Spent the day working on an illustration for a holiday story by Freeman Ng. Should be done in a day or two, woulda been done today but my printer ran out of ink. (What’s pictured is not the illustration I’m working on, this is a part of the second drawing I did for the Kicked Out people for Queer History Month.) Strange day, today MYDP would have been six months.
So I presented my Mentor’s Grove Project to Dr. Kay Fowler’s Death and Dying class (thank you, Kay!) for the second and last time for the fall semester of 2010. It was the first time I got spontaneous applause! Twice! I rearranged my presentation from last week, starting this time with a concrete description of the actual project and then moving into the “why this is so meaningful” part of the talk. Much more sensible order.
It wasn’t perfect but I liked how it went. I introduced the project as a use of art and image making as, for lack of a more compelling phrase, one way to suffer grief as a process.
I talked about a danger of working with images and meaningful objects: Forgetting the significant way of looking at them or telling the wrong stories about them when presenting them. (Ask me about the swimming with dolphins story I told at one of Brady’s memorial services. Perfect example. But I don’t want to spend all night on the computer.) But of course there is a virtue hiding there, the possibility of the process: images unfold, their meanings dance with you as you go through the steps, as you twist and turn, wriggling to get free. What seemed like a perfectly sensible, perfectly satisfying, permanently settled understanding can explode into whole new vistas simply by asking a different question of the image. The images wait through our ignorance and persist through the changes that allow us to see them more fully.
The picture above is a two page spread from a notebook from 2006. It’s a bit outdated and definitely from a time when I was asking the images the wrong questions (or at least less developed questions than I have now) Still I like the way the sequence of views(participations) the grove presents are represented by these six illustrations. And my cartoon of the scorpion people from The Epic Of Gilgamesh may just be one of my favorite drawings ever.
Tonight I finished with the idea of the image not as an illusion or a depiction but the image as a part of nature, a remarkably human part of nature. I will continue to develop that part of the talk though who knows where my thinking will be next semester.
I developed this exercise to demonstrate how complex pretty patterns can be built up out of simple shapes. I start talking about composition and mural design with simple ideas about pattern, repetition, positive and negative space, trying to get participants to see the graphic effect of what they are producing. I developed this exercise out of my love for kolam drawings. For the simple elements I went to my favorite drawing by a four year old. Below is a drawing by Nick (now probably 14) who was obsessed with King Arthur and Knights. I love that castle and horse. I think a t-shirt with that castle and horse on it would be great.
Besides the horse and the castle, Nick has pictured a knight with a sword and a feather in his helmet, and some other items I’m not sure what they are. A half eaten apple? An umbrella? A gift box? Actually I think the gift box is actually a sword in a scabbard. That scabbard image repeated in a radial pattern makes the star at the center of the drawing I produced. For the pattern demo I chose seven elements from Nick’s drawing, including the feather and a pocket in the knight’s armor that looks just like a comma. To those I added the larger organizing elements of concentric squares and circles.
Below is what I produced. About a third of it was freehand: it turned out it was speedier than Photoshop. But for things like Nick’s horse I had to share the original, so I cut and pasted. Participants were then given the organizing rings of circles and squares and asked to fill them in with the simple shapes like hearts, stars, diamonds, dollar signs etc., which were listed on the survey they took as designs people at the drop-in center would like to see in the mural.
… The Rat ran into The Minotaur.
This cartoon came to me while I was working on a film for a general illustration class. The assignment was to make a film meditating on the relation between place and character. What I came up with I called, “A film on location.” Funny, right?
Hi Kenya! Write me a comment when you see this!
