Right Brain Took The Day Off

I have noticed that it is VERY difficult for me to have days which are productive for both art, and not-art.

For instance, on days where I'm getting art done, cleaning the toilet is a Herculean task, requiring a stunning amount of planning, fortitude, and recovery time. I can paint, draw, cut glass, design a dozen new projects, and cut mats for 4 pieces... but somehow taking the trash out is as feasible as a 3 minute mile.

On the other hand, on days when I'm not getting art done, I can do the shopping, clean the apartment (toilet included!), make the cat food, get some exercise, cook something for us peeps, do the filing, answer that letter from my grandmother, and read the newspaper... all in less time than it takes me to figure out which pencil I want to use with my sketchbook.

Why must the 2 halves of my brain be on a time share?? I'd have thought this would all be easier. I have a natural tendency toward ambidexterity, and often don't know right away which hand I want to hold an object or utensil with. I have to think about it. Is there some way to think about things so I can get the other side of my brain into gear?

n.b.: I will be posting some pictures later today, or possibly tomorrow. I've spent lots of time on art since my last picture post, just more in the "technique development" aspect, and less in the "resolved execution of a design" side of things.

Two days' worth...

This is a poor photograph if a watercolor study that I started yesterday. I may or may not actually complete it, there are a number of technical and compositional errors. And, besides that, it's just a study--I wanted to know how this would look, if I put a bit more depth into the mosaic style I was working with last year.

There is a great deal of potential in this, and I suspect this will lead to another composition of a more complete nature in the near future. I may even get ambitious and take a better picture of this one.

Or. You know. Not. You can never can tell with me. Unending surprises around here...

an artistic problem

sunday morning
Originally uploaded by oferchrissake

With photography, there is a persistent problem with how it can be art. In a sense, photography is no more artistic than meeting notes--it's documentation of event(s), and can be just as plain as text. On the other hand, there is the idea that the photograph is inherently visual art, because it evokes time and place, action, stasis, and emotion. There is a story told, or intriguingly not told, with any image. Photographs are no more "true" than any other first-person account, and yet they're regarded as more valuable evidence than the expressed memories of a human brain. A photograph is not a painting, or a drawing, and yet offers the expressive qualities of both. It's a kind of printmaking, but somehow regarded as a less venerable tradition. New money, not to be relied on or accepted fully into society. And yet, it is money, and makes its own society.

So, is this photograph of red underpants on an asphalt sidewalk Art? Is it documentation? Is it true? Is it suggestive, does it tell a story? Is a single such photograph trivial, while a book of photographs of underwear on the ground becomes an epic? Where would the line be drawn? 5 photos? 10? 100? Is there no limit to the number of photographs that I could make of this theme that would turn it into an artistic statement?

Or is it already, in and of itself, Art?

Spring Blow Out

leafingout
Originally uploaded by oferchrissake

Textures

coffeechino
Originally uploaded by oferchrissake

I'm a fan of subtle textures. I can stare for ages at patches of moss, or old brick sidewalks... or the foam in my coffee cup.

Part 1: Soft & Hard

I am finally indulging my fascination with moss. Today I hot-glued broken glass to half a broken plate, and filled the spaces in between with starter moss. The glass is not frosted; it's been sprayed with a moss starter fluid that involves something like buttermilk, so it looks frosted right now. It'll get cleaned up later. The glass shards actually have very raw edges. Pretty sure hot glue wasn't the right thing, but it was the thing I had on hand.

The moss will eventually fill in and grow, as long as I remember to keep it damp. Since I grew this moss from a small dried chunk I found on the sidewalk a month ago, and still have enough left to grow more starter moss, I have some confidence that I might be able to manage this. As I told Regan a couple of days ago, unlike a lot of modern cultivated house plants, moss is a much older life form, and has seen far, far worse conditions than my attempts to cultivate.

There are other potential projects with moss in my brain right now, but I wanted to start with something that I wouldn't have to buy any parts for. I have a bag of broken glass and a glue gun, but most of my ideas revolve around carved designs in less delicate materials. We'll see what comes next, assuming I don't kill all the moss and/or lose a finger caring for the thing.

