Tindaisies

i want to go to palomia

I took the sentence which is the title of this post, divided the words and arranged them into  chunks until each chunk had no meaning. Then I thought about what the combinations of letters represented to me and drew them. I also imagined what Palomia would be like. By the way, Palomia only exists in my imagination, similar to wanting to have Breakfast at Tiffany’s

I was happy with the result because it looks like Palomia is an actual, exotic place that I would like to visit. I wonder what breakfast in Polomia would be like.

The Third Street Sisterhood of Lepidoptera Illlustrators Wash and Wear Bus Tour of Europe

Graphite, chalk pastel and old canceled postage stamps on paper. 8.5 x 11 inches

The sisters  opted for a wash and wear style that would adapt to any climate…. and luckily too, because it was to be a lengthy trip… and in no particular order.

They arrived home looking as fresh as the day they left!

Well, no, this isn’t a true story; this is a page from my sketchbook. Imagine how many butterfly illustrators there would be in one city in order to have a club  for just one street!

I have been spending a fair bit of time working in my sketch book, lately. I have a few sketchbooks, this drawing is in the one that I work out my ideas and problem solve in. This drawing was a rough idea that became more and more embellished.

I cut old cancelled postage stamps and collaged them into the drawing. They were from a rumpled old kraft envelope of doubles I had amassed during my childhood stamp collecting days. Sometimes being a pack rat is a good thing. It felt wrong to cut the stamps up, though… just like how you weren’t supposed to cut into National Geographic magazines or the set of Encyclopedia Britannicas for school projects.

Cracked

I’ve been having fun making found poetry this past week. It’s like collage only using words. The poem written in the above image reads:

cracked
found in the sand
between you and me
contents emptied
forgotten by now

Each line is from its own source, found as a complete phrase in some of my own creative writing, a recipe from a cook book and an instruction manual.

The doll head in the drawing is real. I found it in the garden two autumns ago while picking brussels sprouts. We live in an old farm house and the back of the property must have once been where a previous family  dumped things they no longer wanted. After heavy rains or wind, the soil shifts, revealing household remnants of china and glasss shards, buttons, rusty belt buckles, tarnished coins, tiny medicine bottles, marbles, wheels off toy cars…

The doll’s head was by far the coolest thing I have found yet. I wonder how long she stared at us walking by her before I discovered her. She would have been tiny,  her head is about an inch long; she is wearing a 1920’s flapper hat with a blue stripe on it. She has a mischievous smirk, she is not a classic beauty, but she is exquisite in her own right. I call her Betty.

Pride Takes the Stage

Here stands pride.

This is a simple little drawing that is perhaps a bit too humble for its subject. What I should have done was to have paid enormous amounts of money to have it plastered on a billboard so I could go about puffed out with pride about my drawing and how everyone will get to see it as they drive by.

No? Well, everyone knows form should follow function… this could be life imitating art, see?

Anyway.

Pride is puffed with hot air.  It puts on its best show. It precariously perches on the edge of its stage, filled with pretention that belies its vulnerability. This is a pretty negative image of pride.

Is pride a sin or virtue? It can be both.  In it’s best light, pride is the reward for a job well done.  When it becomes inflated with unfounded self worth, it becomes irritatingly obvious to all but the one who is proud.

This is my drawing for the Illustration Friday prompt, “Theater”

Waiting

Abstract, symbolic drawing. Willow charcoal, graphite, chalk pastel, conte, red ink, rubber stamp ink and collaged papers on Canson Mi-Teintes paper

Waiting to hear important news, whether good or bad and the patience it takes, can be difficult. We listen for the phone, check email …

If the news is very significant, the day’s main thrust becomes weakened. For me, I shoot off in other directions, rather than attempt a solid day’s work. Sometimes even the off shoots don’t see completion. As a result, dishes may be half done in the sink, but the computer is totally defragged, disk checked, updated, scanned for viruses and spyware and backed up. Yet more new ideas for bodies of drawings become sketched and written about until the ideas are flogged to death. Small freelance jobs are completed slowly, punctuated by wandering over to peer out the window and musing to myself.

So, pockets of little tasks get  done, more or less, while skirting around the perimeter of waiting. You have no idea how long the waiting will extend, when you are in the middle of it. And the little pockets of tasks become mish-mashed together where there is room for them.

The little arrows around the black mass of waiting are cut from a 1930’s United Church Hymnary that I stumbled across last month. On each of the arrows is the word “Missions.”  I liked the typeface of the word “Missions” and in multiples, the noun became an action, almost like animation.

In case you’re wondering, by the time I completed this drawing I was no longer waiting

Cinnamon Buns

Chalk pastel, graphite and Conte  pencils on Winsor and Newton 90 lb hot press watercolour paper

It began last Sunday after I baked a pan of cinnamon buns. I’m always amused at the willy nilly spirals that form from the dough and the over all effect when they are bunched together in the pan.
Then, on Thursday, I read in the news about an Artist fined over inflatable artwork that killed 2. As tragic as that was, the story got me thinking about monumental art work such as that of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and then Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.

