A drive to document
I’ve been feeling a drive to document things in my life. I’ve always loved tracking what I’m reading and watching and listening to, but this also party comes from a study I did of the great children’s book maker and fine artist Wanda Gág.
She wrote everything in diaries consistently over her entire life — how her life influenced her work and the other way around. She also conducted amazing experiments with materials and noted her theories on creative work. Like this is her diary entry about one piece she made called “The Forge.”
This lithograph was done on zinc with brush-and-tusche and some crayon. Its texture consists of thousands of tiny strokes, and it took me several weeks to do it.
The subject is an old forge near Carversville, Pennsylvania. I was excited by the varied form of the tools and hand-wrought objects in it, many of which had obviously not been moved for a long time and had fallen into mellow patterns. Almost they were static elements in the picture, but not quite—the dynamic zigzag of the saws created a center of energy which seemed to me to shoot out and by its force compel the more passive forms to take part in its rhythm. I set myself the problem of controlling these forces: to keep them moving without letting them flow out of the picture, to build them up into sort of a cadence.”
From the rough, yet detailed drawing made on the spot, I went on to several more, striving each time for a more compact and compelling organization, and establishing the final values. In my work I do not rely on happy accidents; I know beforehand exactly what I want the final result to be and work consciously toward that goal. In this case, after solving all the problems to the best of my ability, I made a final drawing on tracing paper, traced its outlines on the reverse side with sanguine crayon, and transferred it to the zinc.
With the transferred lines as guides, I drew the main outlines very lightly on the zinc, using a #5 Korn lithographic pencil.
I warmed a small dish, rubbed Lemercier tusche around its inside, and added water to make a fairly dense wash. This was applied with a watercolor brush wherever crisp rich outlines or small solid masses were needed.
Next, the values were built up very gradually all over the picture with Korn lithographic crayon (#3 when the room was cool, #4 when warm).
Then came the ticklish part; heightening the darks with the tusche wash without creating a soggy black mass. This is especially risky on zinc, for, whereas such sections can be lightened up on stone by scraping, no corrections can be made on zinc. I use a dry-brush technique in such a way as to leave a faint sparkle of zinc showing through.
Finally, I like to keep the lithograph around for at least a week "for observation," and for last minute touches. Studying it by twilight or looking at it in a mirror are valuable aids in this respect.”
Isn’t that fascinating?
I wonder how much more she learned precisely because she took the time to process her work in her journals. Would she have been able to achieve all that she achieved without them? I hear her saying NO as she herself said she couldn’t live without her diary.
How much more progress would I make if I took the time to document my processes and what I’m learning along the way?
Well, I’m determined to find out.
I’ve made time at the beginning and end of my work day to absorb what I’m learning by reading, listening, and doing. I’ll share them on this blog, and I’m also going to try the whole YouTube thing. Part of me feels embarrassed about this desire. I have no idea if I’ll like this or even be good at it. But I’m always trying to follow my intuition, and this is what my intuition is telling me right now. Embarrassing as it is.
So this year is my year of documentation.
Here we go 2025! I’m going to document the h-e-double-hockey-sticks out of you. We’ll see what we discover :)