...already? Didn't we just do this? What's not pictured: Three or four pages of show notes for something I'd like to do after the pandemic. It looks REALLY good in my imagination. Also, a benefit of having studio time was talking this concept out with another person, because that also in itself sparks new ideas, and that's why there are so many notes - it went through a lot of conceptual ideas, and they're all pretty decent, but if I'd just written the first one down and not talked through it, I'd still only have the first idea. (Also not pictured is a drawing that constantly made me fall over laughing while drawing it, but might be too spicy for the boundaries of the free web hosting. Lol.) I really miss our undergraduate art Senior Seminar - once a week, you brought in your work and your peers and the arts faculty sat in and offered workshopping and critique. It's nice to have that environment, because for me it's really easy to get caught in a feedback loop of my own making, whether good or bad. School started this week, which has been an adjustment to communicating on message boards like A Regular Adult, not A Terminally Online Adult. This means writing in complete sentences and/or not ending every sentence with "!!" or "lol". It doesn't stop me from commenting on my classmates' introduction posts and clarifying that they DO have a nickname (they don't), and that their nickname is "Madame Peloton" (it isn't). We also were required to complete some "training" about "conducting research" that was probably 90% inapplicable to our program (what is a p-value?). It was pretty boring but it also went by pretty quickly, because all the quizzes to complete the modules were like: 1. What should you eat for breakfast today? a) A pancake. b) A wrench. c) Hydrochloric acid. d) 20,000 leagues under the sea. ♡ Listening this week: Radio Javan. (I use the FarsiRadio app for this.)
♡ Got my contributor copy of Shadow Playboy yesterday! It was postmarked from December 21. It looks great! ♡ Every time I spend time with a friend in person, I am so tired after, and then I have a friendship hangover the next day. In a good way! Well, that's it for today. I didn't have coffee today and I just want to go back to sleep so I might do that.
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I had an idea for a new mask, which, at the outset, could've been finished tonight; however, I don't think I have enough paper in the colors I want to do what I was envisioning. Also, I started cutting into the cardboard to make some elements fall away and others come forward, and it made me think about Rammellzee.
The first time I'd heard of Rammellzee, I think he had already passed on (he died in 2010). It may have been the April 2011 issue of Juxtapoz - the Art in the Streets issue. I was so entranced by the full-body costumes he'd construct - to this day I'm longing for available space to allow me to create and store something similar. (Even in my most recent move, a month ago, the masks could've wound up being a casualty. I threw out all my scrap cardboard.) Although the article from Juxtapoz is not on their website, this feature from The New Yorker is very good. Street Art NYC has some good photos of Rammellzee's work here. I was lucky to be able to see 'The Equation', which featured his letter racers, in 2012. It's unfortunate that we don't have more of Rammellzee's work out in the world; he was very prolific in multiple forms, and I wish he was more celebrated. Just from what little information I know about him as an artist, I'm so astounded by his mind and his creativity. It's very difficult for me to work from scratch, and Rammellzee was out here building whole worlds, probably inventing concepts that we'll never get to lay eyes on. And I think we're poorer for it intellectually! Long live Rammellzee. I started this collage last night (and date stamped it so much that I also thought I would finish it last night), and I was treading water with it for a little while. Then today I woke up and was able to complete it fairly easily.
