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Day 92, and the second in a row of having lots of time for art, thanks to a Sunday off. I painted the lower right hand “room,” glued the walls in place, and did most of the vase.
I still don’t know the main element of the third room, nor lots of details of the others. I did stitch a length of videotape into something resembling cursive writing, which will be the main element of one room, I think. Am I the only person who feels a mixture of sadness and curiosity when they see a length of video (or audiotape, when those were around) all pulled out of its cassette and tangled and dirty on the street? It makes me wonder what was on it–what still is on it, but is now inaccessible. Anyway, this one will be part of a sculpture.
#100days of making art
I started on an assemblage with some techniques and themes that are similar to the last one’s. It’s going to have three or four chambers, so a lot of what I did today was cut the inner walls to size and sand them. I also worked out the string pattern for the lower-right chamber (you can see the plan on the paper in the foreground) and drilled most of the holes in the walls for threading it through. I’m still not sure how I’m going to do that, but I’ll play around with it tomorrow.
I also had a great time drilling successively larger holes in the door (lid) to make a peephole. The cigar box wood splinters so easily that I thought for sure I’d have a disaster if I tried a large bit first, so I worked my way up to a 1/2-inch bit.
I’m trying to stay in that indeterminate head space where I’m lightly holding a theme and some images, without knowing how they all relate to the theme or even being entirely sure that they do. I know I am looking at the difficulties of understanding each other across gulfs of culture, experience, language, etc., and the extraordinary fact that we ever reach any understanding at all.
The virtual vase that emerges from the strung thread expresses this in one, hopeful way. The unspooled, unidentified videotape is more expressive of the frustration involved. If I look too analytically at these or other images that are coming to mind, I’m afraid their meanings will shrink away from me like a snail retreating into its shell. So I’m letting them float in my peripheral vision, hoping that while I paint and drill and sand, they’ll take more definite shape of their own accord.
Day 91, #100days of making art
Here on Day 70 of #100days of making art: the drawing in progress (above) and the model (below).
My wife got into the car on Sunday and passed me a handful of seed pods she had picked up on the sidewalk: different than the kind I drew in Sacramento over Thanksgiving, smaller and darker, though again I don’t know the species. “Here,” she said. “I know you like this kind of thing.” It’s so good to be known.
I put them in the well of the driver’s side door, and there they have been getting drier and rattling around. They’ve also given me an idea for the linocut workshop we’ll be taking from Katie Gilmartin at SOMArts in February. I want to have drawings ready when I go in, or I won’t get far on the print. I’m going to make a series (triptych, maybe) of these pods in various states, from fresh to freshly fallen to dried up. It’ll be a further exploration of something that’s interested me for a long time: the ambiguous nature of decay. “Decay” sounds like a judgment, as does “progress,” though one could use either word for what is happening. “Change” is a more neutral descriptor. That’s what fascinates me. Since they are growing more wrinkled and fragile, we would probably say that they are decaying, yet their beauty is not diminished. It is only different, and to some eyes, increased.
I don’t know how much they have really changed over the last five days. They might only rattle more now because they were damp when Joy picked them up, and now they’re dry. I have the impression that they’re more wizened and bent, but I can’t be certain because I didn’t look very closely at them on Sunday. I’ll know better when I go get some more and draw them at intervals.
For tonight, I just drew them as they are now, twice, quickly, in ink pen, as a first stage of getting to know them.
#100days
These are all over the yard at my relatives’ house. I knew as soon as I saw them that they would be today’s subject.
It’s a quick drawing because I am tired from every cell in my body’s being concentrated on digestion. I don’t set out to overeat at Thanksgiving, but I have to try a little of everything.
I’d like to draw these again, more slowly, and larger, in sepia conté crayon. Their beauty is something for which I am very thankful. I’ll bring them home.
#100days of art
“Or,” ink and colored pencil on a page of The Penguin Atlas of the Ancient World, 21 x 17 cm
More about this piece here.
#100days
Eh, I said in my last entry that I’d post a photo of my next piece about ancient and current empires when it was finished, but why wait? Here it is in progress. Source text: The Penguin Atlas of the Ancient World.
#100days
Yesterday’s art project was brought to us by our wonderful branch library: a workshop in turning plain notebooks into beautiful journals via decoupage. The children’s librarian who led it provided lots of great papers, magazine clippings categorized by my daughter who volunteers there weekly, and withdrawn books such as X-Men comics and a volume of M. C. Escher’s art. As you can see, I used his Tower of Babel.
Drying:
Front cover:
Back cover:
#100days
It’s been almost a month now of making art for a little while every day. I missed it on Tuesday, just tumbling into bed and not even remembering until morning that I’d meant to do some art. I also forgot it was trash night.
This morning, I was so jazzed to continue the piece I’d begun the night before that I worked on it before even showering. And then it blessed my whole day. It’s more altered text, of the text from an Atlas of the Ancient World (sic; it’s the ancient Mediterranean and environs, a very small world) and inspired by the maps themselves, and the day’s impeachment hearing. I am feeling a deep kinship with ancient Nineveh, and admiration for the people if that city. They put on sackcloth and ashes and repented? Amazing.
Here are that piece and another, both still in progress.
#100days
The cat spends the entire day in one spot, but she actually seldom stays still for long. It’s hard for me to draw fast enough to capture one pose before she stretches and turns and settles into another one.
So here is Luna twice in quick succession.
Sermons in Stones 
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