Void Where Prohibited

The idea is that if you create a space you will feel compelled to fill it. Perfectly good theory, not a thing wrong with it. I think even my ascetic friend Scott, who wanted to join a monastery, does this: though he feels most whole with an absence of property, he fills his living space wall to wall with mystery. For most people the theory probably works in some fashion. Give a collector a cabinet and watch what happens.

It's not unknown to trouble artists, though. I have a bunch of notebooks, sketch pads, drawing tablets, even a few canvases bought over the years that are still waiting. It's a pretty vicious fucking block. For me it began with homework back in high school. I paid attention, I aced the tests, but set me down to a blank sheet of notebook paper and it becomes a staring contest that the blank page always wins. You're supposed to transform the sheet with the inner stuffings of your brain. Works the other way for me, run an x-ray on my head and you'll see ruled blue lines.

The problem is two-fold (at the very least). First, I have no idea what to communicate. Or, in the instance of my drawings, I do know what to communicate but not how to turn it into images. Simply, I trained myself as a photorealist and trapped myself by becoming dependent on photographs for my best work. Artist's trap: accept that most of your work will not be your best, you must free yourself to play around. I've occasionally come up with ideas that thrill me for about two minutes until I realize just how facile they are. Visual junk food. Bumper sticker art.

Second: who says doing art has to communicate a message? That's academia, not creation. What I have to show is a love for my subject, and if I do well that should speak to someone. Scott and I were at the grotto today, looking at the religious sculptures. He couldn't communicate to me just why none of them really spoke to him, and the only answer he could give when I asked what would make him happy he said, essentially, “something that makes me feel what these don't”. he needs something that strikes a spiritual chord...as an atheist, I was looking at the artistry and found some of the pieces beautiful. (that's another lesson, BTW, no piece will strike a chord with everyone.)

Basically, I'm stumbling over the idea of art instead of making it. Just make something, that's art. Not necessarily good art, usually not, but art all the same. It doesn't have to be anything.

Third (wait, wasn't that supposed to be only two problems?): perfectionism. After school the problem with my homework seeped into my drawings, exclusively portrait work by then. Can you imagine trying to get every hair in a photograph mapped out on a drawing? But if I didn't, I got frustrated and too unhappy with the work to finish it. I'm still struggling with that. I have no solution to offer, at least not yet, but I do have a tentative fix to suggest to anyone in the same circumstance. Lay off the drawing for a while, and do some sketches – but do it in another medium. At first I had a bias against sketches, they would seem inherently of less worth than a meticulously crafted piece. Once I did one, though, I was struck by how much I liked the vitality of it. My drawings are done in mechanical pencil, .3mm most of them. I did the sketch in ball point pen. You can't erase anything with a pen, and you can't get every fine line. You simply can't, not if it's truly a sketch. Even a sketch can take me all night.

Fourth: depression. Was my depression caused by my block or was it the other way around? I don't know, but I think it's the only way out. OTOH, my depression flares up irregularly from another source, one that I have not been able to surmount. Someone missing from my life but not my soul, a misunderstanding never corrected, a wound that can't heal. But that's another story...anyway, I feel better when I'm working on a project, and I have so many to work on! Working – well, it hasn't outright healed me but it takes blots out the pain for a while.

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Okay, so, as of tonight I haven't yet done another new image to post.  Still, to give this blog a little legitimacy and to show you what I'm talking about, I'll post a few older pieces.  Apologies to the few people who know me, they've seen these already.  Thing is, I'm working in 3D media at the mo', switching back to 2D takes psyching into and I want to get something more substantial posted.

 This is what I do at my best.  See the hair?  I got lost in the hair.  How thick is a hair?  But I had to have each one - nad not a contour line, either, but the shine of each one charted.  It shut me down fast.  

That was done with a .3mm mechanical pencil.  That thinness of lead does not lend a side to shade with, it's all point.  That takes a while to get anywhere.  A small drawing can take a week, and my eyesight gives me  two hours working time before risking an eyestrain headache.  This one is larger, but done back in the mid/late '80s. just before the block took me whole.

Josephine Baker, unfinished ballpoint pen sketch on regular typing paper. Recent.  Now, this was supposed to be just a sketch to test the state of my mojo, which is why it didn't get more respectable paper...but I really like the style that came about for this.  I want to do more like this!  Somewhere around here I've got one of Carole Ann Ford that's really nice - I hope I can find it on one of my flash drives so I don't have to scan it again. 

This is something I'm still exploring, the idea of leaving a a piece partially finished.  I need to get her other earring and the necklaces, but what about her headscarf?  Will that detract from the emphasis on her face?  There's something about leaving an area where the process is more obvious that I think invites people to look deeper, to see what's behind the work.

This is primarily an exercize to discover how well rain can be done in ballpoint pen.  Again, typing paper (accounting for the unanticiparted wrinkles in he shirt, my bad).  the woman is asuka Kurosawa as Rinko, a pivotal (and amazing) scene from Shinya Tsukamoto's film A Snake of June.  As I wanted to display it on sites that were iffy about nudity, and the only place in the scene where she still has clothing is the beginning of the sequence - thus her hair is still not slicked down at this point.  That perhaps detracts from the image being convincing - at leqast, I'm not happy with that particular detail.  I'll try another at some point from the same scene (so many shots to choose from...)

You'll notice that none of these are from my own photography.  That's another problem to grapple with...I couldn't sell any of this, strictly speaking it's not my work.  The images already existed.  This is craft...is it art if it isn't mine?  I'm comfortable with it as long as I'm still only learning, but...that's another post, and it's one I don't know enough about to write.

Here, let me show you those last two agian blown up so that you can see the how the ballpoint works: