simple one. There were some much more sophisticated pieces, but this one, conceived towards the end of the 12 nights, is playful and relaxed in a way that convinced me that in the end there was a point to my practice. I wish I could hold on to that for a while longer, at least when I am drawing.
Art & Writing 