The SketchBook is a sort of ‘public humiliation diet’ way of trying to shame myself into drawing on a regular basis. I may not produce great Art while I’m busy, but there’s no excuse for not at least managing to doodle - whether to keep my skills up or just for the love of it.
The plan is to update this thing at least once a week. Do your part to keep me honest, and privately berate me as needed if you see me slipping up :)
Great art or not, here are the fruits of this endeavor:
Friday, February 24, 2006
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Monday, February 20, 2006
Picture Poem Constructions
In my class-time daydreams, I am envisioning vast landscapes of collage, laid in ink over deckled white paper, evoking half-shadowed figures in lives imbued with meaning.
These are tiny, tiny little constructions. They use papers I bought in Japan and paints I restocked just recently in Evanston. They recycle prose-poems from when I was twenty, and they photographs below look nothing like them.
And they make me very very happy.
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Sunday, January 29, 2006
Yet More Flowers...
Feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the world today. So I’m overwhelming the world through artful smudging.
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Sunday, January 22, 2006
Don't play with your food
I had to rethink my still-life last night, when I realized that one of my subjects needed to be sacrificed for our supper. Never use an even number of objects in a still-life, Mr. Anderson told me in tenth grade. But an even number I did use. And dinner was delicious.
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Saturday, January 21, 2006
Back to Basics
Pencil and paper as meditation.
I had an idea of doing a series of photographs called "Old Friends" - I like the title just because it brings the old Simon and Garfunkle tune to mind. These two aren't necessarily the old friends I have in mind. But they look as if they could be.
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Saturday, January 14, 2006
Yellow Flowers
The first time I ever tried to paint anything in oils, I tried to paint flowers. Dried flowers, dead flowers – they did not move or change over the weeks I spent agonizing, trying to make them live on canvas.
My love affair and my failure to live up to the potential of seductive blooms haunts me still. I watch flowers dying on our countertop and want to paint them up close, working into the intricacies of their tiny bells and great green lushnesses.
The affair is doomed, I fear. Flowers, beautiful flowers, ugly flowers, discarded flowers – they are tempresses all with so little to yield. They are directionless all, floating in discreet bunches on stalks that lead to nowhere. No visual interest, too much linearity, such glimmering color that you can’t help but want to taste them with a brush.
It’s doomed, I say, doomed.
But I still won’t let it go.
I wish the painted version looked as good on paper as I think it does in this photo. But it doesn’t.
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Monday, January 09, 2006
The Rock Garden
When we came back from Japan, I showed off my photographs with not a little bit of pride, I was so pleased with how well most of them came out. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but contain just a little tinge of guilt, considering how little of a hand I really had in that. The light in Japan – just everywhere somehow, even in a cramped little tatami room in a tiny little inn – was inexplicably, universally gorgeous. In the end I just basked in it.
These images, worked from a photograph from the trip, show a young woman looking contemplatively at the rock garden at Ryoanji.
A pencil study and a gouache execution. The study is about 8”x6”, the painting about 11”x8”. Both on paper.
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