Fall 2022: I was enrolled in an Anatomy course at Monterey Peninsula College in California. Below are some drawings I made to help me study.
art prompt monthly - march (part 1)
The March art prompt begins with having us find old printed material, and use it as a starting point to create a series of work. I chose old self-portrait photographs from 2000/2001 as points of departure. Then used either charcoal or gouache on photocopies of the original.
art prompt monthly - february
This month we were prompted to record the mess generated by our daily lives. This paper sat on my desk, was folded and carried in my bag, a mountain range was drawn on it and subsequently erased, it was scrunched into a ball twice and ironed flat twice, and then I covered it with white gouache. I only left one stain visible - the almost perfect and completely accidental circular stain of my coffee cup.
art prompt monthly - january
For 2021, I am one of 12 artists who are part of Art Prompt Monthly. For each month of the year one of us provides a prompt for the other artists, and anyone else who would like to join, to follow in creating a piece or pieces of artwork. The prompt can be followed precisely or loosely.
January: As per this month’s prompt, I found a piece of wood that caught my attention - a piece of driftwood that washed in after a storm on the beach at Tazacorte, La Palma, Canary Islands. I photographed it and drew it. Then I partially burnt it and used the ashes to make ink. With the ink, I drew the stick again. After researching the indigenous language of the Canary Islands (Guanche), I attempted to find words to describe my piece of wood. The most accurate descriptor I could find was the word for woman ‘tamattut’.
december 2020 paper birch
unable to see clearly
blurry; uncertain; unable to see clearly; lack of clarity; obscured vision; hazy; foggy
these photos I took by fogging up the camera lens of my iPhone with the moisture of my own breath.
commissioned drawing
Joshua tree bark
paper birch drawing 2
reflection shards
reflections
'Hide nothing / But the sky'
Small graphite drawings of the same tree’s bark.
Excerpt from To the Fig Tree in the Garden by Rebecca Elson
‘Hide nothing
But the sky’
framing the sky
sketching ideas
small almost A4 size sketch of landscape with clouds.
I have a strong idea of what I want to accomplish, but I need to work through a few images and test them out.
aert van der neer
dutch painter 1603-1677 - he painted these nightscapes… or nocturnes… i’m slightly obsessed.
transcendental etude
Yesterday I spent most of the morning simply devouring the book of Adrienne Rich’s poetry. This one struck and I read the last stanza again and again - about female creative practice. Here are just a few excerpts from Adrienne Rich’s poem Transcendental Etude:
[…}
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
—And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.
[…]
But there come times—perhaps this is one of them—
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;
when we have to pull back from the incantations,
rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,
and disenthrall ourselves, bestow
ourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansed
of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static
crowding the wires. We cut the wires,
find ourselves in free-fall, as if
our true home were the undimensional
solitudes, the rift
in the Great Nebula.
No one who survives to speak
new language, has avoided this:
the cutting-away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry
to which no echo comes or can ever come.
[…]
Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap
bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,
laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight, with small rainbow-colored shells
sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away,
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow—
original domestic silk, the finest findings—
and the darkblue petal of the petunia,
and the dry darkbrown face of seaweed;
not forgotten either, the shed silver
whisker of the cat,
the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling
beside the finch’s yellow feather.
Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,
the striving for greatness, brilliance—
only with the musing of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright; silk against roughness,
putting the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself,
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner, dangerous
to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf
that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound;
and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further
forming underneath everything that grows.
(1977)
pondering over clouds
clouds are on my mind and a new project based around their changing forms. more to come. just some cloud pics for you in the meantime.
legami exhibition
a couple more from today
number seven
even more charcoal push and pull
these sketches are about A4 size. I try to keep the execution quick - avoiding excessive detail and aiming to look at the larger spaces of dark and light. perfectionist Julia wants me to keep going with the detail… but the other Julia tells her to be satisfied with ‘good enough’. and move on.
