Polar Bear in a Snow Storm

I've always been a fan of the "polar bear in a snow storm" drawing (so cute!). Anyway, this is in poor taste, but it's for Palin Vs. Bears.

Faun

Again. This one is a little more concept driven. I'm digging the shorter hair. Unfortunately there will be another character with horns, so I'm working really hard to make them different.

Today is an experiment in color!

It was determined that this looked more like my sister.

Bang Bang

Banged this out in about and hour to see how photoshop would respond. It did ok, a little sluggish, but not so slow that I feel the need to shell out money I don't have on CS3. There are so many amazing things you can do with a computer, and I do this? Practice Practice Practice.

It's hard to think of titles for updates like this.

Starting the painting. I moved some stuff around a bit, so it was more of falling position and less of a OMG so windy I'm getting blown around. Legs haven't changed much so i just cropped them out. I'm thinking about taking this into an Alice in Wonderland direction, or maybe the opposite of that... conflicted. Anyway, this has been really fun so far (which is the point!) and I hope I can get photoshop at home soon. Also, I'd like to thank Paris Hilton for providing the skin tones. Hot damn these sentences where pointless and distracting from the real point of this post.



Found this at the bottom of a folder, I think I posted a detail, but this is how far I got before giving up.

All About the A-R-T.

I seem to be on a big art kick these days, which is good since it seems to be the only thing I'm passionate about. Here's a look at something I'm working on at work in my down time.

More Art?

Dicking around in Photoshop during my downtime at work, so much better then Oekaki. See it full sized here, be warned it's pretty big and full of empty white space. I need to draw more.

Ow, my hand. :(

I keep promising art, and instead I post this pathetic attempt at... something. This was done on Oekaki board, and that's something I haven't thought about or done in well over five years. Since I'm photoshop-less I have to try out my other less advanced options. Some people can do amazing things with this program, but it's not enough for me. Yeah... this killed my hand since I was gripping the tablet pen with a death grip. Also, it seems like every time I try my hand at digital art, I draw a girl with red hair and a dumb look on her face. *SHAME*

Did Being an Emo Bitch Make Me Genuine?

The image to the left was done in 2004, I was about 17. Sorry that it's not work safe. Anyway, I've been thinking that the art I've been doing for the last couple years seems very dishonest compared to what I drew in high school.

I was very much a teenager as a teenager, but I don't think I had anymore angst or insecurities then your average 16 year old. It's pretty obvious that I was putting a lot of what I was thinking and feeling into my art (not what I was doing though. didn't do drugs, smoke, drink, or harm myself.) in a really blunt way. People around me didn't get it, and to some extent I don't think I got it either. Something compelled me to draw, and that's what I did. I wasn't worried about what other people thought, or how my art fit into the entirety of the art world. What I was drawing was uninformed, and isolated from pretty much everything.

Now, after college, I have so much more to consider when I draw. The biggest thing weighing on my mind is the eternal question: "What does it mean?" Ok, so all art doesn't have to "mean" something, but art professionals will not think something has no meaning unless you tell them blatantly. Plus I don't think that art meaning something or existing in a context is a bad thing; if a viewer picks up on a feeling from your art it's an amazing feeling. In the same vein as coming up with meaning, I do want to have narrative aspects of my art, and I want it to look good, and I want it to look like someone older then 15 made it. There's all this stuff to consider, and I think it gets in the way of raw honesty. I don't think my art from 2004 was better, but I do think the emotion was stronger, and the viewer got more. The argument against that is that I was being really obvious, but I'm not going to touch that with a 10 food pole.

Unfortunately for me I don't think there is any conclusion I can come to about this. I'm stuck being who I am now, even though it's interesting to look back there isn't anything in the past that can be recaptured, or should be recaptured.

Arne Bendik Sjur

My posting has been, and will probably continue to be erratic. Blogging just falls down my priority list really fast.



Last Thursday was the gallery walk and considering how close I live, I should really go more. A couple of my friends from Oly drove up, and Tyler brought his friend from school. We had a grand time that consisted of deconstructing art and eating hot dogs. I didn't see a much that impressed me, and some of the work at the TK Artists Lofts was horrible.

So what I absolutly loved was at The Davidson Gallery. The main show was by a Norwegian print maker named Arne Bendik Sjur, and I have no idea how to correctly pronounce his name.

