Ten Days of Sketching! (1/10)

The course of the year has nearly run to completion!! 2016, where art thou? As I sit here pondering it, I hear the quiet hum of my essential oil diffuser and smell the sweet scent of the present. Time is such a fluid thing, made solid only by our memories, words, and pictures of time past. None of my momentos can do any particular memory justice, but at least they are enough to recall thoughts and prove it to have happened. That is the charm of sketching from life. 

For Christmas, I got a little Moleskine sketchbook. It has this aura of class and functionality. The cover is really soft (you can basically pet it) and the paper doesn't produce holes when erased on. All this said, I think it would be a fun challenge to do a sketch per day! Starting today and ending January seventh, ten days from now.

The little scene above was completed close to an hour ago. I'm slightly sick, hence the tissues. Since this is Christmas break after all, I've been sleeping a ton and reading just as much. Even with late mornings, days seem nicely long. I can't say that I'm ever bored. My mind is always busy planning something. 

-M

Semester Laid to Rest

Currently, I write this in my little Christmas den pictured above. The air is sweet, literally, with the sugar and flour of my day long endeavor of baking. My body is tired from not sitting down since getting up this morning. I'm also a little bit distracted by Netflix while writing this. All is well. 

So I'm back on the blog. I've spent a year avoiding artmaking, felt remorse about it, and took on a drawing class last semester. My professor was a master of critique and helped me hone my drawing skills a little more. The works above (minus the photograph) are samples of my work this fall 2016 semester. Most of them are unfinished. Some of them are renderings of my university. Others are of my friends. Some pieces are obviously better than others. 

Above the technical, my professor helped me think like an artist again. To see life in hue, form and shade. But beyond the seeming shallowness of art, there is depth, and it is due to the nature of lines to convey meaning. I think that my year without art was largely a year without voice. When it comes down to it, there is nothing glamourous about art making. It's actually work, like everything else in life. Satisfying as it is, it isn't easy. There are lots of abstract problems to solve. More than once have I been humbled in the face of "I don't know." My professor posed a resounding question which has verbalized my turmoil in regards to art and life.

"Why do you spend your lifeblood doing art?" 

 The question is valid. Art is hard. The answer is not so clear cut. Maybe it is simply that I'm hooked, and I cannot live without it. Artmaking is beautiful and can be honest. It is a voice without words that communicate across barriers in society and culture. But it doesn't speak to everyone -- only to those with an open mind. It that way, it is a secret code reserved for a few. Those few understand pain and joy, for they have felt it too. Different medias of art do it in different ways. Videos can cause an overwhelming wave of emotion immediately, books can explore all the aspects of that emotion, while drawings, sculptures and paintings memorialize that emotion. Making art, just like doing scientific experiments, is a way to make sense of and cope with being alive. This has been an extremely hard semester for me on a lot of fronts. Taking drawing was one good decision that helped me tough it out.

Next semester will be filled with biological, chemical, and behavioral science classes. What form my artmaking will take, I have yet to find out. 

-M

In Everything

"In Everything"

This blog has laid dormant a little too long. Last fall, I started college and have since then been swept up in all the machinations that come with being a Biology major. It's left little time for art making or much less being in the art-creating mode. I have let utility take the upper hand to beauty, and I'm trying my best to reverse that. 

What is pictured above is not something I have intentionally made. For Biology 112 Lab, the assignment was to collect bacteria from our environment. I took several samples from different places, but this one was from the air vent in my room. I let it grow in room temperature for about a week. Just as I grabbed all my petri dishes before darting off to lab, this one caught my attention. An eye had grown naturally in the perfect middle of the agar. What are the odds of such organization appearing in such a random sample? I take it as a sign that even the little things matter. God sees all and is present even in the stress of school. He is in everything. 

