Do I still know how to draw?

August 26, 2018

   Its gorgeous outside.  My sister and her friend just left yesterday, returning to Colorado.  They helped me move my kitchen table and a big storage cabinet into my BKCuny studio.  So my apartment is cleared out. I am staving off the urge to buy a loveseat, which is a long standing dream.  I have room for it now, but it would be too much lost real estate; I still need space to work here.  Plus, having the space around me is nice.  The MFA faculty want us to spend as much time there as possible, and the more I think about this prospect, the more excited I get, because I have always found happiness in having a place to be that is not home.   No cats.  No cat hair.  No distractions.  Other focused people around.  It seems heavenly.

        It is funny to me how many people, who do not have an art practice, assume that having one is "therapeutic".   I can see why people think that, and to some extent, its true.  However, it is only true when a piece is going well (rarely), or has gone well (once a year), or during the initial limerence of the "great idea", which tends to be fleeting. So, not so therapeutic.  Its nice that people think that though!

      I am working on this piece that is just graphite on illo board at the moment.  All this collaging...I wish I could say there has been a learning curve, but its been more like a long road leading to more long road. So for now, I abandon it in lieu of something bare bones.  Besides drawing the figure, what real drawing have I done lately?    This is called The Bride, and it is inspired by all the bling, baubles, lace, ribbons, chiffon, pearls, diamonds...that make a bride "beautiful". Even though I always knew I didn't want to get married, I always enjoyed thumbing through bride magazines, and admiring all the white rendered in different textures. There is something about it.  Just aesthetically.  Not making any kind of statement about marriage, aside from the fact that the composition drove me to create figures traveling down a path beneath ostensible arches, but this was not guided by my conscience.  Naturally, if I am trying to prove to myself I still know how to draw, there must be depth.  Compelled to simplify the process, I draw on my knowledge of what these textures are, and doing my best to translate that through my hand.  I do not draw well enough to capture it the way I see in my mind, but I suppose that would be the prize.

I would love to know a better way of editing this in Photoshop, but for now, this is what I have. Not that bridey!!...or is it?  Its composition driven.  I had an illustration teacheress at SVA (continuing ed) say to me, regarding shadows and highlights, "I just put them where I want them."  Brilliant!

This is a study I did for this a few months ago:

It is smaller..about 11" x 14".

Somewhat hilariously, this is a piece I did in undergrad:

Tomorrow, work.  This will be interesting, this being my first week of alternating work and school. See ya later!

Great Idea

7/22

 

Friday night while wandering the city and intermittently running errands, I wandered into a ChaShaMa location and saw a very nice collage, which inspired this.  Also, I had a guest suggest that the total field collages I made in September of last year (see below) were too much to take in.  I forgot there was such thing.  To my sensibility, complex equals interesting.  Early inspirations include Hieroymous Bosch M.C, Escher, and H.R. Geiger, none of which are known for their frugality of content.  Granted, one can get lost in an image because there is a lot to look at, but one can also get lost in the elegance of pleasing composition.  I will call this "Great Idea".  

I wish time would slow down.  Maybe thats what I will wish for when I blow out my candles in September.  Funny to think that last year, I wished to get into graduate school.  Maybe there is something to this wishing thing...

   

Working

7/13

      I worked this week mainly on this little collage that has been nagging me to make it into something worthy, or at the very least, bring it to some level of completion. Hasn't happened, and I am again faced with my limitations. So far, working small hasn't worked out. Also, I cannot figure out how to make the work reflect the textures, cracks, and streetlights that are its inspiration.  I was close, and now I am not.
      Owning a car again has given me wings, so I have been flying around, covering lots of ground, and soaking it all in. I suspect that graduate school, which starts at the end of August, is not going to create more time for me to make art.  It will give me a clean well-lit studio, fellowship with peers, and feedback from people who know things. But sadly, not more time.
     My job continues to inspire on many levels.  Piles of interesting materials abound:steamfitter's perforated flanges, BX cable laying in retriculated coils, flat wire the electricians use to feed electric wires through conduit, the spiral-shaped shavings from when the steamfitters thread their pipe.   And then there is the  pebbly texture of fire-proofing, the smoothness of styrofoam, the concrete pumping through tubes up to the floors where it will become the slab, and the cylinders of concrete that get cut out by the hole-saw.....
      The intense personalities of the people I work with, the physical challenge, and the unpredictable nature of  construction create days like rollercoasters.  I'd like to think I am storing all the excitement up in me like a battery to draw upon later..... when things calm down...

Stuff I am trying to finish.

The Lounge - Part II

6/24/18

See The Lounge-Part I (12/9/17)  Still a Work in Progress!

Having cobbled together fantasy, expectation, and memory, this piece is a meditation on a wonderful time had by beautiful young people in a lushly baby blue lounge located on the top floor of a high rise in a city somewhere...featuring baby blue shag carpet verging on the vegetative...instead of a bar, a shoot of water, a girl playfully splashing the bartender, a bacchanalian gathering in the fore.  This emerged as a piece about drinking, and a dangerous flirtation.

