I often hear artists use the phrase “making marks” in the context of getting started. It is something to DO rather than just sit and think. Good things can come out of it and at the very least, SOMETHING comes out of it. Just making marks takes the pressure off of feeling the need to create a whole painting or something good. It is in this exploration that, sometimes, a finished painting CAN arrive.
The first time I really became aware of just letting things happen was Flora Bowley’s course Creative Revolution E-Course. This is her whole thing – intuition, marks, layers. She believes in putting down layers of paint, drawings and even words and being completely ok if, in the next layer, they get painted over. I still remember the first time I got to the second layer and being very attached a bird-like image that emerged and not wanting to let it go. I did take a picture of it and let it go but man, that was tough. What if I hated what came next?! What if I regretted covering the bird?!
It’s easy to see from that moment that I am not great at “playing”.
I freely admit that just sitting down and waiting to see what happens does not come naturally. I prefer to have some idea of what I want to create even though having that idea in my head is what actually holds me back.
It turns out, I am a perfectionist and so the fear of not creating exactly what’s in my head, because I “know” it will never look like the vision in my head, stops anything from happening. I would likely be better off playing and this is where making marks comes into… well… play.
I have also read that some artists believe that each person’s marks are unique. That if you sit down and allow the marks to happen, they are intuitive. You won’t necessarily be conscious of what they will be. These marks are unique to you, your own language and expression. This sounds an awful lot like handwriting, which is unique to each one of us. In fact, there is a whole field dedicated to that – graphology.
Graphology – that’s a thing?
Indeed! Graphology is the analysis of handwriting in an attempt to determine the writer’s personality traits. It is considered “pseudoscience” because while you may be able to show a particular signature is inconsistent with previous versions, being able to determine personality traits from handwriting is questionable.
It is cool in theory, though. Each of us/our handwriting has a specific slant, roundness or lack of roundness, which could be used in court to determine the legitimacy of a signature. In fact, the comparison of signatures to determine if magic was used appeared most recently in an episode of the Wheel of Time series.
Odd fact about me: When I was in 5th grade, I changed my S’s to match my teacher’s in grade school because I loved the way hers swooped. I’m sure at this point, though, they would be different because I am different and have over 20 years of writing since then. As I still write by hand quite a bit, I know that my letter N’s have changed quite a bit.
But do I have marks when I paint?
It turns out, I do.
Since I am in my head a lot and not one to just play, I wasn’t sure I had any kind of signature marks.
As I went through some of my work, though, there it was. A thick cross-hatching that is in the background of a lot of my art journals. This is usually how I use up extra paint, by creating backgrounds for another piece. Since I don’t consider that playing, I never thought of them as marks unique to me.
In all of this thinking about marks, I realized I also have a cross-hatching doodle that I do down the sides of pages when I am thinking.
And as it turns out, a finished product of the results of these marks is hanging on the wall in a bedroom in my own house. It is interesting to me that it is not my favorite – abstracts are not my go-to for art but seem to be for my partner. He likes two of the most abstract things I’ve done!
