Released

    Another digital charcoal drawing.  I am super-loving these photoshop brushes my friend Joe Daniels gave me to Beta test.  He's a very talented animator/designer/tool developer and I know he may be putting these brushes up for sale at some point, so if you're interested visit his page and send him a message!

    This piece is one where I just started throwing lines and shapes down and watched as they evolved.  My last piece, which was largely inspired by a great photograph of a little girl in a field and transformed by my emotional state, struck something inside me that I feel drawn to and I think needs to be explored.  This method of drawing and painting allows me to let go of planning just a bit and get some shapes down, and then continually develop and refine them until they form a scene.  This is similar to the approach I used when doing my MFA work, but geared more towards literal storytelling.  My goal here is to see if whether or not I can transform a raw emotional state into a coherent illustration without losing the initial energy.

    I will admit that it's difficult to not be overwhelmed by mental editing, and I will need be vigilant about those nagging voices when I work.  Hopefully, I have managed to hold on to the spirit of this piece and the experience will make its way into those of you who see it. :)

Unfamiliar

I haven't posted any art lately since things have been so crazy: buying a house, Gavin and I renovating it ourselves in an impossibly short time frame, finding myself working on an unexpected overtime schedule at Zoic...basically barely having time to breathe.  All the while I find myself stretched to an emotional limit and, as one of my favorite songs puts it,

"Nobody told you the best way to steer when the wind starts to blow, and suddenly you're a stranger."

So, I guess it's no surprise that when I finally pick up my pen to start a drawing something like this comes out.  This is one of those situations where I had no idea how I was feeling until I make something, and then looking at it my feelings have sudden clarity.  Often these occurrences are the best artworks I have ever created, and all of them have been unintentional and life changing for me.  I guess I just feel lost and overwhelmed and the biggest things I thought I was sure of in my life have suddenly become strange and unfamiliar.  Now that I know why I feel the way I do I can start making decisions to alter the situation and I know that with determination I will make it through.  I have certainly overcome some tricky obstacles in the past and this is no different.  So here is to looking forward to brighter days!!

Asterisk*

Here are some highlights of my work in our end of the semester show for Viza631.  And in case you're wondering, yes, the pictures of pieces that have fallen off of the work is indeed intentional.  My work is designed to degrade slightly over time, as the changing surfaces mimic the fluctuating nature of memory and perception

DAMAGE!!

So due to an error in mixing the plaster for the central portion, I lost a large chunk of the mid-right side.  I am very sad at this, but I also kind of like it.  Currently I'm struggling with the decision to repair it or not, since part of my concept is that I surrender control of these pieces upon completion, but it may take me a while to figure out what the correct answer is.

Dysmorphia

4'x6' (wax, salt, acrylic, powdered charcoal, plaster, plaster sculpting clay, playsand)

 

 

Today I completed my final piece for the semester, titled "Dysmorphia", in which I address specifically my struggles with body image, my diabetes, and gay culture.  My original plan was formulated in a previous post, but as you can see there have been some significant changes, all of which were discovered by accident.  There's a lot of talk about process here, but if you want to get straight to the meaning of this painting, you can skip to the blue section near the end :)

I began the way I normally do, looking at the intuition drawing to reorient myself on the emotional memories, and then letting my body intuitively express them on the canvas.  Next  I next began painting, using water to mix the paint with the charcoal, after which I began constructing the gash in the center with a mixture of plaster and (though I didn't intend this) plaster sculpting clay with I though was another carton of lightweight plaster and tossing around salt and powdered charcoal.  At this point I was feeling lost.  Everything seemed arbitrary and contrived and did not carry the emotional weight I had obtained in the intuition sketch.  So, I went to a crock pot in which I had been melting blocks of paraffin wax, and, since there were no handles to prevent me from burning my hands, i had use some oven mitts to lift out the pot.  Generally speaking, the pot was ceramic and therefore slippery, and this in addition to the lack of friction with the mitts its no surprise that I dropped it on the canvas and spilled wax across almost the entire surface.  Obviously, there was immediate horror, but these things do happen and I have learned to move with the situation.

