Some Redness

To keep things consistent, I'm going to make the claim that from now on I will update my blog every Thursday. Or at least by before-you-wake-up on Friday. We'll see how that goes. Also though, I might update in the middle of the week for some randomness.

This week I continued drawing/ painting on paper. I've been trying to get more invested in the individual drawings, so they're less like imprints. Here are two of my favorites from this week. The second one is closer to where I want to go with these.

I really, really like hands.

I also started painting.

um.

Here's what I did.

The struggle is to keep the looseness while making the forms convincing. This is the sort of thing that Jenny Saville (whom I brought up last week) is so good at. These are both in the very early stages.

Also, early on in the week, Lily and I painted portraits of each other. It was super fun, but I'm not so happy with how it turned out, so I'm not posting a picture of it. Hopefully she's not bored of my face yet and we can get another round in.

I'm starting to reconsider the role drawing will play in the project . . . Mostly because it's just easier to do given the studio circumstances. The scale is more convenient, the materials are less toxic. Plus, hey, I love drawing. I actually tend to find it way less stressful than painting. So maybe I can continue doing both in somewhat equal measure. I think I'm going to start drawing lots of hands.

We met in small groups the other day and had a really good talk about where our projects were heading. Here are some bullet points on what came up during mine, and things that I will be expanding on later.

-Honesty

-Spirituality

-Death

-Childhood

-The HUMAN CONDITION. AHHHHHHHH!!

If you ask me how these things are expressed through my art though, I will most likely curl up into a ball and cry until you leave me alone. So, I'll be working on that. . . Also, I'm very bored with the word "Spirituality" and the phrase "The human condition." You hear them so much that they almost don't mean anything anymore. They almost hurt to hear, so maybe I'll make up new words for them. More on that later.

I hope this is interesting to read. I'm kind of still figuring out what to write. Right now, it's just my brain on a blog, so maybe I can work on refining that a little more.

Time keeping:

Painting: 8.5 hours

Drawing: 3.5 hours

Taking movie stills: A stupid amount of time

thanks thanks thanks

Saville, Jodoin, Kanevsky

As a mid-week interlude, let me show you three artists that I think are super cool.

Jenny Saville

You've probably all heard of her. She got famous in a hurry after she was discovered by Charles Saatchi. Her work, I guess, can be disturbing. She sometimes paints things that people don't want to see, like corpses, or bruised flesh . . . But the paintings are so heartbreakingly beautiful that if you can get over that initial disgust they can be almost spiritual to look at. She paints like an abstract expressionist, but her figures are extremely convincing. Every brushstroke has a purpose and an energy to it. She is great.

Sophie Jodoin

"Haunting" is probably the best word to describe Jodoin's work. Her drawings are like images pulled from a nightmare. Her figures seem like ghosts. Like at any minute they could disappear or be washed away by the background, but at the same time they feel very present. They have a convincing presence and part of that is their ethereal quality.

Alex Kanevsky

Kanevsky's work reminds me very much of Saville's and is every bit as beautiful. There is generally a feeling of movement in his paintings, or sometimes like a vibration. They never seem still, but very alive. If you like his work, you should look on his website, especially at his in-progress photos. His process is very interesting. He'll do maybe a dozen layers, and to me, each one looks like a finished painting. Every part of the picture stays in flux until the very end, which I think is a very good way to paint.

First few weeks

Hi friends,

So I've spent these first few weeks doing mostly art-related things that aren't actually making art. I've spent the bulk of class time in the wood shop knocking together some stretcher bars, a process that always takes at least twice as long as I think it will.

Good news, though! They are done! BAM

Before I even got to that, though, I was able to spend some time drawing. Below are some images that I showed in class already. They're all pencil and ink on paper. They're similar to drawings I've been doing in my sketchbook for a while, but now they're out in the real world. I find that drawing on loose paper is significantly scarier than drawing in a sketchbook. If I draw in a book, I can shut it and it disappears, and there's some safety in knowing that I can do that.

I also was able to go to the open figure drawing studio on Saturday and I made a few drawings that aren't too terrible. (Though the photographs of them are, sorry) I'm going to try to continue to go to the saturday sessions. I think it will be important for me to keep up with figure drawing . . . And maybe next time I will bring more materials so the drawings aren't so boring. These are in serious need of loosening up! But I do like the sort of dancing/ vibrating line that some of them have.

So! The next thing is to start painting! Which I can now do at any time since the canvases are stretched and primed and smell like moldy gesso. So hopefully by next week I can have some images posted. . . Oh, I need to get an easel. blaahh

Oh, ok, so um time keeping. So, I haven't really gotten into the habit of timing myself doing these things . . . And honestly it depresses me when I think about how much time I spend gessoing canvas . . . But here's a rough estimate of the time I spent doing these things.

Drawing in studio: 4-5 hours

Figure Drawing: 3 hours (this is easy because that's how long the session lasts . . .)

Making stretcher bars: 6 hours (also easy because I spent exactly 2 class periods doing this)

Stretching/ gessoing/ sanding canvas: 6 hours. (Does it really take me that long? Absurd, right? but I'm pretty sure it does, which is totally depressing)

Scanning/ photographing/ photoshopping the above images: 1 1/2 hours.

=

Not enough time making art!

Painting with light and then painting with paint

Hi friends,

So, I wrote about 2 assignments. The first one was the first project we did in an intro to photography class that I took over in Ireland. Basically the assignments was to learn how to use the enlargers and how to create photograms. I created these by moving my hands over the paper as it was being exposed. I liked it because it felt like painting. Also it felt like a dance. It was a very joyful thing so I made dozens of them and then I dyed them blue. Here are a few.

The other assignment I wrote about was my independent painting project which lasted 2 semesters and wasn't so much an assignment as it was me painting whatever I wanted to. During the course of the year I switched from painting from my head to painting from life and from other source material. I find the two processes to be very different and I find I am most satisfied with what I do when I do both at the same time. Below are a few of what I painted last year.