Drawing – Page 4 – bexODESSA

Home sweet home

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Holidays, Project 2

A bird sang me awake this morning. It was a lovely song and a lovely way to wake up. It made me think of how our lives intersect with other living things. How we witness each other’s existence. Whether momentarily or for long periods of time, we become part of each other’s story. It’s like Fonzi, he might not comprehend what I am, but, nevertheless, when he bobs past my house, he often sees a strange, upright creature standing on the beach looking at him. I don’t know what he makes of me, but I do know he’s curious about me, because whenever I turn around and make my way back towards the house, he comes in for a closer look. He responds to my presence, and I most definitely respond to his. We share time and space to together. It’s a beautiful thing.

As soon as I arrived back at Anam Cara and breathed the fresh sea air, I felt immediately better. Never has it felt so good to be home from London. There’s lots I love about the city, but even all those things together pale in comparison to this sweet corner of the world.

Spring arrived in my absence, and flowers and flying things abound. My favourite are the big fat bumblebees. I found one motionless on the doorstep the other evening. Darkness was descending and the rain was on its way, so I brought it inside and gave it some sugar-water, which it happily drank. I then played it some Miles Davis, which made it spring into life and start cleaning itself. Next I played The Who, but it went careening about the place, and seemed at risk of doing itself an injury, so we went back to Miles. Sadly, after our lovely evening together, the weight of living got the better of my little buddy, and it passed away during the night.

As well as enjoying all the creatures out here, including the horses that live next-door, and a pair of dolphins that swam idly by the other day (filling my heart with joy), I have been painting. During the Easter break, my primary artistic goal is to finish the Ann painting, which means working on it 8-9 hours per day. It’s an utter pleasure, and I couldn’t be happier. I have also begun drawing for 20 minutes each morning. The aim is not to draw realistically, but to draw expressively, in the hopes I will find my own style. This week I have been drawing horses, inspired by my beautiful neighbours.

Flogging a dead horse-hat

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Experiments, Green, Interim Show, Painting, project 1, Research Project

The other day I was lamenting to my fella about the agony I was going through trying to paint my green paintings, one of which I was hoping to get finished for the Interim Show. To clarify, he asked if I meant the paintings that if I didn’t do them there would be absolutely no consequences. That made me laugh so much. Because he was right, not just about the green paintings, but about painting in general. Absolutely nothing of consequence would happen if I never painted another thing. Sure, I’d fail my MA, and have a lot of time on hands, but no one would die, and except for a handful of people, no one in the world would even notice. And yet, I put myself under an inordinate amount of pressure, and approach my painting practice like my life, if not the world, depends on it. This has been true of the green paintings, particularly the one I had in mind for the interim show.

I absolutely love the painting I had in mind for the show, but I have come to the painful conclusion that it simply won’t be finished in time. Because it is a new type of painting for me, there is a certain developmental process that it has to go through, and rushing or missing out aspects of that process has so far resulted in a frustrating, dead-horse-flogging mess. So, before I flog the idea into oblivion, I’m going to return to the beginning of the development process, so I can build a firm foundation for the type of paintings I want to do. In which case, for the next couple of months, I will focus on colour and drawing figures.

During my last one to one tutorial, Jonathan put me onto a brilliant colour theorist, Florent Farges. I’ve already watched one of his videos, and it was extremely helpful, as is his self-designed colour-wheel system, that takes into account hue, chroma, and value. It’s all pretty technical, but I think it will be well worth the time and effort it will take to get to grips with it. So, watching his other videos, studying his wheel/s, and experimenting with colour is high on my list of priorities.

I have also signed-up for a couple of online illustration courses. So far, they have been enjoyable and easy to follow. I don’t want to do realistic drawings, and am not interested in portraiture, but I do want to develop my ability to draw expressive characters which convey emotion.

Instead of showing one of the green paintings at the Interim Show, I am going to show a painting I did when I lived in Australia. I have never shown it before, and very few people have ever seen it. That’s because I hid it in my studio due to what I perceived as a mistake in it. I always thought it was a shame, because apart from that, I thought it was a beautiful painting. Then COVID came along, the world went crazy, and I finally plucked up the courage to paint-out the mistake, and I’m pleased to say it worked, and the painting is now fit to be seen.

