I'm at a loss. I should be celebrating the hope filled victory for the best presidential candidate this country has seen in decades. Instead I have to come to grips wit the fact that hatred and lies have motivated half of the citizens of California to vote to strip fellow human beings of their dignity.
Apropos of nothing other than the fact that the election is less than a week away and constantly on my mind, I can't help but say something. It's unfathomable to me that Prop 8 stands a reasonable chance of passing in California. More infuriating are the lies and fear mongering that are being used to support it. If it were simply being supported by people who believe same sex marriage should not be recognized, that would be one thing (though I'd still have my disagreement with them). But it's being supported by people who believe it will somehow lessen their own marriage. Or lead to gay marriage classes in schools. Or force their church to allow gay sex orgies on the pulpit. Or whatever other nonsense their lie-spewing church leaders have fed them.
Freedom is freedom. Other people's relationships have nothing to do with my own. My marriage to my wife is no more diluted by two men marrying than it is by the countless loveless traditional marriages that end in divorce. It is unseemly that there is even the possibility of writing discrimination into our state constitution.
I can't wait until this election is over, it's not good for my blood pressure.
What better way to indicate my sudden desire to draw more regularly than to spend an evening not drawing! I'm thinking creatively already.
I haven't been entirely neglecting the pencil at least. I learned a lot drawing this.
Once you've learned how to see, you see things that you don't even know you're seeing.
I'm unnaturally obsessed with Douglas Hofstadter and his philosophy of the mind. Also a fan of Rene Magritte. This piece has been bouncing around my head in some form or another for a long time.
This is rough draft #2. I like it but don't love it. Colors are wrong, spacing is wrong, and yes I'm aware of the misspelling. But it gets the idea across.
For some reason, when I stepped away from it (and specifically, once I took this photo and scaled it down), it struck me that it looks like a book cover. I accidentally stumbled into that odd subset of graphical qualities that most book covers seem to fit into.
Our condo is finally put back together after the water damage, so that's one distraction down. Birthday madness begins now with my wife's birthday, my own birthday, and mothers day falling on top of each other as usual.
But last weekend's distraction was the the finest. 3 days of heat, music and art. This was our third April visit to Indio for the incomparable Coachella music festival, and our fist since they went to the 3 day format. Our last attendance was cut short by a family medical emergency, so 3 days was a test. But we did it right, rented a house with a few other couples, having leisurely breakfasts/swims in the morning, and soaks in the hot tub at night. Good times.
The concert itself was off the charts. Blown away by several acts, notably Man Man, Sharon Jones and the Dapp Kings, Holy F*ck, Gogol Bordello Portishead, and, winner for most spectacular, Roger Waters.
I didn't really expect much from Waters other than zoning out to some good music. I knew he could still play and I absolutely love Pink Floyd music, but I figured that after 30 or so years, there wasn't much he could pull out to really get me going. How very wrong I was. Long story short: giant inflatable pig with anti-war/anti-Bush slogans that he released into the night sky ("That's my pig"), and a low-flying airplane with WWII-style shark teeth painted on it dropping Obama leaflets. It was an absolutely otherworldly experience and I'm thrilled to have witnessed it.
Others may have had him beat on their overall performance (I was particularly taken by Man Man's outrageously manic set), but Waters' show was the very definition of spectacular.
Anyway, here are photos from the weekend. Many of day 1's photos were taken by my wife, while I took the vast majority of day 2 and 3's shots.
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Remember these? Outlawed in the 80s, cigarette dispensing machines used to be a common sight at every restaurant, convenience store, supermarket, etc.
Well, someone had the bright idea to rescue these stylish relics and repurpose them into something not only legal, but damned clever. Namely, dispensing small, cigarette-carton-sized pieces of art!
Head over to http://www.artomat.org/home.html, find a machine near you, and maybe even submit your own art and make a few $.
Meanwhile, I've got a new piece in the works that I hope to be posting soon.
But that's no excuse to drop everything. I've haven't been entirely idle. There's not much inspiring in our bedroom, but I have occasionally pulled the sketch book out and done some exercises. This is a quick sketch of my wife in graphite. Similar to the style of my last post, but with an emphasis on speed. I'm working on getting basic gesture lines and shapes down quickly so I can get better at sketching live subjects. Getting better all the time, to coin a phrase.
So my class is now over. I really enjoyed it and I think I really benefited from it. I'd like to see what I do on my own for a bit, but I'm likely to seek out more instruction at some point. I actually wouldn't mind taking more from the same instructor. The consistency would be nice. It's funny, though, I don't like the style of her pieces. But I think that may be a good thing. It'll prevent me from mimicking and rather force me to focus on using the techniques to create my own style. The contrast will do me good.
My wife asked me an interesting question when I showed this to her. "Do you consider any of these sketches 'art', or is it just messing around?" My answer? Who the hell knows. I mean, this is just a crappy newsprint sketch pad, and I'm just sketching things to work on one or two particular techniques, I'm not trying to make any sort of finished product. Plus, most of the source material used during class was magazine ads (this, for example, was for some diet food or fitness water or something), so it's not like these things are particularly meaningful.
That said, I don't think there's a clean line that can be drawn (so to speak) between "art" and "not art". A drawing like this definitely has some artistic value. At the very least, it imparts a certain amount of information about my style and abilities. The sketch pad as a whole is a record of my slow learning process, which has artistic value. There's nothing in there that I spent enough time on to call a completed work, but there are things in there that I will surely reference and that will inform anything I do make from here forward. So in that sense, yes I do consider it "art".
