the eye of the artist 3

I’m not sure what the circumstances were, we weren’t all that religious, especially my parents, but at some time we drove out to some Methodist resort area. It was filled with all these, cottages I guess, I remember noticing how tiny they were, but then I was used to the classic Chicago bungalow. I had a similar experience when I first moved down to Champaign, how tiny were the houses, and they seemed to be built of wood, and they were all different from each other, what manner of city was this?

I think it was some kind of picnic type thing. Did you ever go to a company picnic? My grandfather used to work for Victor Gasket and they had a picnic every year that we got to go to and it was just fabulous. They had these tickets that came on this big roll, and it seems like they just gave them away so I don’t know why they bothered, but you could drink pop and eat ice cream and whatever else they had until you got sick. And they had events, all kinds of races for the kids where you could win prizes. The races were divided by ages, 5 and 6, 7 and 8, and so on. I remember my mother commenting darkly after we had lost some race about how the winners were older than they were supposed to be for that, and how unfair that was. But then the very next race she told me to enter in a younger category than I should have been in. Well, I’m sure that never would have happen at a Methodist picnic.

But what I’m getting to is somewhere on that festive Methodist holiday, some guy was giving a sermon, natch, and one of the things he said, and this was a little like the moment when my watercolor teacher told me about the eyes. What he said, pointing to the woods, was there is no straight line out there. This had something to do with the greatness of god, but I was stuck on the fact of no straight line. How could that be? But I looked and I looked, and there were no straight lines.

Wow what a thing. What a difference between manmade and a natural object. The manmade objects are so much simpler, mostly straight lines, and whatever curves they have are simple ones, whereas natural objects, after following a few simple rules (trunk on the bottom, leaves on top) go every which way.

Manmade objects all started out as ideas, we’ll put the windows here and the roof will have an angle of thirty degrees, so they are easy to draw, but trees, how come the branches separate here and not there, why does a puff of leaves stick out here and not there? There seems to be no pattern to it, but really there is, and that’s what you have to understand before you can draw a tree. When you draw a house you draw a few straight lines and put them in the right places and that is that. But the tree, you can’t draw every branch, every leaf. You have to study it a bit, the branches seem to fork every so often, the leaves have a pattern for how often they puff out, how often there is a gap, but even that is not perfectly followed. There is a sort of randomness thrown in, sometimes the branch doesn’t fork where most of them do, sometimes where there should be a puff, there is a gap. In the end it is all too complicated to understand rationally, you have to go into your subconscious and pull something out, and even then you know it’s not exactly right, but it’s close enough so that people looking at it will believe it is trees, and that’s as close as you need to get.

And it’s kind of funny, how does the viewer know that it looks like trees? He has never given a moments thought to where the branches separate etc. Yet somehow he will know when the trees look like trees and not a bunch of lines on paper.

I’m going to step out of my expertise here and assume that a woodsman like yourself can tell an oak from a hickory at a glance, whereas to a slicker like myself they all look alike. If I asked you how can you tell the difference, you might say this one is taller or this one has skinnier leaves, but you are just using those words to talk to me, you already knew the way you know somebody’s face without knowing offhand if they have a high forehead or a Roman nose.

Around Christmas time my neighbor hangs stockings on her door and she fills them with those little peppermint canes which she expects people to take, and I do because I like to drop them into my coffee cup and then when I get close to the bottom I get that peppermint sweetness. But they come in little cellophane bags and I didn’t have my scissors at hand, so I was poking at the cellophane with my pen knife. Being used to dull kitchen knives, I poked too hard, and the tiny sharp blade went through the cellophane and into my finger.