porch painting progress, P... P... P...
Friday, September 29, 2006
The colors are all wrong! Click the image to see it larger.
That is really a terrible photo!
I've been working on the new painting slowly but surely. I got all of the colors done pretty quickly, as you can see here. I went as far as to buy a roll of clear contact paper, covered about 18" of the left side and started cutting the lines out of the contact paper before i decided that i was just going to paint all of the lines by hand afterall. I didn't trust that the paint wasn't going to bleed under the contact paper, making a huge mess. It was also really hard to try to cut the lines out in a consistent width. So now i'm about 1/3 done with painting in the black lines and, more than anything else, it's re-affirmed why i wanted to use tape or some kind of masking technique to paint the lines in the first place. I can't paint a straight line to save my life-- even though i have a fairly steady hand. But i'm going with the assumption that once you step back 3 feet from the painting you won't notice the sketchyness of the lines. I'll see them, but hopefully you won't. I'll get a close-up once i'm done and you'll see.
I also got myself a small (4x5) wacom pen/tablet to use with my illustrator drawings. I had played with my friend's roommate's tablet a while back and really liked it, but i got over it and forgot about it. Then about a week and a half ago i hooked his tablet up to my laptop and started messing around with it in illustrator and decided that i really did want one afterall.
One thing that this painting is teaching me is that i like to work with curves more than straight lines. I'm thinking that perhaps using this pen i can get a bit more expressionistic with the drawings and a bit less literal. I've been wanting to do "portraits" of oak trees for a while now, based on a few pictures i've taken, and i think the pen can help me to work on the more amorphous shapes of the leaf patterns. I don't know, it's probably going to be pretty hard to try to translate the solid-colors-and-lines style over to something as complex as clusters of leaves. But i may as well try.
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two things
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Two things to share:"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and sour out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."
--Herman Melville, Moby Dick
It seems like there are three types of writing that you come across most often: storytelling, where the author is basically just furthering the plot; insights, which are usually very short passages in summation of a larger point, where you read them and come to this realization that you've just come across some grand universal truth; and dense prose, where you have to read a paragraph over and over to grasp any meaning from it, completely aware that this is the pinnacle of a writer's craft.
The other thing is this:
My friend Andy sent me a link yesterday to Danish Artist Peter Callesen's online portfolio of paper art. The A4 Papercut stuff is my favorite, but really all of the papercut stuff is awesome.
"My paper work has lately been based around an exploration of the relationship between two and three dimensionality..."
"I find the A4 sheet of paper interesting to work with, because it probably still is the most common and consumed media and format for carrying information today, and in that sense it is something very loaded. This means that we rarely notice the actual materiality of the A4 paper. By removing all the information and starting from scratch using the blank white 80gms A4 paper as basic for my creations, I feel that I have found a material which, on one hand, we all are able to relate to, and which on the other hand is non-loaded and neutral and therefore easier to fill with different meanings."
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A wrong turn
Monday, September 11, 2006
There's this Yahoo Group called Milwaukee Scooterist that meets up once a month at a bar in Milwaukee called Brigg's, on 25th and Greenfield. We'll get together and hang out, drink a beer, and go for a short ride. This weekend Discovery World opened up at the lakefront, so it was decided we'd ride down there and back.Discovery World is in the green park space to the right (East) of the red dot:
The red dot is the corner of Michigan and Lincoln Memorial / Lake Dr., where we sat waiting at the stop light to start on our way back to Briggs, in the light drizzling rain. We were going to go to 6th St, which runs perpendicular to Michigan a few blocks west of the map. I notice that the guy in front is waiting to turn left on green, so i pull up a bit and tell the guy behind him we could go straight, but he kinda shrugs it off like "he's in the lead..." Ok!
If you look on the map you can see Clyborne St. is the other route we can take that parallels Michigan. The only other options after that are 794 South, over the Hoan Bridge, or I-94 West.
