The theatre of Steampunk

What is Steampunk? It’s a hard question to answer.

The  underlying story/fantasy behind Steampunk is a future that never was, full of cool clothing, sprockets and gears, wheels, and mechanical engines. It’s theatre, pure theatre.

Airships powered by magical steam ply the skies. Horse-drawn buggies plod along next to whizzing locomotives. Science thrusts satin-skirted ladies (full of buxom adventure) into the arms of mad scientists. Gentlemen (and women) adventurers explore new worlds;  they study new species of plants, animals, and people.

Steampunk is  a place where people can have wings.

My favorite part of the whole convention (besides the costumes) was the “radio show” put on by the folks at Studio Foglio, publishing house for and creators of the online comic,  Girl Genius. What fun that was! It was sort of a reader’s theater. I love radio shows, but this was even more fun to see the folks doing the lines. What a bunch of hams. .

Seattle SteamCon a blast and a half

It’s taken me a while to recover from the Seattle  SteamCon, a goofy, good natured gathering of space pirates, adventurers, Edwardian ladies, and lots and lots of people wearing goggles.

I’ve never been to one of these conventions before; in fact, I only just recently learned about this sub-genre of a costume party for grownups. It’s been going on at least 20 years, but, well, let’s just say I live a sheltered, nay, a never-get-out-of-of-my-cave life.

I’ve long been a fan of the ultimate Christmas dress-up festival, the Great Christmas Dickens Christmas Fair in South San Francisco. I love the breathtaking costumes and the emphasis on turning the enormous barn of the Cow Palace into the streets of long-ago London.

The Steampunk convention, on the other hand, seems to be all about costumes, however loosely defined the time period might be. At the hotel, attendees sailed through the lobby in full Edwardian suits, Lolita dresses, flapper clothes, or just a collection of gears and feathers built around a corset and skirt. It’s a full weekend of clothing fantasy, and it’s immensely fun to sit and watch the costumes. And watch the reactions of the unsuspecting, mugglish hotel room guests as they disembark from their airport shuttles into a sea of Steampunks.

SteamPunk Seattle here we come

I’m a slow starter, okay? I only recently learned about Steampunk. So this weekend I’m heading up to Seattle to take my niece to the Seattle SteamCon. I don’t know what it’ll be like, but there should be some dandy sketching, and some interesting artwork.

Medieval art and me

The virgin looks great, but who told the chancellor this haircut was a good idea?

I am afflicted with art attention drift. After years of loving 19th-century realism, suddenly, after a first visit to the cloisters in New York City, I’ve become enamored of Medieval art. And not the later stuff, when artists were working out the rules of perspective and the craft of realism and coming up with beautiful renditions of the Virgin and baby Jesus blessing some guy with a weird haircut.

No, I like the early work, the cartoony figures, the lack of perspective, and the patterns. Lots of patterns. Because if they couldn’t draw a figure worth a damn, at least they could make beautiful patterns, compulsively covering church walls and painted parchment with animals, people, flowers, leaves, stalks, and bibs and bobs and swirling loop de loops.

James Gurney says this is called Horror vacui, the fear of open space. I don’t know if folks in the middle ages were particularly fearful of open spaces; I’m thinking it might have been more a function of some rich guy saying, “hey, Duke Weligsburdof in the duchy next door has half a wall that’s got paintings all over it. Be cool to have one of those too. I’ve got an empty castle wall here, and the son of the serf in cottage #5 is a pretty good painter.  Let’s fill this wall with pictures so it’s even more chock-a-block full of weird creatures and lovely maidens than Weli’s wall. Then we’ll have a dinner party, and we can all look at it. That’ll make Weli green with envy.”

It was a sure-fire way to impress the guests. In those days, painted, carved, or cast images were rare; there was little to look at other than the pile of garbage outside the south castle window. And church services were no doubt interminably long with that guy with the funny haircut droning on and on and on in Latin. All those intricate portals and tapestries, the crenelated baptismal fonts, the fancy work and bible stories in stone must have been like television for the Medieval man or woman, entertaining their brains while fueling them with stories and propaganda.

Today we are awash with images. We’ve got so many images, so much clutter (in the 21st century, society at large is suffering from horror vacui) that it’s a sign of wealth to have spacious houses empty of all but some uncomfortable furniture and an ugly rug. But nearly every household in America has a television. Sometimes every room in an American house contains a television.

