The Golden Ghoose

Rain Dogs

2011-11-22T16:30:00.000-08:00

I have been making dogs. They are play-actors in some orgiastic mess, unholy and wet.
I am interested in the gesture of the dog's body, where the squat, with the haunches as fulcrum, is assumed for shitting as it is for humping and being humped. This illustrates the proximity of shit to sex (loci in the pelvis, stretch and strain, 'discharge' [fluid and matter/release: ejection or orgasm]). I'm thinking about the fervor in being pleasured and in being disgusted.

Each is drawn on its own tract of cheap poster bond. I spray the paper with water until it is soaked through and adheres loosely to the wall. I draw the dogs in water-soluble black crayon and pull shadows from the pitch with my hand or a rag. When they are dry, I 'let them out' with a razor blade.
Sometimes the black bleed tags along.

The best part is arranging them. It feels theatrical and a little soap-operatic, making many relationships concurrent inside one drama. There are no two dogs of the same breed.

I am accepting my need to sometimes cut figures out. I like them to be sort of straw men, have some 'real' citizenship. They have to be bodies, not just be pictures of bodies.

Happy Thanksgiving the dog a bone.

The Ghood, the Bad, and the Ugly.

2011-08-28T16:55:00.000-07:00

I am reading Umberto Eco's On Ugliness.
He is now discussing notions of ugliness in illustrations (text and image alike) of Christian Hell.
Agents of Hell are often chimeras, with parts compounded from the human, avian, feline, et al. Also recurrent in their physiognomy is polymelia: a multiplicity of [consummately single or twinned] parts, like the beast with six arms or twelve eyes or doubled sex organs.

Thus, there is something horrible in the repetition of body parts. Abstractly and in mythos, with more eyes there is greater facility of sight; with more arms, of holding and handling; with more genitalia, of coition. In this way, polymelia is fearsome for its connotation of superhuman power. The latter is not always unsavory; it seems that Vishnu's four arms are a manifestation of his omnipotence, with fourfold palpation, knowledge, and might.
But I think the horror of polymelia lies somehow in its superfluousness. In life, most supernumerary body parts are nonfunctional. In circus menageries, you'll find cows with supernumerary legs that hang dead from their backs. It is that deadness, and the simple gestalt of more-than-there-should-be that is frightening. But why frightening? Is it the "error" of nature, citing mortality? Is it animal? Less human, more alien?

Lots of people are afraid of spiders. Like a human, a spider has a head and an abdomen on which its limbs are hinged. But the spider's eight eyes and eight legs immediately dissociate it from us, and are largely what scare us. The house spider is so small, and harmless, and as earthly as us - but with its many hastening legs, its many eyes appraising us, we would prefer it be dead, and not to see its remains.
Because it is so non-humanoid, is the spider a 'monster'? (Is anything that is aberrant from our understanding of what is humanoid a monster?) We are uniquely disgusted by the idea of being touched by supernumerary parts, and similarly, by the many legs of the spider. The wriggling or ticking of insect, crustacean, or arachnid legs puts a tremor in our belly. If the spider is permitted to walk upon us with those legs, it has assumed dominion over our body. Its weightless, woolen step has some preciousness like a lover's falling hair. The spider's touch is therefore a defilement of flesh.

These are of course just ramblings - a sort of shoddy exegesis that good reading moves me to. But indeed, understanding horror is important to my artwork.
This piece is a working composite of twice-life-size drawings, depicting a friend's body and mine, that I began in the spring. In an attempt at forging Ground, there is a 'bedding' of wolf spiders under me: black crayon rubbings of a rubber relief cut on tracing paper. From far away, they could read as a plot of grass.
The spiders were fun to make, but I'm worried that they are too much like applique. Ground - it's back to the drawing board with you.

Now end up with "Goosebumps" by Mr. Bungle.

If You Wanna Get Down, Down on the Ground...

2011-07-26T14:39:00.000-07:00

Where my labor goes today:

JUST BEGUN - AVA.
PASTEL ON PAPER, TWICE LIFE-SIZE.
Two weeks ago, my esteemed professor, Irina Aristarkhova (my Virgil in wrests with gender, literary, and art theory) gifted me the acquaintanceship of Guna Nadarajan, Vice Provost for Research at Baltimore’s MICA.
Over coffee in northern Virginia, Guna posited several questions about my work, which seemed capable of hastening a good ecdysis of my stuff.
The first, and the one I’ll try to unpack here, was “What Is Ground?”
Damn.

When I am drawing you, where are you within the image? I have rarely rendered a definable background to house figures. Often nowadays, all my ephemeral marks, which are a record of my “missteps”, are what enclose the figure. They are accompanied by tons of inadvertent fingerprints, condensed into something like an army of flies.