So the light turns green and everyone starts to go, and I'm maybe 5th in a line of about 12 of us, and I see that the guy in front passes up Clyborne and takes the next right after that, up onto the interstate. So everyone just starts to follow him. I knew what he was doing and thought there's no way in hell I'm about to get on the interstate, so I turned right onto Clyborne, figuring the people behind me would see me go the right way and follow me. But not a single one did. Even the ones that saw me just kept on going. Perhaps I could have been more inadvertent, honking my horn to get their attention or something, but I was just thinking "maybe there's some way off of that overpass up ahead... maybe they know something i don't..." But they didn't. One girl was riding on her Vespa alone for the first time, another had a wreck recently and rides a bit cautiously since, and two of them were on 50cc mopeds that can't get above 40. And they all got stuck riding on the interstate in the rain for about 30 blocks, to the 23rd St. exit. Of course, the two guys in front were like "oh crap we're on the interstate!" and they just took off as fast as they could. The one guy who had been in the lead thought it was great, cruising on his old Lambretta at 65, and even decided to go an extra exit for the fun of it. In the meantime, the rest of them are freakin out... and I'm riding alone on the city streets back to the bar.
I wound up being the second person back-- the guy that had been in the lead beat me back and had no clue what happened to anyone. Everyone else was unaccounted for for a good five minutes. I can't believe that they all just followed him right up there. Now that i know everyone made it back safely, i can't help but laugh at the idea of them freaking out when they realized they were on the interstate with nowhere to go but forward as fast as they could.
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nola porch painting
Monday, September 04, 2006
I've been working on a new drawing in illustrator for quite a while now... I don't know what i was thinking, trying to do something with so much detail. I don't like imperfection, so trying to paint all of the lines in this image is going to be a challenge. Honestly, I should probably be doing this with silk screen and not paint, but... that's a whole other thing. Here:
Click for a larger version
So yeah, i finished the details this weekend and added in the foliage in the background. The plants are actully taken from a couple pictures of my grandma's house, which is nice for me in that the painting will kinda remind me of her porch. I bought 2 pieces of MDF board at Lowes Sunday, primed them that afternoon, and started sketching it out today. I thought about doing this piece pretty big, possibly at large as 7'x 3.5', but neither Lowes nor Home Depot had the sheets of masonite (plywood) i was looking for. They had birch plywood, which is pretty smooth, but not without imperfections in the surface. Neither place had full sheets of 1/4" MDF either, so I wound up with 4' x 2' sheets. I have a feeling that it's going to be hard to get all of the details down, but in the end at least it's not going to be something i finish and immediately have to put in the basement. I sure as hell don't have that kinda wall space.
I'm trying to figure out how i'm going to do all of the lines. For the kim paintings i did it all by hand, which was relatively difficult. The number of long straight lines in this painting, though, is rather daunting. I'm thinking that after i block out all of the large patches of color, i'll probably cover the entire thing in either masking tape or clear contact paper, cut all of the lines out, and just fill the gaps with paint. I think the lines would be way more precise that way, I'm only afraid of the adhesive pulling some of the paint off. Contact paper would probably be a little more forgiving, but i'm afraid it wouldn't stick as well and the paint could bleed under it. Stupid decisions.
I use an opaque projector to project the illustrator drawing from a print onto the canvas. While i was tracing the lines, i was thinking about how there is this sort of duality in Art, a split between the process and the product. This is true for any art form, pretty much, although there is a definate blur between the two where performance art is concerned. As far as visual art is concerned, I think the product takes precedence over the process, except in rare cases where the process is an overt component of the end piece -- Jackson Pollock's work being a good example. It's odd in that in most cases, the process and whatever meaning it holds, pretty much end when the piece is finished. In the end, what does it really matter how hard I slaved over this piece, or for that matter how easy it may have been? I think some people tend to think that taking shortcuts cheapens the outcome, but really, if you employ shortcuts in your process, who cares? If you have a staff of art school kids do all of your painting for you, so what, right? Art is the idea, and the realization of that idea. How you get there isn't necessarily part of the product. The process is all about the experience for the artist. Being the artist, it's up to you what you want that experience to be. Personally, I want the experience to be as concise as possible.
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