My husband was recently bemoaning his seemingly endless project list.
It got me to thinking that, while superficially I too would love to check everything off my long string of to-do’s, in all honesty I don’t believe it’s a finish line either one of us really wants to cross, mainly because…then what? Seen from a certain perspective, always having something in the queue may be the secret that propels us forward.

Daisy Barrette   ©2022 Elizabeth Fram, Ink and watercolor on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches

I think the practice of making art is similar. If we’re doing it right, every day is a stretch leading to another stretch, and then another, and so on. It may seem like we want to get “there”, but do we really? Does “there” even exist? If every time I sat down to make something it just flowed out with ease, my guess is I’d get bored. Keep in mind that achieving a level of facility isn’t the same thing. For me at least, the challenges I set for myself and the resulting growth are perhaps more than half the point of doing the work in the first place. One could always use another 10,000 hours.

As I’ve been adding portraits to my sketchbook this month, I keep chipping away at assorted goals. My current “there” is to simplify, to make a conscious effort to rein myself in despite my love for detail and my desire to pack in lots of visual information. The big question is how does one do that while depicting a human’s individuality and alluding to what lies beneath the surface?

Along the way I’m discovering my own vocabulary, but I continue to look for pointers from other artists who seem to have figured out this mystery of distilling an image down to its essence. Joe Ciardiello sets a great example. His portraits capture a likeness and plenty of additional information with a relatively spare, but oh-so-expressive line. Often he fleshes the image out with just enough color to bring it further life, and/or offsetting that warmth with rich passages of black ink. Without fuss, his drawings seem to convey the soul of his subject. I’d love to be able to do that.

© Joe Ciardiello, Jimmy Smith

If we still lived in the mid-Atlantic, I would have enjoyed going to see Ciardiello’s recent exhibit “A Fistful of Drawings” at ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ. However, I was able to listen to him talk about the show with Gil Roth on The Virtual Memories Show podcast. It was fascinating to hear him describe his thought processes and the technicalities of his approach, nevermind how heartening it was to recognize similarities between our working methods. He too begins each portrait with a subject’s eye, finding it key to a successful start. We share a preference for drawing older models: he says the lines of their faces reflect a deeper story — I just find the topography of an older face more interesting in general. And perhaps most reassuring of all, he freely admits to continuing to make many mistakes.
What could be more inspiring than that?

Hood   ©2022 Elizabeth Fram, Ink and watercolor, 8.5 x 11 inches