self-portrait # 20, Bitumen Shower, Unfinished Finished (people on a ferry); Only a Matter of Time; Sources
Category: Uncategorized
Heat Map, Legs, A Slightly Damaged Fence, Wingspan, Broken Glass, Bamboo, That’s Some Dance!
I see this male figure as both arising from and sinking into a hot, melting landscape. The cool areas are an illusion. The creator is the destroyer.
I love the angularity of these legs.
In the writing I’ve been doing recently, I’ve been drilling down to identify my passions, and one of the things that I’m exploring is a love of pattern. This fence is the first exploration of this.
This particular drawing has several layers as I kept trying to get to where I thought I was going; I never quite got there, and I’m dissatisfied with where it sits at this point. I’m going to let it sit for a while, and get back to it after a few days of hanging it on the line where I can look at it casually from time to time.
pink mist; some untitled pieces, experiments in colour; also moving on to figure drawings using a wooden model
This next sketch is a wip. I’m not sure what to do with the head; also, the spikes on the head really need a lot of work. I might try to make another version of this, fixing the head.
dismantling a Barbie tree
A few years ago I made a Barbie tree from a basic wire structure. I added some dolls that I had partially painted with green and orange paint, and who had pieces of broken mirror glued to their body parts. I think this may have been my attempt to deal with body dysmorphia. I’m not sure if I actually have body dysmorphia, but I have a limited ability to know what I look like, probably related to something I know I “have”, which is prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize others by their facial features…unless I know them really well. Even then, if someone I know really well dyes their hair, or shows up where I’ve never seen them before, I just might not recognize them until I hear their voice.
Anyway, a few years ago I made a Barbie tree, and it has been sitting on a high shelf in my apartment, gathering dust. I never look at it. In fact, it scares me a bit, with all its broken mirror bits.
Also, I find that people who see this tend to feel sorry for me; but I just find this funny, so maybe there is something off about my sense of humour. Well, I don’t really care, but I don’t need to keep this any more.
And I really don’t like Barbie dolls. As you can see.
Today I decided to dismantle it. I did this in the kitchen, as you can also see.
I also decided to record the dismantling, and put it here, because really this is my only diary to speak of, and I guess I’ll continue to keep this diary until…I can no longer write or do art or take photographs.
thinking about some stuff (that makes me sad); continuing with Woman with Red Straps (where I tooks it); woman with green arms; Climate change? it’s over that way; Re-evolution.
she took to her bed with a terrible illness, 2 untitled pieces, 4 eggs, and woman with red straps
I’m taking a drawing course through the Banff Centre this spring, a course which focuses on drawing with pencils, something I avoided doing in my college drawing classes by always opting for charcoal. But, I felt that I wanted to dedicate some time to drawing with graphite, and this course popped up in my FB feed. We are drawing eggs. Day 1, I drew one egg. Day 2, two eggs, and so on. These are the four eggs I drew on day four. I’m not getting better at drawing eggs yet, but the great thing about drawing is that I can SEE what I am doing better or not doing better. Doing something “better” doesn’t necessarily result in a better drawing, though.
Woman with Pink Scarf PLUS Too Soon PLUS Woman with Blue Scarf PLUS Softly, Softly
Trying to draw self-portraits seems to be important to me. I’ve never known what I look like, so drawing focuses my attention on the details that I can’t see on my own. I sit at my easel and look into a mirror propped up to the right, so it feels as if I’m always looking back at myself. I don’t feel as haunted as these self-portraits suggest. I like looking back at self-portraits I tried when I first started art school, and will continue to do self-portraits from time to time as a way to gauge what is important to me at any given time.
There’s something else I like about drawing real people, including but not limited to my self. When I take a photograph of someone, a photograph of my self, I have captured the image at a particular point in time. The picture is taken, and then it is over. When I draw myself, I do this over an extended period of time, making observations of my face, which may be affected in microcosmic ways by what I may be thinking about throughout the drawing process, so I feel as if, unlike a photograph, a drawing is a reflection of the changes that can impact a face over the time of the sitting.
Different micro expressions show up in different parts of the face at different times. So the drawing of a face is a composite of those expressions over the time that the face was observed, not a “moment in time” expression of a photograph. It might be interesting to animate a drawn portrait.