According to Greek mythology, Acheron (lit. river of woe) is the name of one the rivers in the underworld, which, along with the river Styx, Charon ferries the souls of the dead across. It’s an apt title for the painting, as I painted it at a time when I was miserable with unrequited love, an experience that sent my life into a tail-spin of hadesian proportions. Ahh, at least I got this painting out of it. A fair price I think.

The Dark One

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Experiments, Green, Interim Show, Painting

Some artists like silence when they paint, others like music. Personally, I like watching documentaries (technically I like listening to them, though I do pop my head up now and then to see what’s going on). My absolute favourite are pre-history ones, especially if they deal with religious practices and/or death-related rituals. I also like documentaries about water, hence why I chose water as the subject for my overall MFA project. As with pre-history, I especially like the religious aspect of water, such as its role in creation stories and its use as a conduit of transformation and spiritual cleansing. These two roles of water are almost universal, which is something I find fascinating. I especially love Celtic beliefs surrounding sacred bodies of water – that they are portals to the underworld, repositories for sacred objects, sources of healing, and, as with rivers, the embodiment of deities.

My idea for the Interim Show is to do a painting about the river Thames (from Celtic “Tamesas” – “the dark one“). Not only is the exhibition space on the bank of the Thames, but it is also an incredible waterway, with a long and fascinating history. I have chosen a small aspect of its history to focus on, and am happy to say that I now have an overall concept for the painting. The above image is a little sketch of one element of the idea. I don’t normally show/explain my workings/preparations for a painting, but we are encouraged to do so on the course, so I thought I’d give it a go. Once I have the concept rendered in a series of small preparatory paintings, it is my intention to produce one big painting for the show. I am not sure if I will have enough time to produce the big painting, in which case, I will submit the small ones.

As well as developing the concept of the painting, I spent the weekend painting more eyes. I think I have done enough for now, so will move on to some of the other elements I want in the painting.

The eyes have it!

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Green, Painting, Week in Review

It’s been great to be back at school this week, though its made me acutely aware how quickly time is passing, and how hard I will have to work if I want to make the most of the course and the opportunities before me. Looming large is the Interim Show, which is a college-wide exhibition for first year students, due to take place in the second week of March at the Bouy/Chain Store, Trinity Warf in London. It is a wonderful space/location, and it will be a privilege to show some work there.

I’ve decided I shall align my submission for the show with my aims and objectives for my overall project about water, chief of which is to include figuration (people/creatures) in my work, and also to size-up (i.e. make bigger paintings). Whether I am able to achieve both or either in time for the show, remains to be seen. However, I intend to give it my best shot. To which end, this week I have been working on eyes.

Although I want my peopley-creatures to be quite loose and melt into their surroundings, I would like their eyes to be expressive and convey the emotion of a given painting. Again, it remains to be seen whether this is achievable.

It’s been a wrench to come off the Ann painting in order to focus on the Interim Show (IS) work. I only managed a couple of sessions of the latter this week. However, I’ve now put the Ann painting away for the weekend and intend to only bring it out for my early morning painting session from next week, leaving my other two sessions each day for the IS work.

My daily wanders down to the sea now include a little paddle. Inspired by a massage client who is an ardent Northern Dipper (i.e. a member a wild-swimming group here in the north of the Island), who claimed her daily dips in the sea have changed her life, I decided to get in on the action. However, the stretch of sea I live on is not safe to go swimming in, due to the fierce tidal currents in the vicinity, so I have to content myself with paddling my feet. Holy smokes it’s cold!

To be honest, my first attempt wasn’t very successful. I had left my shoes half-way up the beach, so that when I stopped paddling in the frigid waters, my feet were very tender, and it was too painful to walk across the pebbles to get to them. Never fear, with a bit of Kiwi-ingenuity I managed it.

