January 7, 2011
December 31, 2010
December 22, 2010
December 21, 2010
December 12, 2010
Another Positive Sunday Workshop
The Leaders of the Future at Project WOW! worked for two hours turning their silhouettes of Ball Categories into dynamic wall decorations for the mural. These will eventually share wall space with a special iconography they are developing and some sort of (possibly verbal) history of Project Wow!
We also started to talk about experimenting with colors in relation to the success of designs. Here’s a demo I worked up before the workshop. Weeks ago, after watching SENSOLOGY by Michel Gagne and MIGRATIONS by Alyssa Sherwood, participants tried to visually evoke beats they like. The first mural we are doing is for the drop-in center’s entry way and they are trying to create a welcome. Bashir — where are you Bashir? — said after watching the films that she’d like to try to use the techniques we saw to catch the spirit she feels upon entering Project WOW!: “Pump the Beat!”
These first drawings were experimental and didn’t generate too much enthusiasm. I played with a bit of this one by Midget (self-styled) to show how playing with colors, borders and ground colors could bring out what was potential in first efforts.
December 7, 2010
A Little Color Just For Today
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.
December 6, 2010
Best Grove Presentation So Far: 2003/4-10
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.
November 30, 2010
Presented the Grove Today
I added some new stuff, shifted my presentation around. I think it went well. I have another shot next Monday so I’m hoping it goes even better.
One of the things I added was an introduction on Brady’s philosophical concern for intentionality. I showed some of the classic illustrations and then I tried to suggest how this concept influenced his methods reading and interpretting events and narrative. I started with this drawing:
Which illustrates a part of Utnapishtim’s sleep test for Gilgamesh. Whereas today we would say, “Gilgamesh fell asleep” the text asserts that “sleep poured over his eyes like a mist.” I think both descriptions are available to us as sensations. Learning how the original readers of Gilgamesh understood sleep adds to what I can notice about sleep. Still though, sleep itself is known to us or at least something we are familiar with in our own way. I then moved onto this cartoon, dealing with another familiar subject, this time a bit metaphorically (?) and I asked the class, “And then what happens?’
November 28, 2010
style: visual identity & equivalence
I made this post card to send to James Kochalka when his daily comic AMERICAN ELF reached the ten year mark. My image is based on a photo of Kochalka and his kids and on a somewhat famous painting by someone else.
Here’re the same elements presented as a comparison, bits of multiply reproduced (degraded) GUERNICA and grid paper atop pages from Kochalka’s THE HORRIBLE TRUTH ABOUT COMICS. This is from a series of photographs I took: videotaped collages I made while I was designing a previous version of this web site (no longer extant.)
And here again a comparison involving the GUERNICA baby: this time posed against Minnie, Vinny and some Mayan Glyphs. I appreciate glyphs, especially with regard to their foreignness. I am always looking to achieve in my drawing and writing the formal quality I appreciate most readily in markings that are illegible to me.
And finally, GUERNICA baby and some grafitti I copied from a barrier on the side of southbound Route 17, around Allendale, NJ. (Graffiti no longer extant, except in the series of photos I took. I believe this tag says or originally said, “Messiah.”)