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
bexODESSA 