Here is what the Davidson has to say about the show: Personal Transformation is an exhibition of finely detailed drypoints spanning the past twenty years by contemporary Norwegian artist Arne Bendik Sjur. His work is about people and relationships. Sjur creates his evolving series by working on a single plate, printing an edition, then reworking the existing plate through multiple states. This continues until the series is complete. By obscuring and adding elements, the artist is able to portray the passage of time, transformations, and metamorphoses - suggesting the transient nature of reality. The small scale of each work and the meticulous rendering draws in the viewer and captures the imagination. Also included in the exhibition will be Sjur's most recent insect images and subjects revisiting his Chinese experiences in a series of sampans. Mr. Sjur's work has been exhibited in numerous museums in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.



Unfortunetly, The Davidson's website doesn't have examples that show how narrative these images are, which is what I love the most about Sjur's prints. I guess this comes from years of comics (ahem, Graphic Novels), but when two images are framed together all I can see is the gutter, and what might be going on. I'm also attracted to the weirdness of prints. Even the portraits have an otherworldly quality which I think comes from the etching plate, but could be all style.



I think I'll be adding Arne Bendik Sjur to my favorite artists list.

Edit: Some how I completely missed Sjur's personal site. Here is the link!

Audrey Kawasaki

I know this is going to sound super bitter, but I am over Audrey Kawasaki. I used to really like her work because it was esthetically pleasing and I guess the imagery was something that I felt some attachment to. Conceptually, her works never done anything for me, but when I first started seeing it that was ok. Kawasaki had a solo show opening over the weekend at Copro Nason Gallery in Santa Monica and pretty much every art blog I read creamed their pants over it. Here's the list of evidence: Boing Boing, Cool Hunting, Right Some Good, and NotCot.org. There's also an announcement and after opening post on Kawasaki's blog, but that can't be held against her or as a part of the collective cream. I think Kristen Anderson says it best (on Right Some Good), "More of the same of her slightly sinister, enigmatic girls, but so incredibly well done." Yes, Kawasaki is a great painter, but I'm sick of conceptually dead, pretty pictures. In the grand scheme of things, my opinion doesn't really matter, but some times you just have to bitch.

A Whole Lot of Nothing

Here I am promising to make updates with scans of my sketchbook, and then I get the damn thing back, and sit on it forever, and I didn't even realize there was NOTHING in it worth scanning. Yuck.

Here you go anyway.















The words in this are: 1)Pizza and a Movie 2)Cold and a Movie 3)Falling asleep and a Movie 4)drool. True story, that one.

More Work Doodles

I still don't have my sketch book, so here's another page of random doodles. I've never been fond of gridded paper, but I'm really digging these Hemlock (litho printer we work with) pads. Also, if anyone is having problems viewing images, let me know.

Art?

No, not really. I left all this stuff I need to scan at Tyler's house. :( Here's a work doodle to tide you over (and make it look like I'm posting).



In other news, I got super sticky eye cream, not sure how I feel about it.

Trying So Hard

I'm really trying to update once a day. Hopefully this will encourage me to draw more.


Random thought.


This Vietnamese place across the street from my apartment. I slapped some color on it because the pencil was so light. I probably should have put more effort into the color since the sketch was involved. I spy on the people that eat at this sandwich shop, just a heads up.

Christmas Eve

Even in my most spiritual moments, I consider myself agnostic at most, so Christmas doesn't mean much to my life. The consumer in me does have a good time though, and now that I'm out of school and have a real job buying gifts is less of an issue.



Like the pictures says, I got Tyler a toy helicopter for Christmas (I didn't pay 80 dollars for it, wtf amazon?), and this is basically the nerdiest holiday ever because he's also getting Super Mario Galaxy. I'll admit that while shopping for gifts for him, I wanted to get something a little more... mature? cultured? not something my bosses 8 year old son would want? I did break down and face it though, Tyler would appreciate a subscription to Smithsonian, but it would not bring joy to his life, or spawn naked drawings. He was super excited when he opened the box, and then we had to rush off to the store to get batteries, and then (this was the really hard part) we had to wait half an hour for the thing to charge. The first flight was rocky, but full of grinning and edge of seat sitting. Seeing how happy Tyler was made me understand why parents are willing to go into debt over Christmas. There's a substantial wave of pride that washes over you when you know that the perfect gift was picked out, and it's making the person you love almost pee with joy. We'll see how mario does, but I definitely win this Christmas.

That picture with the helicopter is the first thing I've drawn in weeks, and I feel horrible about it. My new years resolution is to spend at least half an hour drawing everyday. Work and the gym take up a lot of my time, but I can stand half an hour less sleep!