Old Glass, New Sun

Danielle sent me some stuff from my life-before-2D, and one of those things was a bundle with 4 panels of stained glass that I made a while back. It's not any kind of great composition, just a technical exercise, really. But it made me happy to see it anyway. Who knows, maybe it makes you happy to see it, too.

The panels are about 3"x5" each.

Test Pattern

There is a 5 panel water color composition I've been working on. By working on, I mean, staring at in frustration. Friday I got frustrated by that, and decided just to set it all aside and do some painting. For want of a better plan, I decided to play around a little with the color qualities and pigment separation of some of my paints. So, I made a grid, with circles, mixed the paint, and painted.

I can't say it did anything at all to advance the 5 panel project, except that it diverted my energy, alleviated some of the frustration, and gave me a sense of purpose that consumed a fair amount of my time on Friday. I'm not totally clear how doing something more or less completely NOT the thing I was trying to do helped me, but I was satisfied with it, and I approve of feeling satisfied.

Making Friends With Chalk

Another foray into the world of making friends with new materials. This sketch was done with chalk pastels, with the basic pattern outlined in black ink. It was kind of fun, and I don't hate it, but I have trouble seeing how I'd execute a fully resolved image in chalk pastel. So far I've mostly been using the chalk pastels to add final accents over dry watercolors.

Ongoing Obsession: Knots

I used to work knots out that were symmetric in at least one axis. Lately, I've been more interested in free-hand designs, and when they're more formal, in different symmetries, such as 3 and 6 sections of a circle, and multiply symmetric with 4 or 8 blocks.

Also have been working on some variations on this theme that have the general composition characteristics, but with not so much of the formulaic/formal execution of the knots. I haven't got pictures of most of these yet, because most of them are still in the stage of being ridiculously smudgey half-asstrophes on tracing paper. But eventually they'll turn into finished work of some kind, or at least completed line drawing patterns.



If you click this picture to the left, you can see some of the others, at least in part. The colored one is the same as the larger one (pictured above here), colored in with glitter gel pens. Which made me laugh. Because, you know. Part of me is still a 12 year old girl. Apparently it's the part that decides how to spend my allowance.

Man, stickers used to be really exciting! Those were the days.

Sketching with Oil Pastels

I'm trying to make friends with my oil pastels, because they seem like the kind crayons that I would like. The colors, the blending, the relevance to paint colors. Seems like a good way to make sketches for things I want to paint properly later on.

The problem is... I always hate new media. Almost always. I never hated metal or glass. But even new pencils are problematic for me at first.

Although this first picture looks kind of sloppy and disjoint, it has an alibi: The left side was drawn with my left hand, the right side with my right. I wanted to give both sides of my brain a little workout. There are only a few places where the two sides diverged significantly, and most of the size/shape/angle differences I chalk up to the fact that I do have a dominant hand.

This is just more goofing with the oil pastels. I suspect this would look a lot better in paint. And I might try it sometime. Without all the white around the edges, though. It's pleasingly amorphous and twine-y.

Really? More than a month?

It hardly seems possible, but the numbers don't lie. More than a month has gone by since my last post here. I have been kind of busy with making things, since then. I've developed a (possibly unhealthy) obsession with putting moss on things. I've carved in plaster. I've painted, and drawn, and consumed lots of tea and coffee--a critical part of the creative process. And I've taken uncountably many pictures of my cat, which is my version of practicing portrait photography.

This picture is a smallish oil painting that I have started, but not yet completed. It's partly on hold because I'm not 100% sure how to proceed technically. The good news is, it is so far pretty much exactly what I had in mind, as far as composition and execution. This pleases me. I expect it will please me even more when it's finished.

Sugarblog: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pUzpoQ8nBc2K4cQPGM02Gfg

8.5 years old, dx 2/22/08, eats raw food, microdose kitty (>0.5 IU bid).

Shockingly spoiled, even for a cat.

The Time It Takes

Sometime last week, I accepted something that has always been difficult for me to accept. I accepted the fact that creating things takes time. Creating objects. Creating ideas. Creating skills. Creating mastery. Creating style, substance, philosophy, all that. Takes. Time.

