Ends and Odds: The Ravings of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Part Two of "How Abstract Painters Help Me Survive Old Age'.

   How Abstract Painters help Me Survive Old Age - Part Two by Dave Jaffe.




    One talented visual artist summed up my visual art this way. "Mister," she once said, "all you want to do is copy." I can only admit she was right. Nearly every day after I wake up I read for  an hour or so . Then I thumb through a book on modern  art. In this book or a second one I have, I search for an abstract painting by one of the American painters that are grouped under the title of 'Abstract Expressionists'.
   Usually I hone in on paintings done years ago by artists like Philip Guston, Mark Rothko or Franz Kline. Then I paint or draw a variation of one of these artists' paintings. I often  use coloured pencils that I can easily change with an eraser. In the second stage of my art work I look at some of the photographs I've stored away in files, or I browse through books on photography that sit on my bookshelf. I select a photo and then do a line drawing over the abstract image. The drawing is based on the photo I'vec hosen. Yet I also change the photo from the original as I draw or paint it.
      As that visual artist also told me years ago, "You don't have an original bone in your body." Once again this lady hit the nail one the head. Yet how easy it is to do a drawing with my method. Years and years ago when I first started drawing with coloured pencils it would take me hours to complete a poor drawing. I would go to parks on Vancouver's west side and if the sun shone, sit down in the park and try to capture the scene around me.
    I nearly always failed and after a few tries at doing a picture of part of the park,  I was ready to give up drawing with coloured pencils. Then I came across a book on Andy Warhol, the famous painter of Campbell soup cans and many other things. As I read about Warhol's life I realized that most of his paintings were based on other people's photographs. "Uh, I dunno," Warhol once told  a journalist who kept asking Warhol why so many of his paintings and silk screened works dealt with death and destruction.
     I don't know the reason for Warhol's fascination with electric chairs, car crashes, paintings of a grieving Jacqueline Kennedy and the by then dead Marilyn Monroe. Yet I quickly flashed on to the fact that Warhols's  work was based on other people's photos. "Why can't I do the same thing?" I asked myself and quickly concluded that I could. Then I realized that I still needed to find a painting style. A few years ago I came across the paintings of the abstract expressionists, and started to do works based on their styles.
     Then one day a few months ago, I realized what I had to do. As other writers have pointed out, it was the "Aha moment" when it seemed as if a light bulb had gone off in my head. Now I realized that doing drawings based on other people's works was really easy. I've been following this method now for over three months. It usually works out very well.