-M 

Miniscapes

 "Aerial View of Black Desert"

 "Maple Mountains"

 "Gold in the Garden"

"Catastrophe"

When I was around seven years old, I remember my grandmother handing me her drugstore disposable camera to document her sixtieth birthday. I remember her bragging on my eye for composition to many people after seeing the results. Before social media and computers were really a thing in my life, I actually did go through old photo albums pretty regularly. Personally, I think that was the hieght of photography. Several Christmases ago, I got a pretty nice digital camera that I obsessed over for a few years. Since then, I've had a falling out with photography, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps its the plethora of photos on the internet that have fallen prey to vanity, or the fair amount of uncreative photography I've seen that is so bad that it suffocates my own desire to create via camera. Whatever the reasons, my falling out has resulted in my photo stream being cluttered only with pictures of homework problems, powerpoint slides and professors' office hours. All this to say, my photography above is a little dated.

"Miniscapes" was my AP art portfolio backup plan. I took a some of these shots a few summers ago in a forest in Sweden, and one ("Maple Mountains") at the Grand Canyon National Park. I like the concept of small things pretending to be great platforms for life. Dollhouses fascinated me as a kid and they still do. I have once been much quicker at seeing the details and appreciating the whole more. Observing the often overlooked gives me a fresh perspective on how I view things I see all the time. Really, that is the powerpunch of photography that many people have missed.

-M

Despite Apathy

"Affliction of Apathy"

The most disgusting thing is to see a life wasted -- a person working on something with such dispassionate style. When I see such people I want to despair. Conversely, people with a good sense of their purpose just radiate life in all they do. They are fires that cannot help but burn all that is in sight. Society seems to hold passion as a virtue essential for reaching "success." But culture preaches that a good life consists of being lazy and enjoying things like social media and Netflix. The mixed messages seem to have produced a generation that is able to do much but is willing to do little. So many people I've met simply don't care about things that will not give them any immediate reward. I've found it so easy to believe this, too. However, caring only about things that effect me is the loneliest and most disparaging worldview of them all. I always miss the good parts of life. Apathy is poison that kills purpose. It takes a strong heart to take the risk of being compassionate and spread the goodness of love in a world that is aching for it. 

"Affliction of Apathy" was made in response to this. The yellow frame around the baby-faced teens is hinting to the iconic National Geographic frame, by the way. I haven't liked collages much in the past, but I'm warming up to them. I'm pretty pleased with this one, maybe even more now, three months later.

-M

Faces of the City

Long ago, when I was in pre-school, we made a lot of crafts.  One I particularly remember was a silhouette portrait. My teacher illuminated the side of my face to cast a shadow on a black paper taped to the wall. After tracing my shadow, she cut out and pasted it on a colored sheet of paper (either red or green). One day, when all the parents were in class, everybody's silhouette portraits were hung together on the wall -- without names on them. It was then we discovered how alike we all looked. On the way home, I studied the portrait I had snagged, doubting that it was actually mine. Thus dissatisfied, I tried to make a genuine one by using an office lamp in my room but failing hopelessly because I could not trace my profile while simultaneously looking forward. The above portrait silhouettes were much easier the trace, thanks to my family members modeling for me.

I was assigned this project several months ago, but in the slew of school and summer and school again, it sadly hasn't moved much off the ground until mow. Pictured above are three of the four in the gang. The fourth is still on my easel. They are all quite large, each being 29.5"x23.5" and are made for the sole purpose of bringing color to an industrial-looking Laundromat, here in town. Painting buildings is a new favorite of mine. The combination of geometric shapes and color come together in perfect union, forming an image that triggers a feeling of familiarity in any human who has ever set eyes on a city. I see the city as an area of saturated human experience and therefore find it fascinating. Hopefully others will too and can see themselves or others in the silhouettes of these characters. 

-M

Happy Birthday Baby Brother

"Baby: Study"

Today is my brother's first birthday! He is the baby of the family, so naturally, he is doted on. This post is a tribute to him. 

Last spring, I used him as a model for one of my projects (pictured below) for AP Art. This project was one of the most detailed ones I have ever done. There is much story that can be found in this piece, and I think it mostly speaks for itself. It brings up the issue of teenage pregnancy and communicates in relation to my portfolio concentration, which was Modern Inconvenience. I think the more teen pregnancy has become normative, the more normative it has become for society to have disjointed families. This may be an obvious consequence, but young people seem to think they are immune to consequences. They ought to think.

"Children Having Children"

-M