STEAL FROM THE BEST: Klee exercise

A friend posted this watercolor by Paul Klee on Facebook the other day:

Once emerged from the gray of night, paul klee (1918)

The title of the piece is Once Emerged from the Gray of Night, and it immediately fascinated me. I’m a huge fan of Klee anyway, and this one really resonated. I decided we could take a break from worrying about William Blake’s Inn or re-establishing Lacuna Group (our old theatre collaborative) and its website and play with literally STEALING FROM THE BEST.

As I say in the chapter on STEAL FROM THE BEST, reverse-engineer your heroes. Examine their strategies, their media, their forms — and then use them yourself.

Back in the day — and even now — apprentice/student artists would be charged with setting up in front of a great painting and directly copying it. The idea was that by replicating a Raphael, the student would learn techniques that they could then use to create their own art.

We’re going to do something similar. I won’t be copying the Klee square by square, but I am going to make my own version to see what I can learn.

First up: watercolor paper, 9” x 11.5”

Divide into 1" squares.

I think I shall leave the 1/2” strip at the top, like Klee’s, with something scribbled up there. Otherwise, I shall use the 9x11 grid much as Klee did, with geometric letters filling some of the squares and then watercolors deployed in all the resulting shapes.

Next task: Selecting the text. (At the moment I’m thinking either part of my sonnet “Throwing Stones” or maybe the Lichtenbergian Society’s mantra about the labyrinth:

Take the Path
to explore
uncover
confront.
Return to the Fire
to confirm
affirm
retreat.

Follow along as I STEAL FROM THE BEST — and feel free to do your own version and post it in comments!