summer studio sessions part I

Kerdieekrdaad spent the unbearably hot portion of the past couple weeks in her ethereal air conditioned studio.  I came out with a series of 12 3" square paintings and Bri is going to town on a bunch of source material with her exacto.  Here are the first five:

Moleskine June 2009-April 2010

I figure it's been a while since I posted a sketchbook update.  I'm going to start casually drawing more, so here's a dump of what's gone into the sketchbook between the last time I was using it a lot (see Fabriano 2008-2009) and the next run (which will start tomorrow.)

 The untitled title page of the moleskine.

 I began writing as much as drawing in this sketchbook.  I find I need both languages to be honest in my expressions.

keys.  I obsessed over their forms for a week, nothing visually successful came of it, except this drawing.  

Now I can identify the keys on my chain by the pattern of their teeth.

I was thinking about Da Vinci for a while (see lung drawings)

but I don't remember what old Roman architecture had to do with it.

Man on the bus.  Liked his hat.

Maya Lin at the PaceWildenstein Gallery.  Maya Lin used to be controversial.  You know why?  Janet Kaplan told me a lot of old white guys were uncomfortable with the fact that a design made by "an Oriental" won the contestfor the government-funded Vietnam Memorial.

getting my mind out of the city

I'm on vacation.  Well, my body is still walking down the parkway to school every day, but in the studio I am walking through the woods behind my house in Maine, watching my mother tend her gardens, thinking of the colors of the late afternoon in Umbria two springs ago, and peering at the sky through the cherry blossoms of April.  And I'm wondering if the result of all this pretty and happy will be too precious or trite.  I guess I have every reason to revel in real beauty--this art isn't a brain twister or a solution to the world's problems, but perhaps it's a positive experience for my viewer and that is enough right now?

Fellowship Panels, Update

I'm beginning to slow down on these a bit for a lack of focus and a slight loss of interest, but I have to keep plugging. Hopefully continued work on them will get me off the plateau and help me pick up the pace!

string things

I've been toying with the idea of a visual representation of a single life, specifically the progression from innocence to experience. This is the form I've come up with.

String, a tack, all strings supporting a leaning frame and converging at the tack on the studio wall. To the left is a good explanation of how the object looks in my studio space.

When the viewer looks up into the frame, they are put in the small position of an innocent person, probably a child but not necessarily. Everything they see is within the frame, and there is very little color on their side of the frame; in their experience. But, as most people do, there comes a point where one must leave behind the framed world and jump into the mess of knots, twisted threads, uncertain roads.

Here, and from almost any other viewpoint around my composition, there is more color, more understanding, and a greater sense of the whole, the way of things. There is also more confusion, but it is confusion that is tangible and could be worked out.