So, I let everything cool down, meditated, and play with the new surface, discovering it was impossible to paint on but also froze everything underneath the wax which was awesome.  So I took it further, pouring on more wax, throwing n more charcoal, getting a knife and carving into the surface, spraying on a clear matte primer which allowed me to paint again, but what was this telling me?  I had done all these things to the surface but had not discovered anything.  But of course, this is when the revelation came.

When I first started dropping the charcoal, I had gotten a water bottle and sprayed water on to see if I could freeze the powder to surface with it without blowing it away.  Here I did the same thing, and unintentionally created pools of water that drifted across the surface, picking up particles of paint, wax, salt, and charcoal and depositing them in the cracks and crevices of the wax.  Unintentionally, I had discovered a way to reveal every mark and scar in the surface. 

How does his relate to dysmorphia?

Glad you asked!  I came to the realization that in this piece, the wax becomes my body, and every element that I added to alter the surface becomes a reflection of what I feel I need to change about myself.  These efforts destroy and alter the surface in ways that are mostly invisible to me, yet an unintentional element reveals the truth.  The water washes away the surface, picking up the superficial materials and redepositing them into the traumas that I have inflicted beneath the projections, forcing me to acknowledge not only the fact that they exist, but that I am accountable.  In many ways I do not see myself as I am, but only in terms of the environment in which I am placed.  This relative identification is corrosive because those elements are not inherent to my body, placed, instead, by the cultures of which I construct my identity.  The images of male models and masculinity are merely simulacrums of perfection, yet for me they have become reality and I am a deviation.  

You may wonder about the significance of the scar in the middle of the image.  Well, to me, the flaws in my appearance are the only things I see.  They become magnified to extreme proportions, though in reality they are mostly unnoticeable.  This scar is a side effect of my diabetes, called lipodystrophy (the deterioration of fat due to frequent insulin injections).  On my left thigh, I have developed a small dent where the fat has deteriorated, and though it's barely noticeable, I obsess over it enough that it is perfect for a representation of how I see myself.  

First Pass on a Final Piece for the Semester

As usual, exploring the effects of different orientations

close-ups of specific techniques of burial and excavation

So this painting is 4' x 8', and the scale is critical to the theoretical basis of my work this semester so the pictures really cannot do it much justice but I'll do my best to give an accurate depiction of what's going on here.

Staring at the huge blank canvas before me, it was incredibly difficult to make the first marks.  For whatever reason the sight of such a large area of pure possibility can be slightly paralyzing, and I have this fear that my influence will ruin that purity.  To help myself, I chose one of the intuition exercise to serve as a map for my emotional state:

Now I am not using this as a 1:1 sketch for an exact composition, but more of a guide to assist me in honing in on a particular emotional memory.  In doing these exercises, I am able to quickly sketch and express and remain true to emotional responses without the distractions of conscious mental processes.  However, working on a piece of this scale I am unable to maintain a continuous expression simply because I have to pause so often to prepare materials.  To remedy this, before I start throwing things on the canvas I stop and meditate on these sketched images to tune my intuition back into the region of memory response that I achieved during the sketch, and once I achieve that start letting my body create what it wants.  I literally use no constraints as to what artistic techniques I use: if I want to throw dirt and plans in with the paint I go outside and dig a hole and mash the dirt into the canvas.  If I want plaster to dig through I mix up some paint and plaster and glob it on and start digging through it, or if I want to cut through the surfaces I find the nearest object and started scratching and grinding away.  The process is incredibly liberating, and much like the photograms reveals much more than I ever could have consciously chosen to demonstrate.

As I worked on the piece, the meditations on my memories began to take the form of a mad scramble, as if I were digging to uncover something that I knew I needed though not knowing what it was  This is what it was like for me, especially in those first few years on my own as the strict rules that governed my younger years broke down and I built a new framework to live by.  This concept took root in my mind and I naturally began to look to earth and organic matter to form the surface upon which I literally dug through to uncover previous layers on the canvas.  I plan to continue to incorporate different materials over the next month to build mass on the surface and to further support the sense of history and discovery I am working towards.

Concept for a tree painting

Here's a concept for a tree painting I want to do. Since my phoenix painting I really have become interested in texture and using different materials placed on the canvas and painted over with oil. For this one I'm actually thinking of stripping bark off of trees and placing it on the actual trunk and then painting over it for some cool textures. What do you think?