Volley XVIII: Back to work, jerk.

I've been in a slump. For a long time. Barely producing, and never finishing. I moved from Des Moines to Houston, to a much smaller space with many more distractions. Free time (and the internet) is your enemy when trying to work. Now that I've set up my drafting table and a flat file to store some of my junk, it's time to start cleaning things out and unpacking. And organizing. I'm working as a crate builder now, so I have access to lots of fancy cabinet plywood scraps. I'm getting some fancy knives in the mail to start working on woodcuts. The only problem is, I don't really have space to print, or access to places to print anymore.

Recently there was a figure drawing session at a gallery in Midtown. I attended, dragging many things in tow to scribble for a few hours. Here are some of  the results. Everything was done very quickly. With the longest poses being around ten minutes. But most averaging between three and eight minutes.

I really like this one. Something about the marks and the look of her hair reminds me of those sixties style graphic ads.

Drawing two people at the same time was interesting. I really wish they interacted more, as in twined limbs or some kind of embrace. Regardless it was fun to draw. They liked my drawings so much I gave them one. I didn't really get a picture of it, but the layout reminded me of a Mignola cover for Hellboy.

I'm glad I jumped back in to drawing. It's been at least a year since I've done any figure drawing from the model. For the amount of time allotted, there should be a lot more information here, and it should be done with a lot more confidence.You can tell. Well, maybe you can't but I can. It looks like I'm out of practice. I need to go outside and draw people.

Also, late new year's resolution. Update at least once a month.

Volley XVI: The Male Gaze

Recently, I sat in on a figure drawing class. I also had the time to shoot a bunch of them in between scratching my head to fix this. I'll be out of town for a bit, but you probably won't notice any less irregularity in updates. All of these were done in under half an hour, forty five minutes max. With charcoal and white chalk. 

 They all begin the same way, with a gesture/drawing of the skeleton in vine charcoal, and then I start building. My drawings don't feel very solid, or rather the figures don't feel very grounded, but they themselves do a good job of having mass. Like they're being sculpted. Which is weird to me because I focus on line and movement of it a lot. Or at least I think I do. 

Volley XV: I look at myself way too much.

Actually, I don't. It's a real problem. I have body image issues, in that I'm pretty fuckin' ugly. I used to give the description "bridge troll like," when people asked about my appearance, but for the sake of maintaining a type of chaotic good/chaotic neutral, Paul gave the descriptor "Taco Dwarf." Which fits perfectly.

Regardless, as money is tight and I haven't gotten out much to draw others, I had a friend come over and photograph me. And a deer skull. I was remembering Hamlet, or rather the grave digger and Yorick in particular. I want to make a picture that is whimsical (for me, in that no one is screaming) and has elements that are in conversation with eachother. I also like the idea of ritual, and the me in the painting is not holding the skull in a manner of study, but rather one of contemplation, or as if he were engaged in conversation with it.

Now based on these images, you might be pondering "what skull, you dope? All I see is a weird looking chubby dude doing an Errol Flynn (and failing) impersonation?" Well fear not viewers. It is said that Sargent, in his attempts to capture Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, he composed multiple watercolor studies. This may have been due to the fact that he was struggling to get her skin tone correct and she kept hiding it behind (as was customary for the time amongst celebrities) piles of leaded white makeup and unnatural coloring. So here's study number one. More to come soon. 

Thirteenth Volley: Oodles of Doodles

This might be a bandwidth killer. There are a lot of images here. This is the finished product for the Brooklyn Art House Co-op show. The premise was you could pay to receive a sketchbook from them and had to have it completed by the end of January. It, along with 4,999 other books of various themes will now travel the lower 48 for the next few months. It was kind of scary, working in a theme (Fears and tears), or with one in mind as opposed to trying to modify/bullshit something I already to to fit. I was paralysed in the beginning. Only working when I had an idea. It is a sketchbook after all. It's supposed to be incomplete. The idea of a body trying to fit a theme as opposed to a singular piece. As such, I was much happier about some of the drawings as opposed to the majority of them. And when I started screwing up, I would tell myself to keep going. If you added up all the ugly parts you would at least get something, while not beautiful, at least would be unified.

I figured I'd do a quick, and loose painting for the cover. Inside I stayed with sumi ink and watercolor. I started to tell a story about things I'd been through, like the loss of my sister. I'd falter, backtrack and also look for found imagery to help augment what I was looking for.