And I suppose, like the complicated designs of Medieval art, television fills a vacuum in folks’ lives.

The practice of music and art

Pastel pencil on colored paper

This is a small drawing I made of my friend Cyndy. It’s from a photo taken as she was sitting around a campfire, playing tunes with a group of musicians.

I know Cyndy’s present teacher. He’s told me that she’s the kind of student a teacher loves to have. She really thinks about the music she plays, and she makes him think about it too. And she practices!

She’s passionate about her fiddle in the way most of us are passionate about a new romantic partner. But, come to think about it, I know a lot of musicians who are married to their instrument, and playing music is simply part of their everyday experience. I also know artists who feel the same way about their art. (I’m torn between the two. Do I play tunes, or do I draw? Tough question, that.)

Sometimes playing music or making art becomes a stale thing, or a stressful thing, fraught with needs and cravings that block the joy of our passions. But if we really think about what we’re doing, and lose ourselves in the process, suddenly the work becomes play, and we amaze ourselves at our success.

Shannon Heaton, one of my favorite Irish flute players, has a terrific blog at Whistle and Drum called The Inner Game of Irish Music about practicing the music. She’s talking about Irish music, but she could be talking about drawing, painting, old time music, classical music, dancing, or even just plain-old, everyday work.

Framing the figure

This drawing I completed after visiting the Vermeer Milkmaid exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What luck to be in the city while the Met had a special exhibit about Vermeer. I was able to study the paintings in real time, and try to understand what made them work.

I wish I could live in that museum (I loved From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler when I was a kid), but, alas, they will not let me. So whenever I visit New York, I spend as much time in the museum as possible, sketchbook in hand, trying to infuse my brain with master works. I don’t always understand what I’m learning while I’m at the museum, but somehow it ferments in my brain and bubbles to my conscious mind later.

One of the things that I noticed in Vermeer’s work was how he often framed the figure with geometric shapes. In A Woman Asleep, he frames the face of the young woman with a gray square. He often uses a wall hanging of a map as a geometric element that frames the subject—look at Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, Woman with a Lute, and Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in Vermeer, The Essential Vermeer is a terrific online resource.) But it really didn’t make a big dent in the attention I was paying to Vermeer’s color and brush technique.

But I must have filed this bit of framing arcana on top of one of the piles of information cluttering my mind, because it surfaced later that evening. After a three hour stretch at the museum, I tiredly took the train back to New Jersey where we were staying. I sat across the aisle from this young man who was trying to sleep, and took out my sketchbook to capture his lanky pose.

Suddenly I realized that it wasn’t his face (I could scarcely see it), or his figure that attracted my attention, but rather, the way he was framed by the dark of the window and the back of the seat. Light bulbs went off in my mind. This was what Vermeer was talking about when he use a shape to frame his focal point!

It’s a simple sketch, but it pleases me because it reminds me that I’ve discovered a new way of seeing.

Green

Rondout Creek in Accord, New York

Coming from Central California, I expect the landscape to be brown. Except for a brief green period in the spring that’s stunningly brilliant, our hills and valleys are mostly shades of furry-animal brown.

The late-summer colors in New York astound me. Everything is so green. Every shade of green I can think of, and some I can’t. Even with fall color beginning to brighten the deciduous forest, it’s the green that overwhelms my eyes. To a brain used to bare brown hills with only a scattering of dark green oak trees, this riot of foliage across the entire green spectrum is exhilarating. My brain is turning somersaults over the colors: yellow green, apple-green, sap-green, viridian, turquoise, blue-green, orange-green, even red-green.

I’m not much of a landscape painter, although I do like to try to take down the vistas. But before I tackled this landscape, I needed to figure out a green palette, instead of  simply relying on my default sap green paint (a mixture of blue and yellow).

My first attempt at a color chart was haphazard, but I learned something from splashing randomly. Soon (when I’m not on vacation), I intend to make a more thoughtful color chart.

Visiting Olana and the Hudson River

While in upstate New York, we managed a quick visit to Olana, the castle-like home of Frederic Edwin Church, the 19th century landscape painter.

