Drawing detail.

Here is a detail of a drawing -- hopefully I will post the full drawing later. The scanner just wasn't big enough to accomodate, and I didn't feel like getting out the camera. Used rice and water color, pen and graphite. This is from Dec. I think. I started drawing with rice and watercolor, and took the rice off later so that the color would pool around it and create washes. I was thinking about sadness and winter and Persephone, her eating the seeds of the pomegranate (?) in Hades, and locking herself into staying there for a certain number of months. I have to go back and look, but I think it was really Demeter, her mother, who bargained to get her out of there for part of the year. Not sure how this connects to the other stuff, but sometimes disparate work eventually starts to inform the other, so I'm puttin' in out there. I am so happy about this blog, by the way!

additional member?

Hey guys, I was wondering if you guys would be open to another member on the blog . . .my friend Eleanor. I haven't asked her yet, I wanted to run it by you guys and see what you thought. Mori, where are you?

yeah, the city weights

Yeah, the pics do feel very heavy to me. They were taken on a an overcast day (most of them) and printed on gray rives bfk, so that could have something to do with it. Part of it could be that sometimes the city does make me feel heavy. Also, color choice -- muted, washed out. I don't feel like the images want to be light, as far as in the photos, but I do feel that when I start drawing them a lot, they will start to lighten up. The thing I love most is the fabric, which is really a black mesh. I like standing on my roof and seeing it blowing against the scaffolding of the school. They pretty much only work on it at night and in the evenings, I guess so as not to disrupt classes. The hand-drawny looking shapes in colors were monoprint. The graphite y-shaped spiky things were drawn after I printed out the image from the printer onto the monoprints. These pics are kind of what I have been feeling like, on and off lately. Not super light. I vascillate. Place does really determine how we delineate space in our artwork. When I lived in KNoxville, I was making these big open landscape-y drawings, things falling into space. Here, things are much more cramped and urban. I am wondering if the two will collide when I get back to Dallas. More art coming soon!

Oh yeah, and I did go to Blackburn for about 2 hours yesterday -- printed some drypoints -- not great, but it's good to get something on paper and maybe use it later.

a little more

Also, I wanted to say with these new images, I was thinking about images in the city, want to use images from my time here. I have noticed above some doorways and windowsills that there are these little y-shaped spikes, and I think they are to keep the pigeons away. I started using a similiar mark in some of the prints. I also read (In Uncle John's Bathroom Reader), that pigeons mate for life. I was thinking how people think they are gluttonous and a nuisance, when really they are committed and resourceful. I don't know about actually using pigeons in the work, but I was thinking about them (interesting how this ties in with the locusts) and how they are generally considered somewhat pesty and ubiquitous. But I think it really got me that they mate for life. That's cool.

Images loaded from last week

So I think, hope, pray these images loaded. It took me awhile. I had to do them one or two at a time. These are photos I took and then worked a little bit on in photoshop and printed over monoprints that I worked on at Robert Blackburn. Mainly I printed on the ghosts. I am not crazy about them, but love the fabric and scaffolding, so those images could be integrated into drawings and paintings eventually when I get set up in Dallas. I think I have some printer lines. Also the fabric had these orange cords running through it at regular intervals, which, when printed looked like a printer malfunction, so I also painted on top of the images with watercolor.

Oops, it cut off some of the lines of the locust installation.

And Lis, I want to see pics of your prints! Did you print your drypoint at Blackburn the other day? Your photos are interesting-- what are the individual elements on your plates? Is that rice?

Annee, have you started your gold foil eggs?

And, raise your hand if you think Mori should make something. (Mine's up. High).