I thought my first paddling attempt might be my last, until a little while later my feet began to tingle and I had an overall sensation that was quite delightful (my feet are tingling just thinking about it). Needless to say, I have been paddling everyday since. I can now understand why the Northern Dippers are committed to there daily dips, though how they are able to get themselves all the way under is a mystery to me – though I bet they feel amazing afterwards!

Speaking of the Norther Dippers, here is a Pathé inspired video I made about them for a film course I did last year with Berlin Art Institute (note my fella’s amazing narration).

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Experiments, Green, Painting, Reading Group, Week in Review

A family crisis descended this week, yet, despite the chaos, I managed to keep up with my coursework and painting practice, and even made some progress. Here is a rundown of what I have been up to this week:

I have been loving the switch to a green pallet. It’s a very satisfying colour to paint with, and has plenty of scope for exploration. I am just painting small ‘acrylic on paper’ works, but hope to scale-up to large canvases once I have a handle on the pallet, and a better idea of the direction I want to go in. So far, I have found green to be a much better representative of “underwater/underground” than blue, and I like that it has a darker, more mysterious vibe. Here are a couple of successful paintings from this week:

As well as painting with green, I have been reading all about it in two wonderful colour books my sister bought me. I highly recommend both books; they really get the juices flowing regarding colour.

I have been settling into my new studio, and it now feels like home. It functions well for both of the painting projects I have on-the-go at the moment. One being the experimental underground/water paintings, as mentioned above, and the other, one of my big oil paintings (working title “Ann”) that I will go into more detail about at a later stage. Both require different things from a studio space, and I am now able to move between the two with ease.

I had book club (not the naughty one) again this week. This time we had a Ted Chiang reading “The Evolution of Human Science“. To be honest, I found it a bit confusing. It was written in the form of a scholarly, scientific article, and I wasn’t sure if it was fiction or not (which I’m guessing was the author’s aim), and which I was pleased to discover was, because it was about meta-humans superseding humans, and making the latter irrelevant. I also discovered that the reading group I have joined is a “post-humanist” one. I am not sure that I am a post-humanist, mostly because I don’t understand what post-humanism is. But, the other people in the group are clever and interesting, so I think I’ll keep going.

According to the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia:

Posthumanism is a philosophical perspective of how change is enacted in the world. As a conceptualization and historicization of both agency and the “human,” it is different from those conceived through humanism. Whereas a humanist perspective frequently assumes the human is autonomous, conscious, intentional, and exceptional in acts of change, a posthumanist perspective assumes agency is distributed through dynamic forces of which the human participates but does not completely intend or control.

Naturally, I am still none the wiser.

My drawing class this week was cancelled, I’m guessing due to the teacher strikes. However, here is something I drew in last week’s class on light and shade.

Despite how stressful the last week has been, 3 things have brought me great solace:

Painting (naturally)
My amazing, kind-hearted, supportive, patient, generous, capable (an undervalued but bloody fantastic quality), cute as a baby animal, and extremely funny boyfriend;
Seeing Fonzie.

Seriously, watch this video and just see if all your troubles don’t melt away:

Wait for it..

_{Title quote: Sun Tzu}

Back to the drawing board

CSM MFA - Progress Blog

Humans have been drawing for a very long time. The oldest evidence, etched on rock, of this most human of activities is estimated to be 40 to 50 thousand years for figurative drawing, and twice that for geometric drawing. Of course, long before we went to the trouble of drawing on rock, we were no doubt drawing on the ground and each other. Our ability to communicate using pictures and diagrams sets us apart from other animals and is the key to the progress we have made as a species. Drawing is at the centre of all human creativity, ingenuity, and endeavour.

I have been thinking a lot about drawing this past week, due to the 2 drawing classes I attended. One was a one-off intensive workshop, and the other an on-going weekly course. Interestingly, both were very similar, and could be best described as a modern, somewhat abstract approach to drawing. Personally, I like this approach, especially the results it produces. Unconstrained by the limits of depicting reality, it allows for freedom of expression, and a greater sense of emotionality. It is a beautiful and satisfying way to draw, and one I will continue to practice and incorporate into my paintings.

Here is some drawing did this past week: