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Week XIII

  • Realizations about my work flow:
    • In regards to my creative practice, I always need to keep moving; I have a lot of ideas that generate and evolve and dissolve constantly
    • Often, I lose momentum on bigger projects and it starts to feel disingenuous to keep making them once the initial flame of inspiration has died out
    • It doesn’t feel satisfying to dwell too long on one big idea–if I do, I have to break it up by interspersing it between multiple smaller projects
    • I feel far more invigorated and less intimidated when I write in fragments (bullet points, mind maps, vignettes) and then string them together at the end to create a “finished” piece. This also applies to my painting and drawing projects. I feel like I work better this way. It provides a sense of clarity, lessens the hurdle of putting something on a blank page, and makes it easier to edit along the way.
    • Because I work best this way, I would like to work on some kind of instruction manual or collection of ingredients/inspirations as reference for my future self
      • References: Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono and 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl
  • Current trajectories and sparks of inspiration:
    • Writing about my inclination to work quickly and with accessible materials reminded me of a past exhibition that really expanded my perception of fine art: Cauleen Smith’s “Human_3.0 Reading List” at the Art Institute of Chicago. In that collection of drawings, Cauleen Smith depicted the covers of books that changed her life. (Coincidentally, Grapefruit was on that list!) If my memory serves me correctly, all of the drawings were made with watercolor or colored pencil on lined notebook paper. This really blew my mind in 2017–it felt radical to see such “lowly” materials treated with care and hung in such a prestigious institute of art. Even though the exhibition made a strong impression on me, that idea is something that hasn’t come up in my own practice until the pandemic hit, but is very relevant to me now.
      • I use music to understand the world around me, to self-soothe when experiencing difficult or uncomfortable emotions, and to connect with others (see: drawing my friends’ favorite albums). The desire to draw and write about my favorite albums has been swirling around in my head for a long time. Ranking my all-time favorite albums would be interesting, but ranking also feels like such a finite, severe act; I think I would get too intimidated/overwhelmed to work on it. Realistically, my “ranking” of albums is fluid and ever-changing. Regardless, I’d like to take a leaf from Smith’s book and draw my favorite album covers–and maybe write about them, too. Writing about music is not necessarily a language I am familiar with, but I’m willing to tackle it. I think I could achieve something I’m proud of by approaching the writing portion from an autobiographical perspective–i.e. where was I at in my life when I found this album? Who or what do I think of when I listen to it?
    • Making drawings for others: I have been slowly chipping away at these series (drawings based on ingredients given by my friends; drawing my friends’ favorite albums), but unsure about where to go with them in the long term. I don’t believe that every project or experiment needs to have an end goal, but I don’t like feeling too disorganized. Ultimately, I’d like my practice of making drawings for friends to become a long-term, if not permanent, project. I could use major holidays as a sort of motivator–if I aim to send some friends a drawing for Valentine’s Day, for example, then I have an informal deadline. Although sending digital pieces is foolproof and easy, I would eventually like to send physical drawings in the mail. (Right now, though, the unreliability of the postal service makes that too risky–many of my small packages and letters have gotten lost or returned to sender since the pandemic began.)
      • I revisited one of my old sketchbooks from when I was 17 or 18. Although they were undoubtedly amateur and clumsy (which is not a bad thing, of course), I was inspired by my younger self’s ability to draw from imagination and memory–a practice I all but gave up when beginning undergraduate study. I realize now that drawing from imagination is a skill you have to practice to maintain.
        • The desire to revisit drawing from imagination absolutely connects to my desire to escape/to make escapist, surreal work. It also connects to the idea of drawing for others in that drawing in sketchbooks, on napkins, etc. is a rather intimate and personal practice. It calls to mind the act of tearing out a page of my sketchbook to give to someone else, of doodling my friend’s portrait on a piece of notebook paper and giving it to them.
    • I am perpetually unsure about the “final” form of my obscured portrait/compulsory heterosexuality series. I still haven’t mounted my shredded colored pencil portraits (from the TBD exhibition) on different paper because that choice feels so weighted. I catch myself thinking, “But is there a better type of surface I could mount them on than what I already have?” Honestly, I think I just need to bite the bullet and remount them using materials I already have. Sometimes, the process of picking a new material, buying it, and working with it is an unnecessary barrier for the work, especially when it is experimental in nature.

Week VI

This week, I continued contributing material to the project I started last week, in which I collected ingredients for paintings from my friends. For my obscuring project, I purchased materials (gel medium, etc.) for photo-transferring on canvas–I haven’t begun working on it, though, as I’m allowing the materials to quarantine before I use them.