AA Self-Storage/ Shmevils

6/8/18

      This week, I have been working on replacing the below with the belower.  Please excuse the disturbing Photoshop on that first one.   I painted  this while living in AA Self-Storage, my first New York City "apartment".  Living there marked a strange and heady time, but mostly, just strange.  Someday, I will spend the time to recount the events from this time, but in the meantime, they are very much sealed in my memory.  That deranged man who called himself my "landlord".  The shoe polish in the hair, all those cats, the pots and pans in the shower.  The hipsters that would show up living there every once and a while.  The stuffed animals.  The way my room was where he always kept his latest "girlfriend".  The darkness and the filth.  The painting studio I had in that gigantic room, where I would paint at night when I should have been working on lesson plans and sleeping. The way he attacked my character because he wasn't getting what he wanted from me.  The juxtaposition of this strange home life with my early morning teaching stint that turned out to be an abject failure...

      I have no idea what became of the original, but after reviewing Saul Steinberg's work, I felt compelled to revisit this composition as an examination of broad flat junctions. Quasi-parallelograms located approxamtely in the same plane, but shifted just a bit...  Swimming in reds and oranges is exhilarating.  

     I started using devils, which I call Shmevils, as human subject matter as a way of avoiding gender, historical placement, and was attracted to the imagery for whichever reason it has attracted artists through the millennia. These are not usually a contemplation of evil.  In the case of AA Self Storage, it is just two beings staring at each other from either end of a hallway--trapped in their loathsome vulnerable humanity, for a window of time oddly subject to one another's scrutiny. 

AA Self Storage --Lost Original

AA Self Storage --Redux (In Progress)

   Its mind boggling to think of how much work I have sent into the world ,and how much of it disappeared without my knowing it. This is far from the first time I felt compelled to recreate a piece that was sold or stolen. 

Bonus track:  

The Class

Drawing the Figure

5/14/18

    Spring is here and the new weather heralds in feelings of freedom and relief! The block is gorgeous with its explosion of flowers and all my neighbors talk laudly and laugh in the middle of the street.

     I had a caricaturing gig in Rockville cntr this weekend.  Its been too long!  I was so nervous when i entered their private residence, but the family was delightful, and we all had fun, and I am still find the LIRR to be slightly romantic, a feeling of going somewhere much further away.

    I spent a fair amount of time this weekend getting acquainted with Instagram.  There is a lot to this, and I already crave and despise it.  I am trying to make it so that this is about art, and about "me as art", like Rosanna said so colorfully.  Trying to maintain a zero-baby pics policy.

     I believe social media is a scourge.  Too much change too fast. I am a Luddite to begin with, and the ubiquitious discussion about cold hard technology is deafeningly boring.  Its not going to lead to anything good.  This rapid fire exchange of information, and no one is even addressing the truth about our planet?

Figure drawing group on Sunday:

    The model's name was Sheila, and when she twisted this way in front of me, I felt a jolt of seratonin course through my system.  She is a wonderful model.  Tiny and composed. Another great model is John, below.   Everything about him says, "soft" - his flesh, his voice, his hair which wisps about like feathers.  I have come to know him after a few sessions.  John started out as a bureaucrat working for the city, decided he wanted to travel, received a Fulbright Scholarship (Russian), and traveled to Kyrgyzstan where he lived for two years, teaching people how to cultivate their land.  Fascinating.  His pale skin is splotched with pink and his hair follicles look inflamed-a testament to his fragility.

    From attending these sessions, I met Anjl, who
 taught me how to grafitti today!!

    All these years of trying to do it with paints and pencils!!!  I have no interest, oddly, in creating legit graffiti, only in appropriating its formal aspects.  Anjl and her peers are into creating completed murals.  However, it is the unfinished-looking hastily and secretly executed "throwies" that compel.  This is for the same reason reggae devotees enjoy the echo effect...somehow, it suggests something otherworldly.

Waves for Johnny P.

April 11, 2018

I finished this drawing for Johnny P. finally.  He is my gang mate at work.

The way that I found out that I was to do this drawing was this: Before I left for Tanzania, he had stuffed, unbeknownst to me, an envelope of money with a strange document into my backpack.  It was written with some kind of imagined officialdom, with flowery archaic phrases, and seals and signs of notoriety.  The long and the short of it, he ordered me to be paid to make this drawing.

This is the picture I worked from.  Each time I approached him about details, he just shooed me off saying, "Just do your art thing."

 I enjoyed getting lost in the waves, and attempting to catch the whisper of the rainbows.

....and here is a picture of Johnny, who is the most wonderful man I have ever met.  I will always have a place in my heart for him.  His kindness and good humor has been a fucking blessing to me these days..