Fast warm ups often produce fun and energy, on the paper right where you want it. It is a good way to put the muse on alert, solicit the help of your art guides and convince your subconscious and other invisible sources that you are now serious about getting on with painting.
Playing with Artist Studio iPad ap
This was my first sketch, all done with my fingers on the iPad2 surface. Taps change the color and pen size and other features.
The experience is surprisingly satisfying. It feels very much like finger painting, and I find the result expressive of my mood, which is what I have always liked most about doing my kind of art, the people’s art, art therapy, play, expressive art.
I have ordered a stylus, a kind of pen or brush sensitive to the surface of the i-Pad. I understand I can also do doodle-cartooning and screen capture a movie of the moves the hand makes in its creation. THAT could be fun!
Hand with the Blue Agate Eye
 |
| This blue agate eye is very ancient and was given to me by the late Tibetan dream yoga master Tarab Tulku. October 22, 2007 |
Attunement Intention Hand
So Many Bright Stones on Fort Ebey Beach
 |
| July 9, 2011, painting with Cheryl, writing with Peter at Ft. Ebey State Park on Whidby Island |
So many bright stones turn in shoreline surf
that when I close my eyes at night, they still
shift, roll, shine in the water sliding down
the cave wall of my sleep.
In half lit trance I gather again green jasper, slick,
hard as jade. White quartz, rounded into thousands
of small bird eggs, is beach punctuation
in the grammar of the shore.
Once again, in dream I said, “Pile the clearest agates
on my grave when I go, fresh
from the tumbler of the sea.
Find them for me here, on this
sunny, specific strand of gravel beach,
headland to headland, where
even the oldest cliffs dissolve
to polished agates moved by waves.”
 |
| The Bluff Trail entices us from headland to headland |
 |
| The wind driven shapes of ancient trees |
 |
| Art lessons on the picnic table; Cheryl’s beautiful soft washes |
 |
| my paintbrush overloaded with all the colors of the evening sky |
Sandy Brown Jensen
Photos by Peter Jensen
Art lessons by Cheryl R. Long
Spring, As Usual
tempts me to the barbeque hootch
in the back yard, traps me there
between the drum of rain
on the plastic roof
and the smoke of charring steaks.
Six minutes per side of beef;
nothing to do but sit
like a neighborhood cat
in the canvas chair, spatula
in one hand; bubbles
in the other. For the first time
I notice how our backyard is like
being inside a green glass jar,
how the wind shakes the pear and
cherry blossoms in wind spirals of petals,
how flocks of kinglets with their high,
distant voices never stop commenting
on their aerial world and the worth
of bud burst.
–Sandy Brown Jensen
Last April 2011 sometime
Notes retrieved from my journal
Heceta Beach Rain Agates
 |
| Heceta Beach Rain Agates |
Time folds green over
each line of dissolving surf.
 |
| When I was a child, the sky was this soft with rain. |
 |
|
Headlands reared up dark
as horses over rushing creeks
entering the sea
like me
after a long run
through clear cuts
& old growth red cedar.
|
 |
|
Pelicans like synchronous
pterodactyls circle
the sanctuary of birds.
|
I have always found myself
in Heceta’s black sea cave,
walls streaked down acid green
with algae; white guano splatter.
Boom of surf and now
as then
in & out
of the surf line of time,
one agate is mine.
Today,
translucent blue like
old glass,
layered in the matrix
of hard sediment.
This agate is about time
and the Pacific surf.
childhood and the Cascades.
Vultures hung out for the night
sway on their roost tree
like heavy, dark jewels,
shoulders rounded into themselves:
All my agates are about life.
All my agates are about death.
Some agates are left for a life of looking
on the rich clam flats and pools
that rise and fall between the tides.
-Sandy Jensen
June 12, 2011
Happy birthday to Cheryl and Lisle!
Paul Martinson, Painter of Birds and Dreams
 |
|
| Limbo of the Mother Venus by Paul Martinson 2009 Watercolor, watercolor pencil and gouache on paper |
My friend Maria Middlestead purchased this painting and sent me the link to Paul Martinson’s work. Martinson is a famous painter from New Zealand specializing originally in scientific bird illustrations.
 |
| Two Black and White Creatures in Trance and Sleep by Paul Martinson 2007 Watercolor, watercolor pencil and gouache on paper |
 |
| Live Trance Performance by Paul Martinson 2009 Acrylic and watercolor on paper |
Later in his life (and this interesting material from his gallery website): “The artist acquainted himself, at a rudimentary level, with Freud’s concept of the “free flow of ideas” from the subconscious. This idea, with its basis in psychoanalysis, fundamentally informed Psychic Automatism, a method of expression predominantly influencing art and literature in the third decade of the twentieth century.
 |
| The Destination of Oblivion by Paul Martinson 2009 Watercolor, watercolor pencil and gouache on paper |
Psychic Automatism subsequently formed the basis of Andre Breton Surrealist’s Manifesto of 1924. The Manifesto claimed that, “Pure psychic automatism…(meant)…thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.”
 |
| The Creatures Must Sleep by Paul Martinson 2009 Watercolor, watercolor pencil and gouache on paper |
While Martinson acknowledges that it is impossible to give oneself over entirely to the “flow of information” from the subconscious uncensored by the intellect, he attempts to work by intuition alone without censoring on the basis of reason, scale and anatomical accuracy.
“Automatic drawing for me is a personal thing, but has in common with its origins in the Surrealist movement, a “sanctioned” right to draw spontaneously without conscious reference to normality, morality and social taboos…it is an attempt to allow a ” free flow” of imagery and ideas as a painter. I feel such freedom is an important aspect of personal expression.”
 |
| The Meaning of Mother by Paul Martinson 2009 Watercolor, watercolor pencil and gouache on paper
|
 |
| The Aquatic Trance Trio
2009 Watercolor, watercolor pencil, gold foil and gouache on paper
|
For this artist, it is as if his subconscious is filled to overflowing with myriad experiences, thoughts and ideas around the depiction of birds, both extinct and existing, and they will make their presence felt. Martinson believes we are therefore, at any time the sum of our entire experience which includes on one hand the connections we make throughout our life with all other creatures on the planet, even fleetingly (this comprises the great range of relationships we make), everyday experience, and the swirling, interlocking personal reality of our subconscious, and all that it comprises.
Therefore, at the end of a decade of painting birds objectively they continue to dominate current work, although in contexts far removed from their purely representational origins – often in isolation, but more often, with a Venus figure.” (Source: Sanderson Contemporary Art Online Gallery)
 |
| The Creep of Cats by Paul Martinson 2009 Acrylic on board |
As a viewer, I respond on two levels to Martinson’s work. I respond as a birdwatcher, as an admirer of fine bird illustration to his scientific renderings. I respond as a poet and a dreamer to the staged psychodramas caught in the halflight between worlds of waking and sleeping. Each painting is an illustration from a story I seem to be telling myself that is too deep and too important to lose.
Seed Pot
I also had a dream last night – you were whispering to me in a secretive way that you had an incredible new project.
Nest Building
Nest Building
A soft brown wren pecks for tiny seeds
strewn from yesterday’s weeding.
On closer look I see
she collects not seeds but tiny dried grass –
slight as a thought.
A beak full of bristling grass,
mustachioed she tilts her head,
making me laugh.
Then she lifts off, flies west toward home
to line her silky nest.
April 24, 2011