This kind or style of collage is not something I'm used to. And this is a small page! There is a lot of building up background in order to get it to look right. I am also pretty pell-mell about it - I didn't do much in the way of placing and then gluing, though I did for a couple of things - I just glue it and if it looks weird I glue over it with something else later. Hopefully I have already established to you, the gentle reader, how very impatient I am. I feel there's a sort of instinct about this - knowing when we have to push through to the other side, and knowing when trying to push is going to be counterproductive and we need to take a break. If I'm starting to get really frustrated because I don't know how to 'fix' something, then usually I need to get up and do something else for a little while. If I'm frustrated because I need more pictures that look orange, well, then I just gotta keep pushin' through. Sometimes I will show something to John Morgan, my art professor from undergrad, because I'll be stuck, and his advice is generally "Put it down and move on to the next one." We have to know when to advance, and when to retreat, in a way that works with our own unique way of working. Last week was a weird week - I kept writing in my daily diary, "tagh o lagh!" Classes started today, so maybe that was why. Who can say. It was a week of stresses and sinus headaches and mail issues (now resolved), but there were high points: ♡ Virtual studio time with Monát, whose birthday was last week (Asa showed up for one session!) ♡ Good mail days: Christmas packages from Monát and my brother Armando ♡ Going back through sketchbooks and finding things to work back into (Hawaiian girlfriends, above; also PMCX:AU(78) ♡ Re-watching 'Bad Blood', one of the best and funniest X-Files episodes ♡ Zoom Museum Sundays: We went to the virtual Guggenheim! It has very good 404 images. Katie and Dr. Steph came, which is more than I could hope for on any given day. Stressors are still stressing me, but I think of them as running in the background (stress.exe), and as such they have been manifesting as nightmares in which I have a tight schedule of partying all night in Paris before flying to another country, or in which my teeth have...I don't know, actually...boils? Whatever. I liked it better when I was digging my heels into the bed in my sleep. After reading The Lonely City (see last post!), I have had Henry Darger on the brain. I love that this is from a website with "art" in the title but they can't bother to credit this with a title! Since these were all posthumously found I am more lax about it. One of my favorite experiences with The Lonely City is an ongoing one - Olivia Laing describes many works of art, most of which I hadn't seen before, and so it was fun to get an image in my head of a painting or a photograph she described, look it up later, and see how the idea in my head and the actual image differed. Darger's art utilizes collage and carbon tracing, but also watercolors (such as the watercolor above); I had been imagining them as more heavy on the collage and the color saturation - a bit more like the work of collage artist Lance Letscher. There's so much to get into - normally I'd link to the American Folk Art Museum, but their server seems to be down today? - and I had filed away the carbon tracing and collage as a future project, but maybe this particular stress is well-suited to some tracing and collage. I think it might be. So that's something to do instead of letting my imagination borrow trouble. In closing, check out this 16-month performance on extinction by Australian artist Lucienne Rickard. The drawing of Xerces' Blue butterfly took her three months: People following her progress pleaded with her to cancel the butterfly’s erasure; to make an exception for the butterfly living on the page. Her parents applied similar pressure, lamenting their daughter’s efforts with the wings. Have a good week! ♡
This week has been a delight in terms of reading. The Lonely City was wonderful - I may go back and re-read it tonight - I had to pull out a pencil and mark some passages, which is something I usually do not do in a physical book. There were some descriptions of paintings that I haven't seen, and I think it might be a fun exercise to have those to work on in the studio and then see how different they are. David Wojnarowicz is one of the people featured in The Lonely City, and I had his memoir on Kindle - I am always checking to see what drops to $3 and then snatching it up - and I had started it a couple of years ago, but had put it down and not come back. I think that it was not the right time then, but that after The Lonely City it was the right time for Close to the Knives. I made a lot of highlights. There were moments reading it that put me firmly within a time and place, and then moments that could've been written yesterday. The world is poorer after losing David Wojnarowicz. After Close to the Knives I have been reading We Are Everywhere, which is a treat and a delight and full of wonderful photographs and historical facts. We're lucky to have Matthew and Leighton (and their fiery social media presences on Twitter and Instagram). It's great to have a historical reference to the queer liberation movement that examines the movement but does not center only one experience. I'm moving into another book soon, and I'm glad I have all these available so I can keep the momentum from one and move to the next one! I have been in the studio a bit - not as much as I should have been this week - I did work on a piece last night and this morning, but it is Not Quite Done and I am trying to figure out what will bridge the gap to Done. (It involved some application of gold leaf, which was not as terrible as the last time I attempted to gold leaf something because the secret to a successful gold leaf operation is gloves. Wear some gloves.)