The fingerprints get there because as I draw with my right hand, I hold as many pastels in my left as I can. Then, when the paper has buckled where I must achieve some fineness of line, I use my left hand to press it flat as I draw. Bodily regions that are important to me – like faces – will always sport this mark to their left. Only where I have cut the figure out of its page or painted a dark color around him/her will there be no buzz of fingerprints.
The fingerprints have garnered many responses, heartening and hateful alike. I guess I like that they signify my body and that peristaltic process of ‘physical intimacy’ that births another’s [often nude] body on the page.

I need to settle up my estate with Ground. I have treated it as utterly ‘second chair’ to the aria of the body. The only rub of my ground, the fingerprints, is accidental and still uncertain.

Don’t I want you to be somewhere?
In the mud, the fluid, the membrane, the sac of consciousness. On the slab, an examination table, to be studied and the marvel of your form cooed at. In the hot white light, where you have left your body (deferring some control to the viewer) and have never lived so truly inside it (your autonomy, and the autonomy of your nakedness, still whole). In some impossibly transient moment where you were divine. Human but somehow less temporal: transcendent.
The picture is a document of who you were just then, just now.
I don’t really need to see the room you live in, or your things beside you. Isn’t your body where you live, inextricably? Aren’t those parts grafted all over you, your property, your onus, your tools?

I don’t know what to do with Ground. I think I need to keep the fingerprints, but I think I need to pump up the jam, for sure.

Body Talk

2011-05-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

And it seems like,
And it feels like,
A brand new day.
- Van Morrison

1. Twinned [Marc]: pastel over watercolor wash on cold-pressed paper.
Winter intercession had me in total psychological dissolution. The loss of Guru Meher was, and is, a little ship sinking in my heart. But with those weeks to recalibrate, my January return to State College was good.

Really good.
I taught Figure Drawing to a covey of genius-students, whose vision and energy restored mine. Because teaching that mirrored my own studio practice, it enabled me to go fully heart-bound into what I do. I got a lot closer to knowing and feeling the 'purpose' in my work.
(Go on, blush).

1. Abrade [Mordecai]: pastel over watercolor wash on cold-pressed paper; craft paper; crayon rubbings of woodblock cut.
2. Untitled [Tapir, Knotweed, Nicholas]: charcoal drawing on cold-pressed paper; sanguine conte rubbing of woodblock cut; pastel and water drawing on Tyvek.
I enjoyed a theory course around ideas of beauty (and willfully revisited Freud, Marx, and Foucault). I also enjoyed further experimentation with printmaking, and the counsel of my peers and visiting artists in Graduate Seminar.
I read A Mercy by Toni Morrison, which pulled my heart chakra wide open, and now I have run the gamut whole of her books.
I placed second in the Penn State School of Visual Arts' Graduate Research Exhibition in March, which was a great lift.

1. Press [Kirsten]: pastel over watercolor wash on cold-pressed paper.
2. Gird [Bobby]: pastel over watercolor wash on cold-pressed paper.
I made new self-portraits, attempting to illustrate both distress and desire. I am inhabiting my body somehow differently than I used to, and I am much happier.

1. Untitled [Self, Down]: pastel and water on cold-pressed paper; craft paper; hot-glued graphite rubbings of woodblock cuts.
2.Untitled [Self, Up]: pastel over watercolor wash on cold-pressed paper.
3. Oh, I Was - [Grief]: charcoal and water on cold pressed paper.

What I'm posting here is not all that I made, but is the bulk of it. It was a fruitful semester of hard work and rebirth. And I defeated some hesitancies insofar as what I depict and how, and am thus closer to someday making my actual point.
I think that if I so want to excise people's shame and fear, I should try to have none myself. And so it is. I will not be abashed, guilted, or made remorseful.
So, save the date: in April 2012, my wonderful colleague Kerri O'Neill and I will install our MFA thesis show.

Annotations by Mr. Bungle; New Art by Ghi.

2010-11-13T17:16:00.000-08:00

You're not human,
you're a miracle.
From Vanity Fair

OUTMOUTH
Completed September 2010.
Pastel, watercolor, and gouache
on cold-pressed paper.
3'9"x5'7".
First part of 'overgrowth' series.

So much. To abridge me:
+ My lover and partner and friend, Gu, died suddenly in September. This took apart my world in a deluge of grief.
+ I am a graduate student at Penn State. I have a big, beautiful studio which I occupy most of the time. I teach Introductory Drawing to non-majors.
+ I enjoy the companionship of a uniformly brilliant and talented community.

Love and blood begin to meld, you've lost the self that you once held
Merry go round your head - awake, asleep, alive, or dead.
From Carousel

(UNTITLED) [ANNIATOLE]
Completed October 2010.
Pastel, watercolor, and gouache
on cold-pressed paper.
57"x29".
Overgrowth series.

There is a careful fault-line in my heart that maps the loss of Gu, embankment to a watery recess that's only sadness. It has been remarkable to find relief in working. I have always loved to draw, but never like this.
I am finding again my hard, loving itch for beauty (but am discussing it freshly).