I’ve long admired the Hudson River School of painting, a style that celebrated nature, and especially the landscapes of the New World. During the 19th century it was hot stuff, but it fell out of favor when those darned impressionists brought their pastel-colored personal impressions to the art world. Fauvism (along with modernism) has ruled the art world for the last 100 years, but I think people are rediscovering the realist painters of the past.

Church was one of the most famous of the Hudson River School, known not just for his famous iceberg paintings, he but also paintings of the dark brooding Catskill forests and luminous skies reflecting in the shining Hudson River. Alive when artists could attain rock star status, Church was a box office draw. He also came from money, and had wealth at his fingertips.  So he built a beautiful, over-ornamented home on a hill top overlooking the river valley.

Olana is a sort of homage to a Victorian-era Persian fantasy. There are Middle-Eastern motifs everywhere you look, right down to fake-Arabic script on the wall panels. Once breathtakingly colorful (Glittery silver and gold decorative painting on the door! Bright yellow drapes! Burgundy and green velvet furniture!), the colors have faded to the muted tones we associate with old photographs.

I have to admit, it’s a little like visiting the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. It’s a bit over the top, and it’s hard to imagine people actually living and visiting amidst the ornamentation. But how prejudice against decoration are my 21st-century eyes, having been trained and honed by the naked lines and sparsity of mid-20th century modern?

The Victorian era was all about ornamentation, and Olana is a tribute to that design ethic. But more than that, the house is a series of frames for the surrounding landscape. Church wanted the house to frame his beloved Hudson River Valley, and every window and door opens on some incredible view (Unfortunately, a storm obscured the vistas when we were there, and so we only had more intimate views). Even the ornamental balustrades frame views in miniature.

It’s something I need to learn more about, this framing of the landscape. Too often I begin drawing before I’ve properly figured out the design of the landscape I’m trying to paint. Then I am overwhelmed by the whole thing and my painting (and my mood) falls apart.

Llamas in New York

To be honest, one of the only reasons I chose to stay at Clove Cottages (near High Falls in upstate New York) was because of the llamas. They have two, Sugar and Cocoa. If they’re curious that day, and you look interesting, they’ll come up to the fence and whiffle softly over your face. They don’t much like petting.

The cottages are very sweet, although a little funky. But what can you expect from buildings that are nearly 80 years old? The floors slope, they smell of old wood, and they are thoroughly charming.

The llamas have been great fun to draw.

Vacation journaling in a sardine can

This was done rapidly in pencil on a packed cross-continental flight for New York. You can barely draw on a flight like this. There’s no elbow room at all; there’s barely room enough to get your pencil and sketchbook out. There’s not a centimeter of extra space for your sketching arm.

Airlines have been packing flights full these days and I guess to make up for the relatively inexpensive airfare, we had to pay by sitting arsehole to elbow with the 169 passengers that a 737-800 seats.

2 bathrooms for those of us in steerage…I mean, coach. The passengers in first class had their own bathroom. Hidden behind a drawn felt curtain, they might have been engaging in the kind of rich people-on-an-airplane debauchery that those of us mashed into the rest of the airplane could only fantasize about. Like getting up and going to the bathroom when they needed to, rather than  planning ahead as if going on safari.

But in the back of the plane, our 2 bathrooms were fair busy. And 20 minutes after the flight attendants bustled through with the refreshment cart, doling out fizzy drinks and weak coffee, it got worse.  Imagine roughly 140 people hearing nature’s call to action in the same 10-minute period. At times, the gotta-go line stretched more than half-way down the aisle.

And that aisle was narrow. Exceedingly so. And here, dear reader, I’d like to make a plea.

People! When you’re waiting in line for the potty on an extremely crowded airplane—and believe me, I know it’s exhausting. I’ve been in that line too. But I don’t care how tired you are—please don’t rest your huge squishy bottom on my shoulder. Don’t rest it on anybody’s shoulder. Especially if said bottom is clad in a worn pink sweatsuit.

And if you do, be aware that some of the folks you’ve rested on might not be as polite as I am.  Some might be inveterate sketchers,  and upon seeing  that expanse of faded pink jersey, might possibly be overcome with the urge to sketch. The person on whom you’re leaning might just whip out their Tombow brush pen and sketch a little scene on your rear end.