This piece is one I had actually laid out last summer in the sketchbook, but I'd forgotten about it and caught it as I was re-visiting the sketchbook. So when it's done, I'll post the sketch; it has changed a bit since I first envisioned it, and I'm happy with the changes, but it still needs some 'jeujeing' as Pharis would say. The best thing for 'jeujeing' something, in my opinion, is to have some tracing paper handy, so you can trace the change you are thinking of making onto the tracing paper so that you aren't making an irrevocable change without seeing what it looks like first. This is always my advice, but for some reason I never have tracing paper. For a little while, I've been using colored pencil or just graphite pencil, and this piece I'm almost finished with is in Posca with gold leaf and it's odd to be back in that stark world of flat color! I never thought I'd find it strange. I would estimate that much of my time in my life has been spent either gazing at or attempting to gaze at a woman's naked form. I'm not sure what my first drawings were - my parents never even told me the story of how they met, much less considered imparting any anecdotes about my life other than my father once tearfully asking whether I remembered when he would take me to the beach and I would eat sand. ("You'd think he would know," remarked my mother with disgust, "that if you were young enough to eat sand, you probably didn't remember it.") Though I could ramble on about this for the rest of time, constantly departing down rabbit holes of anecdotes that may well be false (remind me to tell you about the preacher and the Saran Wrap), I recently was talking to Katie about erotica, pornography, and the male gaze. Many aspects of erotica and porn are different now than when I was growing up - Katie and I are around ten years apart - and I came up in a time where feminine beauty and sexuality was centered around the male gaze. Additionally, the 1980's were a horny decade, the decade of the rock music video babe. There were babes everywhere you turned in the 1980's. And then came the 1990's, when I started reading superhero comics - and then suddenly, the Comics Code was out, self-publishing was in, and so were Bad Girls. (Let me tell you, I was living.) This is all to say that my personal understanding of what was sexually desirable came mainly from what was available to me as a child (Tex Avery cartoons, Jessica Rabbit), a teen (comic book ladies), and then as a young adult (the back room of the video rental place in the next town, the ability to buy Playboy and Penthouse). We didn't have a Gay-Straight Alliance in high school until years after I graduated (and even then, the creation of a GSA was so panic-inducing that it led the county school board to suspend all club activity in schools). There was very little in terms of queer teen companionship, of any kind of queer elder mentoring, of much community. So there was really no one to tell me how to be queer. I just continued in the way that I knew: looking at babes. Who doesn't want to look at babes, I would think, and I probably still do. Today I was reading The Lonely City and was so struck by this passage. It's an excerpt from Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty: "This may explain, in part, why the meat-making of gay male porn doesn't produce the same species of anxiety as that of straight porn: since men - or white men, at any rate - don't have the same historical relation to objectification as do women, their meat-making doesn't immediately threaten to come off as cruel redundancy." Of course this seems obvious, but it brought with it so many avenues of thought. I have always been so struck by the joy and celebration that I see in the works of gay men, also in gay male porn: the appreciation of the visual, the exaggeration, the fun. Think about Tom of Finland and you'll understand what I'm getting at. Everyone is having a good time, except maybe the occasional woman who shows up in a comic.
One of my favorite stories in Sometimes She Lets Me was about a femme who just wanted anonymous sex, who just wanted to cruise. It was bemoaned that lesbians don't cruise, and I felt that. I also bemoan it, certainly. But it isn't safe. For many reasons. And this passage made me think about what it is to be a sex object, because there's power in that. But it's a fragile power, in a way, because it doesn't mean we can cruise, it doesn't mean we can walk alone at night - it's a different kind of objectification than the objectification of a white male body. Objectification with power, and then the powerless object. My day has been kind of like this Juxtapoz cover (which I think about Often), but instead of dragging everyone by their hair to listen to Lady Gaga, I want them to look at the art I found today. It's really been a good Monday. First up are the hair miniatures of Melanie Bilenker: These are so amazing that they make me want to scream into the void for hours. The Vogue article has a mini-history of Victorian mourning jewelry AND a timelapse gif of Melanie creating one of these pieces, which is a joy. Cleveland-based artist Wadsworth Jarrell has a book out now about the AfriCOBRA collective, which he helped found: “White people know what they did to us," he said, explaining his artistic philosophy. “We don’t have to put it on canvas. They made slaves out of us. What are we going to do, make paintings of slaves in the field and somebody standing over them with a whip? That’s not inspiration. Painting is supposed to be inspirational.” The Smithsonian Institution has made millions of its images open access. One can search for particular items, or browse through some of the featured items - it's absolutely delightful, and for the most part, the descriptions are present and fascinating. I especially enjoyed the various bouquet holders, courtesy of the Smithsonian Gardens: Look at this absolutely stunning sculpture, The Death of Cleopatra, by Edmonia Lewis - the first professional African-American sculptor! This is amazing and also huge! I can't wait until the pandemic is over so I can see it in person. I could go on, but I'll leave y'all with this quilt by Viola Canady that evokes the look of a stained-glass window: That's just phenomenal! Definitely take the time to look through what the Smithsonian has available. I have a new sketchbook and I should go work in it, but - last thing! - Dr. Martens is putting out a Keith Haring collection. Oh man. Maybe it's time...for boots.