Here is a link to a website that discusses micro expressions. https://www.paulekman.com/resources/micro-expressions/
After sitting with the self-portrait #13 for a day, I made some changes, reflected below. It still doesn’t really look like me, but I’m keeping both up here so I have a record on my blog, and a reminder not to jump the gun, so to speak, but to let things settle in for a while before I declare them finished. In the next iteration, I fixed the jaw line; toned down the ear by making it smaller and lighter; added some light blue in the background; darkened the sweater collar and shoulders.
Next, I want to try a self-portrait using only shades of blue. And in the next version, I’ll work on getting the eyes smaller and farther apart.
Drawing with colour…
…and pastel…
I have a number of “projects” that I’m working on, or planned, for the next few months. Right now, while I’m gearing up for the other things I am doing, I’m focusing on drawing with pastels. I also have a small air-dry clay sculpture on the go, but I have ordered a back-iron, a contraption that will help me to make sculptures without having them collapse from the weight.
In my last blog post I included an earlier version of this drawing, not realizing that it wasn’t complete.
I find it impossible to draw anything that does not include some sort of comment on how humans inhabit a dying planet. I am astounded by and curious about my own willingness to continue to turn over my van’s engine, to turn up the heat in my apartment, to run water from a tap. My own contradictions bother me and I try to turn my face away from the contradictions of others, at least until I can get my own under control.
Round-up
I haven’t posted anything on this blog for a few months because I’ve been busy, but here are some photographs of some of the work I did in school and out of school since February. My focus this semester was ceramics and drawing, and I’m trying to use materials that are as natural as possible. My question is: how do I make things while at the same time thinking that there are enough things in the world already? I liked working with clay because that’s like working with the earth: some people love gardening, and I love getting my hands into the clay. I didn’t think I would. And what do I draw? I tried to draw with charcoal and pastel, avoiding plastics. Do we need more plastic? No. And I tried to draw things that I am concerned about: the impacts of climate change on water, air, animals (including people).
The series of ceramics sculptures entitled Open 1, Open 2, Open 3, and Open 3.2 (immediately below) are pieces through which I was trying to express the ways in which my relationships nurture me. I used a different glaze for each of the pieces, and tried two different firing processes, Raku and Cone 10.
This next series of drawings have been embarked upon since school ended in early April. My relationship with colour in my drawings has been tentative, so my first project for the intersession is to push myself into adding colour to drawings, while also staying with the theme of environmental degradation.
First, some Bach. Then, “The ‘Declaration of I Don’t Understand’ in Which I Feel Like an Insect”; “Incipient Variant in Petri-Dish”; “One”, and “Two”, and “Three”; Student Incubator at CVAG
Today’s music: Bach, The Art of Fugue
The Genesis of “Incipient Variant in Petri-Dish”
One, Two, Three
These next three, just playing around. I wanted to see if I could create expression with very simple elements, no internal interpretive cues. I’m currently reading a book called “Asemic: The Art of Writing”; I am being influenced by the idea of asemics, markmaking that looks like some sort of writing, calls the viewer to attempt to interpret the marks/lines by trying to “read” them, but of course they are not representative of any particular language, but merely representative of the “act” of writing and in that way these lines tend to foreground the “art” of writing.
I am attracted to this, and have been for a long time. So far, I’ve tried to work with a depiction of eyelashes, and maybe a way to go with eyelashes is to make them look “asemic”, as if the printed eyelashes are some sort of language that refers to the inexpressible. The more I engage with visual expression in the form of image-making, both 2D and 3D, the more I recognize that like language, both oral and written, there is an interstices that can’t be breached, can’t be expressed. The idea, the feeling, the emotion, lies somewhere beyond words, beyond mark-making, beyond line. Maybe it is somewhat like the extremes of grief and ecstasy.
So, I shall begin more consciously to explore this beyond place, this ineffable and mutable truth.
Student Incubator at CVAG (Comox Valley Art Gallery)
Today, January 8, our 3D design class installed our projects at the CVAG. Here are a couple of photographs of my part.
Spätblühendes Künstlertagebuch 