I also made some observational paintings when a sharp-shinned hawk visited my backyard to eat lunch one day. Trying to capture the hawk’s likeness was an enriching challenge because it never really stopped moving (on top of that, its movements were unpredictable), and I couldn’t see it very well. It was basically a gestural drawing exercise set to hard mode.

Most of my studio practice time this week was devoted to writing–specifically playwriting–rather than drawing or painting. I’ve been finding a lot of joy exploring absurdity and the surreal. The pandemic has rendered me a pretty strong proponent of escapism. Because my reality as a disabled and chronically ill individual is so traumatic right now, I am less interested in centering my marginalized identities and personal traumas in my work (although, of course, I still do). I am increasingly averse to artworks and pieces of media that act like op-ed think pieces–particularly about the pandemic, particularly from the perspective of highly privileged people. I’m simply not interested in engaging with the work of privileged people who are just now, in 2020-21, learning how to critically question their socioeconomic advantages. Often, the “out-of-touch think piece” genre of work feels like a shallow call for diversity–the breed of diversity that aims to make institutions and privileged people look better, rather than the type of diversity that tangibly, actionably makes reality better for marginalized people. Although some folks argue otherwise, I believe art that allows the audience to escape from reality–especially a reality as traumatic as this current one–is incredibly valuable. Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox now before I actually end up writing a think piece of my own!

I write short (3-5 page) plays every week for my playwriting class, but I have two long-term plays that I’m slowly chipping away at: Silver Spoon and The Galapagos Affair or Betrayal in Galapagos. They both fall under the umbrella of escapist/absurdist/surrealist plays, although Silver Spoon examines the experience of girlhood–particularly, the experience of young women in online fandoms. It is a loose adaptation of a BTS fanfiction from WattPad called Nerd to Beautiful. (Some of my classmates will recognize this title from a piece I made for Video II last semester, in which I did a dramatic reading of Nerd to Beautiful.) I’m incredibly fascinated by the concept of self-insert fanfiction, in which the reader is explicitly meant to project themselves onto the protagonist. I am so excited about the implications that has for the stage, for a piece of theatre that breaks the fourth wall and asks the audience to directly engage with the actors.

My other play, The Galapagos Affair, is about a group of three people that end up living on an uninhabited island in the Galapagos. It involves a love triangle and a donkey and was inspired by a true story I heard on the podcast My Favorite Murder. (For anyone interested in hearing that story, which took place in the Victorian/Edwardian era, the podcast episode is called Coincidence Island–it’s very entertaining and I highly recommend it.) I am using the reference material very loosely; I basically took the story and ran away with it. I’ve found that I really enjoy appropriating other material–fanfictions, real history, historical plays (i.e. Shakespeare)–for use in my plays.

 

Week V

TBD Exhibition:

In consideration of the TBD exhibition, I made a mind map seeking to find common threads between mine, Reid’s, Simone’s, and Kelly’s work (at least, what I know of it thus far).

020821_TBDmindmap

Some words and ideas that stand out from the mind map process (including the ones made collaboratively on Miro):

  1. Process
  2. Scientific/Biology
  3. Meditation
  4. Autobiography
  5. Curiosity
  6. Interpretation
  7. Distorting/Obscuring

Ingredients for paintings, courtesy of my loved ones:

For every short play or scene we write, my playwriting instructor gives our class ingredients that are meant to spur our imaginations. A recent ingredient list included “a reunion, blue nail polish, and an engine that won’t start.” We are allowed to incorporate them as representationally or as abstractly as we please – for example, one of my peers wrote a stage direction to this effect: they moved like an engine that wouldn’t start. Having an ingredients list has been very helpful in instances when my mind was devoid of ideas, and I think it’s a practice I will continue to utilize well into the future.

One day when I was feeling particularly unmotivated to draw or paint, I reached out to some of my friends and asked that they give me ingredients for visual works. My intent was to make a little piece and dedicate it to the person who generated the idea. Not only does making a painting for someone you love feel more special than making one for yourself or for a class, it provides a degree of accountability – because you promised it, that person will expect you to produce something. Also, I recently took an online quiz that told me one of my primary love languages is gift giving and receiving, which helps explain why I think it’s so meaningful.

Here are three of my favorite ingredient-based experiments so far (more images to come; I am way behind on documenting my work):

Studio Prompt III: Process Demo

I mentioned in my Studio Prompt #2 post that I wanted to make digital mock-ups of my future paintings in Photoshop. I used this technique for a Life Drawing assignment last semester, and I found that it’s a very useful, painless tool for planning compositions.