Finished a sketchbook this week! Another one is on the way, although I'm nervous about it because I haven't used this type before and it's not spiral-bound (I couldn't get another one of this same kind, which I really liked). I guess we'll see how it goes! I have omitted a couple of pieces here for various and sundry reasons. My astrologer sent along something that was inspirational, and I'm keeping it under wraps for the moment. Sunday is my social day of what amounts to about five hours of Zoom meetings. My Religion adviser from undergrad, Dr. Cath, hosts a Zoom meeting in which she shares her screen and we all go on a virtual gallery tour and look at art. Last week we were at the Uffizi for The Divine Comedy Illustrated by Federico Zuccari - we did Inferno then - and today we did Purgatorio and Paradiso. It's been inspirational in several ways, mainly the sparse use of color in Inferno, followed by the brown ink washes of Purgatorio and a return to color in Paradiso, with added color in the final illustration. We've also been interested in how Zuccari defines the action in the illustrations - rather than Dante and Virgil appearing in the middle of an action, Zuccari draws them at the foot of the mountain, ascending the mountain, and at the top, all in one drawing, and often this action is occurring from right to left. Also, Zuccari depicts Dante's dreams in a circle above the sleeping Dante. The Pugartorio and Paradiso segments also have text within the illustration, which also made us all think of comics. I had written down "Philip Roth" in my sketchbook while I was reading The Creative Habit, as he's mentioned in the final chapter, and then today I found American Pastoral in a Little Free Library. Another Little Free Library find: The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai. I also ordered The Lonely City, something that's been on my wish list for a while, after Austin Kleon featured it on his blog.
Luckily, this year seems to not be flowing at the breakneck pace of last year. At least, it seems slow for now. That may also be due to spending more time working or reading than refreshing the bird website. It's a good feeling. "I know there are artists who like music in the background while they work; they use the music to block out everything else. They're not listening to it; it's there as a form of companionship. I don't need a soundtrack to accompany my life. Music in the background nibbles away at your awareness. It's comforting, perhaps, but who said tapping into your awareness was supposed to be comfortable? And who knows how much of your brainpower and intuition the Muzak is draining?" - Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit I had been picking away at The Creative Habit for quite a while, but I finally re-read and finished it on Monday. I really enjoyed it and very much recommend it. Lately I have been thinking about this quote above, because I do listen to music quite a lot when cleaning or in the studio or just generally. This week, though, I have been working without it. It's an interesting change. I do feel a bit more focused, I don't feel the loss of background ambience, I have just been fully engrossed in what I've been working on. I actually finished a sketchbook yesterday! I think I'm going to do a weekly roundup of what I've worked on that I'll post on Sundays. Piggybacking from the last post, where I linked an interview with author George Saunders where he talks about social media, here's an interview with artist Tishan Hsu that also touches on how humans and technology interact: Even in the mountains, then, the artist felt watched: by the sites he visited, by the phone he took to bed. “They actually have cognitive psychologists helping them design this software so that they know what will pull you in,” Hsu said. “We need to stop and think about what it’s doing to us and our bodies. So in a way that’s what my work has been trying to grasp. I would say, whether people connect to my work — I think I’m really just trying to ask the question, ‘What is really happening?’” This is something we've discussed in classes: how easy it is for us to forget that there are always human beings behind everything that's programmed. Sometimes we long for this ideal of impartial computerized decision-making, but human beings themselves are not impartial, and have hidden or overt biases - these can all be reflected in a program that we might believe to be free from human error. More inspiration for the week:
♡ This Artists' Questionnaire on Caroline Kent, who uses cut paper instead of an initial sketch for her abstract paintings ♡ Social distancing, 432 years ago (I was just telling my cousins that I would love to have a six foot long pole that I could hit people with if they got too close to me in line) ♡ The work of artist Ellen M. Blalock. Amazing, beautiful, heart-rending. (I'd rather look at her quilts than look at Red Composition.) Today I slept in and decided to work in the studio all day, which was mostly successful, and I wouldn't have known what was going on in the world if I hadn't looked at my phone. "If you have managed to pull that off," my best friend said, "continue on that course." So I went for a walk, and came home, and took a hot bath and ordered dinner, and I continued on my course. I made a collage in my sketchbook, which took up the better part of the day. Every now and then, I have to remind myself to get up and take a break when things don't make sense. To stop, and step back, and look again. I did a drawing yesterday that had an error in proportion, and I didn't notice until the drawing was finished. Part of this is lack of proper planning while sketching. "I'm not the most patient soul," my grandmother said to me once, and I also am not the most patient soul. Part of my work has been trying to work with this rather than against it - no rulers, no pencils, mistakes corrected creatively, the entire piece mostly done in a sitting or two. When I'm not working like that, however, the lack of patience shows in the draftsmanship, and it's embarrassing. It's very hard at times for me to slow down. Not in terms of what I'm doing, which is mostly lying prone and reading on the couch, but just in terms of thinking and planning and moving myself out of the world of the internet, or at least out of the world of social media where everything is either dire or a joke or a dire joke that shortens my attention span and zaps my will to live. On that note, I really enjoyed this Guardian interview with George Saunders, which also touches on stepping back, revising, and the results that follow. (There's an article linked in that interview which is also worth reading.) Currently reading: Lessons in Classical Drawing, by Juliette Aristides.
Slow down! Take breaks! Take the time to look before making a mark! |
AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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