I'm not one of those incredibly impatient people who starts spitting fire because the clerk is taking too long to say, "Good morning" or the elevator doesn't show up in 15 seconds. I'm just a victim of my own very active mind: I'm lazy. Even knowing how common that is, even knowing how I've been this way for ages, it's still taken me a long damn time to acknowledge that being lazy isn't actually the recipe for creating things.

Unless memory fails, it was Woody Allen who said, "Eighty percent of success is showing up." This strikes me as a bit more relevant then Edison's glib, "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration."

Let me be blunt here: My brain is FILLED with brilliant ideas. I've had several ideas that would've made me rich if I had acted on them in a timely fashion, or indeed, at all. But I didn't. One problem is that I'm not motivated by money. I like recognition, although probably wouldn't want fame. Shit, I've had two nifty ideas since I sat down to write this post out.

Another problem is that I've allowed my social anxiety issues totally override my creative efforts. At times, it got to the point where I'd refuse to create anything, for fear of having to interact with people about that. Sometimes even acquiring materials for a project is stressful enough (in my imagination) to cause me to abandon the project. It's not exactly uncommon for creative people to be reclusive and weird about social interaction, but in my case, I've failed to be accidentally discovered, so either I need to push myself about this, or I'm going to continue not being recognized, and whatever I make will pile up in my house until I throw it out or am divorced. Making physical objects as art is much like breeding dogs... they're wonderful, but you can't keep all of them. You just can't. Either you let some go, or you have to stop making new ones.

This blog is actually a big step in the direction of connecting what I make with people who aren't me or living with me. Knowing people look at this kind of freaks me out, and it's almost exclusively people I know. Someday a stranger will look in here, and that will really be a new thing for me.

At the moment, I seem to be adequately medicated about my depression and social anxiety issues, and I'm hoping to get my brain rewired, so I will eventually be functional without the medications. And part of the chemically induced equilibrium is that I've become more productive and less fearful of what that could mean. For instance, although I'm still apprehensive, the notion of showing some of my art publicly isn't terrifying right now. And I've taken some very small, hesitant steps in that direction.

And, I can finally accept that being creatively productive leads to ... well. Being creatively productive. Yeah, it's couple of mirrors at an angle to each other. The more I do, the better I well become at getting stuff done. The more ideas I have, the more ideas I will have. The more projects I finish, the more projects I will finish.

This all seems very obvious, and I've certainly observed some of these things in the past, but knowing a thing and accepting a thing are really not much alike. These thoughts are lending me a new patience, and a new motivation. In the past, I have gotten so frustrated and annoyed that I didn't have the skills to execute the brilliant ideas. I hated the fact that my work has often fallen far short of my vision.

Currently, I can see how not only are those disappointments and frustrations not a problem, they're actually a necessary part of the process of mastering what I do. They're something I need to look for, and do on purpose, instead of trying to avoid. The idea of deliberately seeking out annoyances to engage with is pretty goddamn foreign to me, but there it is.

Anyway, if you made it this far through all my poppsychobabble, here's a little reward for your patience.

(What?! They can't go around naked!!)

Placate The Joc! Pt. 2

I like the white better, but I already said I wouldn't buy these.

Silly Shoe Parade Continues

I would never wear shoes like this myself, but I sure do like 'em!

Placate The Joc!

It's a little warpy, and maybe faded. It's almost 2 years old, and probably not handled well.

Today's Eyeful

This is the current in-progress painting. It's about 1'x3' or so, acrylic. I don't think it is anywhere near done, but this is the general idea. There will be a lot of detail in the spheres, if all goes according to plan.

SSDD

Here's another one. I'm so, so conflicted about this. On one hand, I love the idea of getting some of my designs out there. On the other, it feels kind of cheap. Not to mention my profit margin is crap. But it would be nice to get paid for my stuff, even if it's peanuts. But I'm not ready for the kind of mass production that means better margins. And I'm not really sure if I like the idea of going into mass production anyway. But, a creator getting paid for their work is pretty much my definition of a good thing.

Here is the link to the place where you can buy this postage. It comes in different denominations and sizes. This is real custom-printed USPS postage!

Again with the print on demand

squidmug
Originally uploaded by oferchrissake

You could have one these, too. You know you want one. It's what you've always been missing.

(get it here)