Experimenting:
Paintings as love letters: my friends’ favorite albums:
works in progress
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).
Some words and ideas that stand out from the mind map process (including the ones made collaboratively on Miro):
- Process
- Scientific/Biology
- Meditation
- Autobiography
- Curiosity
- Interpretation
- 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 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.
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.