Using the process I showed in my demo video, I started making digital manipulations to use as references for paintings:

In a way, I think the digital references are finished pieces in their own right. I really appreciate the dream-like quality achieved by applying a gaussian blur filter in Photoshop, and I look forward to finding out how the portraits further evolve when they are painted on paper. It’s like putting these portraits through the blender one more time – they gradually become more distorted with each filter they’re put through, like how memories often get blurrier and blurrier with time. I think using gouache on paper will allow me to mess with the opacity, as I’ve done in the digital mock-ups. I’m also interested in painting digitally, though, if I can’t achieve my desired effect with gouache.

I also think Reid’s suggestion of photo transfer (onto canvas, etc.) is a fruitful idea for this series – especially considering that these digital manipulations may end up being my final images, not the paintings. Kelly recommended an amazing artist, too: Du Jingze.

Studio Prompt II: Paper

My reading and pondering about paper made me stumble into an idea for a much more personal, vulnerable project: a series of small portraits on paper about my experience with compulsory heterosexuality. The idea is to make these portraits as a therapeutic practice – to acknowledge my experience of compulsory heterosexuality, then let it go, making room for me to explore and celebrate my queer identity without hesitation. I would paint portraits of every man, celebrity or otherwise, I’ve had a comphet crush on, as well as every man I’ve had a relationship with. In their final form, I would like these portraits to be displayed with a flower – a means of thanking these individuals for helping me to discover my identity. I can see them being hung on a wall or placed in a book or zine.

Thinking that they would be studies for eventual watercolors, I started making bust portraits in colored pencil on paper. As I drew more and more, I discovered that the portraits were too detailed and representational for my comfort. Something felt wrong about depicting these men in such a vulnerable context without their explicit consent, and it felt uncomfortable to confront them so directly – staring at photographs of them looking directly into the camera, for instance – when I’ve only just begun unpacking the emotional consequences of the relationships.

Setting aside the colored pencils, I moved to the digital canvas, wanting to see what it would be like to explore these portraits in a more abstract fashion. Going abstract would help protect my own comfort and the identities of the subjects (at least, the ones from my personal life), although I’m not incredibly experienced with abstracting portraiture. One idea I had was to blur reference images in Photoshop, and base the resulting paintings off of those distorted images.

My Home Studio

Here are some photos of my basement studio space, featuring my little brothers’ painstakingly crafted LEGO village.

Two components that I really recommend to all of my peers: my cart from IKEA, which neatly stores all of my painting supplies, and my gallon of white gesso from Blick, which I got on sale for 50% off during their annual sale. That gesso is almost 5 years old now and it’s still going strong. I think it’s a priceless investment as a painter!

Studio Prompt I: Flowers

Although they are non-human and non-human-made, is the mere existence (and, by extension, persistence and resilience) of nature (and flowers) an act of resistance against capitalism? In that same vein, how is the mere existence of marginalized people an act of resistance against capitalism?

Many plants and flowers show striking resemblances to insects or mammals. I wonder how many visually similar species I can find.

Nothing But Flowers Concept Map

10 Flower Studies. Digital (Procreate for iPad), 11 x 8 in.

I decided to make my visual responses digitally, as it is a relatively accessible, pain-free, mess-free process. I find that drawing on an iPad is very well-suited to process-based work and experiments. It’s also a great way to work if you are struggling with motivation, as I am, because you don’t have to prep paper or wet material.

Reid noted that the two pastel studies (Flowers #5 and #6) have a similar sensibility/materiality to a watercolor I made last semester. It’s interesting how, even across mediums as different as video, I gravitate towards the same color palettes.

Reid, Simone, and I agreed that painting and drawing digitally is an entirely different beast to painting and drawing with dry and wet materials. I recalled viewing the work of illustration majors at my old school, MIAD, and being amazed at their ability to understand digital color theory. Strangely enough, colors behave much differently in a digital environment than they do with traditional media. As I made these flower studies, I tried to work with color the same way I do with traditional paints and found that they did not respond as expected.

I really admire the digital work of my friend and former MIAD classmate, Claudia Carlson (Instagram: @claudialinnea182). Claudia was a fine art major, not an illustration major, but her materiality and sense for color translate effortlessly into the digital medium. (Claudia also uses Procreate for iPad for her digital work.)

Recommended viewing: I found out that, starting next month, Tory Folliard Gallery will be hosting an exhibition called Wallflowers. All of the work will be viewable online at their website. Tory Folliard is my favorite gallery that I discovered during my time in Milwaukee.