printmaking bonanza

these are my final projects for printmaking class, both are on 2x3ft linoleum. i've been really happy this term with my progress in art, i really feel i've unlocked some doors onto how i go about creating drawings as well as successfully making the transition from my normal note-book size drawings to a large-scale format. i was very intimidated by drawing in large-scale, it's a lot harder to conceptualize subject matter and composition on a scale that requires you to step back a lot further to make those crucial decisions. i don't have a lot of space in my room and it hasn't been easy to work on these pieces, but thanks to my overhead projector (graciously donated to me by Mikey Griffith) and some older drawings i had laying around i managed to create some things i'm excited to see completed and printed. i'm really excited to do more large-scale drawings this summer. printmaking is awesome. it's nice to find myself continuing to learn from my art classes and continuing to grow in my processes, but a little scary to find a craft i like a whole lot better than painting for the time being.

personal narratives?

this is an 11x15 drawing for my first lino-cut in printmaking class. i finished it tonight and will be carving away all week. i'm really excited to print this and am really happy with the drawing itself. sweets!

i.e. jordan and i's sculpture project

not a lot of you even saw these sculptures, so i figured i'd post some photos. jordan and i put them together in december for an assignment i had for class, and they looked pretty cool until their trip home from school when they were destroyed by portland rain. i like the photos though.

back to painting

this is a painting i did last week with tissue paper sheets i've had since jordan and i worked on that sculpture project. i did it by painting on a layer, placing another sheet of tissue over it, painting again, and so on and so on...i don't think it's finished yet, but i really enjoy the process and the ease i find that comes from using materials that are pretty much free. if i fuck it up i really don't give a shit and that feels nice. i'll be doing more of these pretty regularly i hope.

the colors ended up really reminding me of the southwest and the zuni jewelry my mother would always buy from pawn shops on our family road trips.

what grocery stores look like to a bird

i was really excited when i discovered that the interstate fred meyer has a balcony where you can overlook the entire store. i'm going back with a better camera than the one on my cell phone...

yes. i realized i had never seen a grocery store from this perspective and that probably not that many had either. the amount of stuff in these buildings is greater than i had imagined and i am still so enamoured with the view that i know i'll come back to it someday in art-form. as if cell-phone cameras aren't art or something, pfft.

MOON MAPS

i found this image online tonight, it's a map of the moon's surface with added color. wouldn't this make a sweet painting? someday. someday.

hey-o!

sketchbook, lino-cut, and more sticker paintings...

today

i decorated ricky delucco's fridge with skeletons and a monster...

and i did this drawing last night....

i'm becoming much more proud of my drawing skills. the skeletons are my favorites.

my favorite Borges

Argumentum Ornithologicum

"I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision last a second, or perhaps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the number of birds definite or indefinite? The problem involves the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because God knows how many birds I saw. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because no one can have counted. In this case I saw fewer than ten birds (let us say) and more than one, but did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, which was not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That integer - not-nine, not-eight, not-six, not-five, etc. - is inconceivable. Ergo, God exists."

for today, at least.

get moving

this is a new painting i finished tonight, again on one of those stickers about 8.5 in x 8.5 in. i'm really liking this one...looks like bones or something...

when i got home tonight my lawn was COVERED in foot-long earthworms. i touched a couple and watched them shoot right back into the ground where they came from. my cat doesn't find the worms interesting at all, even upon their retreat, and i find his attitude intriguing in itself. stupid cat. if i was a cat so lacking in the skill of the hunt (as he is, all fault his own) i would at least think a worm might make a pretty easy meal. or good entertainment.

oh yeah

ashley and dan! i cut all my hair off! summer's coming!

miss you guys...

tonight's crafts!

these are paintings i did tonight on these 8.5 square inch vinyl stickers ashley and i got from scrap a few weeks ago. i'm trying to really practice just letting myself play with materials, and created these by basically mixing various values from my 'use-this-paint-before-it-dries-out' drawer and smearing them on, letting them dry, and then drawing with a paint-pen over everything. i never have any idea what i am going to draw or paint before i start (well, i rarely ever have an idea). women and hands seem lately to be what i've been drawing, both difficult for me. i am enjoying the freedom i'm starting to feel towards drawing, and although paint-pens suck and are really hard to draw with, and there are plenty of places where i totally messed up and froze for a second, it's like i needed those problems to remind myself that i don't want to fucking care about some stupid sticker painting i did in an hour on a sunday night. it's entertainment for god's sake! i'm supposed to keep telling myself that. art school really messes with your concept of what "good," "bad," or rather, "fine" art is. i'm trying not to care.

and you know what? i like them.

the self-portrait

who is yourself?

"i never met someone who wanted to KNOW me as much as you do (when i don't even know myself), but i do know i'm capable of feeling fear and love simultaneously and that i believe one can be nothing without the other."

loneliness versus (via?) hopefulness.

hi

some random projects and disasters from the past four weeks...

a

i crazy.

form fully freely

the morning after

taking tons of photos of oneself (as it's hard not to in this digital age) comes often with a sour narcissistic guilt, but what i think it really boils down to is the constant desire of all humankind to try to see themselves as another might. digital cameras of course show our physical representations quickly and easily but most interesting to me is HOW people use cameras and the self-portrait to highlight what they might WANT someone to see about themselves. i'd like to think someday i'll write a book about it, but until then here are some of my non-sober attempts to represent myself, well, maybe a little more symbolically then i would normally be apt to do. plus the colors in my room were just too stunning to ignore. The first one is my favorite because i look like some egyptian mummy wrapped in a blanket. and cold too. i look cold. wow, is that how i want to represent myself?  as a cold mummy? 

oh check it out, can you see it? did any of you guys know that i have a harry potter scar on my forehead between my eyes? it's a special scar to me because i remember so vividly how i received it - falling face first down cement stairs at the otter exhibit in the former washington park zoo. i was probably only two and it was the first of many visits of mine to the emergency room. i am much clumsier person than one might think. the end.

THE PAST FEW DAYS

my eyes have been opened, we don't need to say how so, but i always appreciate the after-glow and the way my thoughts race down my arm from my head to flow out my fingertips without preparation, planning, or preconceived ideas. here are two drawings i've finished in the two days since, and both are powerful for me to view completed. i've been struggling for a while with confidence in my abilities to draw, well, representatively and symbolically as well as semi-realistically (in the 'you can actually tell what this is supposed to look like' sense). these drawings contain images of women that appeared as i was working and i love them because of my own surprise at the characters arrivals and at how much i'd been waiting for them. i feel an incredible weight lifted and i'm ready to take on a new approach to how i make art - for fun. i should enjoy what i do and realize that no matter what i make, no matter how much i like it or how much i hate it that i am never wasting my time creating things. 

yesterday i went through my studio space and organized all my old drawings, paintings, scraps, whatever i had squirreled away hoping i would find use for it, and when i was done i felt immensely better about all the attempts i have made within the past few months. although i've felt stagnant in my creative life, the disaster of papers and canvases i sorted through proved very much otherwise. it's time for me to look at myself and my processes and come away ready to never stop creating.

Welcome?

I have roots in blogging, but have resisted the urge to go back to it for several years now. However, the day is new and being sick of using myspace as a window into my creative world I've chosen a corner in this vast cyber land and decided to use it to showcase the latest, well for lack of a better word, excretions of art and thinking from my one and only brain. use it or lose it motherfuckers.