Between dead birds and burning trucks, I was looking to convey things loosely. Which was harder than I expected. There's a certain push and pull between expressiveness and context I think. I can make a very angry image, and you can get a sense of the violence of it, the energy that animates it. But I worry that that might be the only thing perceptible at that point because you lose sight of the subject matter. I like to maintain a balance of both.

A lot of the text comes from songs I was listening to at the time. Some stuff you'd expect, like Leonard Cohen. But some things came from surprising places to me. Like Sheryl Crow, or snippets of things I heard on the radio that just seemed to fit at the time. I'm no poet, but I enjoy reading it a lot. And a huge influence on both how I read it, and what I look for stylistically comes from Graham Foust. The book's title, As in Every Deafness, as well as the lines I butchered on the fourth page, come from his poetry. Which is very minimal but has a quiet and frantic desperation to it. Like the last moments of what I'd imagine some one being buried alive feels like - minus the euphoria that comes with asphyxiation.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Pardon the awkward line breaks. Myself and technology are polar opposites. Next time: Painting up dates!

Tenth Volley

So, Dan is putting together a show. He's a printer by trade and wants to make the mailers and posters by hand. I offered to contribute to this. I started out with a pen and ink sketch just to get an idea.



When I was doodling, I noticed that the skeletal figure reminds me of the Hermit from the Tarot, but I remember it specifically from an old room mate's Led Zeppelin poster. It's interesting what the hermit implies. Someone who has seen and been through it all, whatever that may be, and withdraws from society, disillusioned, cynical. That's neat, but I didn't want it to be, oh hey, I lifted the hermit image from a poster for the poster. I reversed hands, I dropped the corpse/pieta body and kept the wayfaring nun.


It's faint, I know. I draw delicately with pencils now. And I'm still struggling with hesitancy. This means I need to draw much, much more. It's either that or get so sleep deprived that I just don't care any more, and then draw. I like this image better. I scrounged up some old wood that I had laying around and sanded the layers of old acrylic gesso off of it. Note to the future painters everywhere: Acrylic gesso is not your friend. I own a palm sander and go through a ridiculous amount of sandpaper to get things smooth. This is because in the sanding process the gesso actually melts to the sand paper in sticky clots that then get deposited on another section of the surface you will be doing art on. And they stick. I razored a few off, and then I sanded some more.

After a few sessions of sanding, I had a block ready to put an image on.



Neato, huh?

The legs are too short for the torso and the arms are weird, man. I'm still retouching the arms and I've since redrawn the legs, to be posted at a later date. It's a lot of detail packed into face grain of the pine. I'm curious as to how well I can stick to rendering those soft lines and things. Perhaps the carving will add some aggression that the drawing lacks.

Seventh Volley

"Constancy is defined as: the quality of being faithful and dependable; a state of being constant; the perception of an object or quality as being constant under changing conditions. Artists are invited to share their concepts of faith, spirituality, and beliefs in a culture that rapidly shifts and evolves. How do we define a constant God in a changing world? Is our image of God altered by our faith and system of beliefs? How does the reality of everyday life as we know it alter our perceptions of God?"

I'm in a show (see description above). It's coming up soon. This is a sketch for the drawing that I'm submitting. I'll come right out and say it -- I'm an atheist. Submitting to this should have been fairly easy right? I hang a blank sheet of paper, or there's an empty spot with my name next to it, or just a picture of me giving the finger and going "But you're making this shit up!" Which is unnecessary, and uncalled for. It also feels like cheating. I like to create stuff, I don't like to tell people what to think about that stuff. So I look back to the time when I was struggling with my faith (and then losing it). It was a traumatic experience, and not something I relished going through.

In doing so, I came to the realization that the perception of God (at least in the Christian society I was raised in) is largely made up, and personified. Here we have this all powerful being, all knowing, creator of the heavens and earth, and all the cosmos in between, and we expect it to behave in a human manner? We expect it to bless us by giving us a parking space at the mall, or to help our team win, to cure our sick and suffering? Faulty reasoning, twitching scientists, and broken logic aside, what a way to reduce in power and attempt to humanize an hypothetical being. The problem with said being behaving like a human, is that it is subject to human flaws. While these make us interesting, the idea of a god that is powering the universe, but having an off day and not feeling like getting out of bed has terrifying consequences for those peopling said universe.

In sticking with this idea of making a god, there is a short parable by Jorge Luis Borges titled, The Witness, in which we find a dying Saxon, the last Pagan, and with his passing, all his rituals, his beliefs, his history disappear. Which got me to the thought, if we were to die, does our perception of god, if not the idea of god itself die with us?

In the updates of this, will be experiments with gilding (my first time! woo hoo!).