I was back to spirals. It got me thinking about cinnamon buns again. No, I didn’t bake another pan, I drew pictures instead:

Spirals - To each their own

Chalk pastel and graphite on Canson Mi-Tientes paper

Eddies - Chain of events

Chalk pastel and graphite on Canson Mi-Tientes paper

Jetties - Cause and effect

Chalk pastel and graphite on Canson Mi-Tientes paper

Instinct

Charcoal, carbon and graphite pencil on BFK Rives

As it turns out, the crow’s penchant for bright, shiny objects isn’t to decorate its nest, but rather to stash them away, in case they are food. Crows just happen to notice bright shiny things, the same as we do.

I used this drawing as a means to experiment with texture by using different media. The silver objects were drawn with graphite because graphite has a metallic sheen. Contrast was added to darken the shiny objects with carbon pencil.  The  crow was drawn with lovely, velvety willow charcoal. Again I added graphite to the charcoal to create highlights in the feathers.

It was my intention to make the act of drawing – as well as the choice of media used -  apparent. The strings holding the objects together are unembellished pencil strokes. Oddly enough, those pencil strokes were the most difficult part of the drawing.

Resolve

Charcoal, hard pastel, graphite and prismacolor pencils on Murano paper

This drawing began as a curvy zigzag down the sheet of paper, the black “wings” came next and then followed the keys. I was thinking about balance as I worked. The balance of the elements in mobiles and scales,  balance in weighing good against bad, the balance of a saving grace within a bad situation, and of course the compositional balance of the shapes and lines I was drawing.

As I worked on this study, I paid attention to the dynamics happening on the page and questions came into play, how did the elements in the composition make me feel? Well, I really liked the black wings on the left, they were powerful although the right side was empty, blank, weak:  the effect was disconcerting.

So, in order to make myself more comfortable, I began to work the right side, it needed to be the opposite, yet balance the left in some way that I could live with. The drawing began to meet in the middle, and it ocurred to me that I wasn’t sure if both sides were coming together… or splitting apart.

An exercise in resolving a compositional problem, I discovered that the drawing itself was about resolve. Don’t ask me why the bird motif happened…

See the web gallery of all the souls here

Willow charcoal and graphite pencil on BFK Rives paper

I’ve been enjoying the effect that graphite pencil has on top of charcoal.  Charcoal goes on paper as flat black whereas graphite has a contrasting shimmer.

This series of drawings began as a very controlled experiment:

There are only 4 elements to each drawing that can be altered:

• hands
• face
• the silhouette
• and the folds in the robe

There was a predefined process for drawing each image:

• Each sheet of paper was precut to 4 3/8″ X  5″
• hands and faces were drawn on frisket film and cut out with scissors
• hands and face films were applied to the paper
• silhouette was drawn on the paper and filled in with willow charcoal
• film was removed, face and hand detail drawn with graphite pencil
• folds were drawn in graphite over the robe

The most exciting part of drawing these figures is what happened despite my controlled approach.  Slight variations in head shape, facial features, hand gestures and the shape of the silhoutettes all combined to make very unique, individual “portraits.” It surprised me as each personality took form.

I would like to draw many more of these. I’d be interested to see if a natural shift in the drawings would evolve from the process of repetition, or if recurring types of personality would happen, like human evolution and heredity, or on a smaller scale the party game “telephone” where someone whispers something in another’s ear and around the circle the whipser goes until it has morphed into something different.

If these souls look familiar, they are the small figures in the jars that Lucy Spratch plays with in the ongoing Spratch series

Daily

Abstract drawing. Symbolic road map. Graphite and Graphitint pencil on BFK Rives paper

I’m not sure if I like this drawing, but I find it interesting because it resembles a hand drawn map.

It began as an exercise in exploring the qualities of graphite pencil. The first mark I made was in the upper right hand area where the beads are, on parallel strings. As I drew lines,  they were like pathways and in fact, my pencil was traveling.  Road blocks, tangled aggressive swirls and a series of jagged triangles happened. Some lines were gentler. The variety reminded me of a course of events throughout a day.

I didn’t plan exactly where the pencil was headed, but the space I arrived at on the paper and the length of time each line took to draw, determined where to put each main event of the day.

• Sleep is a line descending downwards and moves through a series of different stages and dreams that mirror the working day.
• Waking is a spiral that eventually unwinds to meet the world in the morning, as the radio alarm broadcasts the news.
• The commute to work involves taking the right turns and facing traffic jams.
• Work is a 9 to 5 ritual of accomplishing tasks within the framework of the daily schedule.
• The commute home is the exact opposite of the commute to work.
• At bedtime, the day’s events vaporize and float away as they escape the conscious mind.
• Once again you dream of the day’s events.