(UNTITLED) [NICHOLAS]
In progress.
8B graphite, vine charcoal, and
dirty water on cold-pressed paper.
42" in height.

In your technicolor heartbeat.
And they say
that it helps you forget everything.
From Sweet Charity

This hemming pain has been repelled a little by listening more to all of Mike Patton's music, which is why I've peppered this entry with it. I have lived there. I returned also to some country and to some especially lewd and sophomoric hair metal.
I'm helped also by studying and the acumination of my critical thinking. I've been decentered, but somehow I feel closer to myself.

(UNTITLED) [EMILY]
In progress.
Pastel over watercolor wash
on cold-pressed paper.
45"x55".
Overgrowth series.

Now I'm finding truth is a ruin.
Nauseous end that nobody is pursuing.
From Retrovertigo

My program entitles me to work all the time. All the time. I adore it.
The temporarily titled Overgrowth series deals in ideas of the body, sexuality, and disgust. Furthermore, it looks at affiliations of the specific form of body parts and facial sites with a condition or disease of soul. I'll explain more of that later on. There are recurrent themes of self-worth, illness, ugliness, and also splendor, confection, and richest pulchritude.

(UNTITLED) [BABOONS]
In progress.
Marker, watercolor, and white
chalk on cut cold-pressed paper.
About 3' at max.
Overgrowth series.

The St. Sebastian piece (below) is shortly to become my first drawing gone performance gone sculpture. There will likely be an entry in this blog devoted only to its documentation. So look alive.
I remember that in my freshmen year of college, seven years ago, I proposed creating a segmented painting of St. Sebastian for Painting Studio I. I cannot recall why, but I shelved the idea. It was, indeed, too ambitious then and I am pleased that I waited these years to now stamp this terrain so hard. It feels terribly good.

ST. SEBASTIAN WITH SPARKLERS
In progress.

Pastel and charcoal atop ColourFix-primed
32"x80" hollow-core door.
Figure drawn from imagination. Been a minute for wingin' it.

My hand gets tired and my dick gets sore
but the girls of porn want more.
So I flip through the pages one more time
and I just let the jism fly.
From Girls of Porn

So I'm working and it is apparently salvation. Just like they tell you.

(UNTITLED) [VALERIE]
In progress.
White charcoal pencil on black
craft paper.
2.5' in width.
Overgrowth series.

Where's my rainbow?
Where's my halo?
There's my halo.
From The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

Ghi for Two and Gu for Tea

2010-08-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

10/26/10 - This portrait was created (and this blogpost composed) before Gu's passing in September. He and I had a wonderful dialogue as I was making it. He loved the picture. I hope this is at all helpful to everyone whose heart is rent by the loss of Gu.

Click to enlarge.
GURU MEHER
JULY 2010
30"x44"
PASTEL, WATERCOLOR, GOUACHE

When I was sixteen, I was blessed with the camaraderie of Gu (Guru Meher). The plain phonetic appeal of “Gu and Ghi/Ghi and Gu” and our knack for portmanteau summate the mirth and musicality of our relationship. He pocketed my heart then, and has since never returned it. Gu is a rarity and completely without parallel in the world.

He is intellectual, extraordinarily complex, and Good, and the way he looks holds close hands with these traits. He is terribly pretty, and his bearing is indefinable and intense. All of this supplies a platform of reason for the many hours I spent drawing Gu when we were younger. He was even achromatically (and poorly) depicted in the third acrylic painting I ever made.

A N00B TEEN-GRADE FEATHERED-LINE SITTING SKETCH FROM 2003.
GU AT 15.
I left for college only a few months after Gu and I got close. In my sophomore year, after Gu had cut his very long hair, I drew his portrait in the only work I ever purposefully dubbed ‘Untitled’. The picture was an aberration from my style then, using landscape, color, black and white, pastel, ink, pencil, text, and a multi-figure hosting. ‘Untitled’ won me $1,000 from the Berkshire Art Association Fellowship that year.
And so Gu has long been deeply important and dear to me, for the gift of him in my life and his mien so compelling it turns wheels in my artwork. (Though of course, looking at ‘Untitled’ now, you’ll find it’s really quite awful.)

PROMOTIONAL PLACARD FROM BAA SHOW.
FIND THE GU, AND THE GHI.

Gu was gone to the west coast for a while, but returned here in June. His company put the pencil back in my hand, and I drew him again.

It seems that I unbridle my creative mind when Gu’s my subject. I feel a sudden ease with symbolism and metaphor (however [un]successful I am is irrelevant). As part of my sketching process, I wrote two pages of words that recount or illuminate Gu. (Ex: Bur, Tissue, Earth, Light, Narrow, Cool Set, Mouth, Seared, Tactile, Side/Stitch, Nimble). The words help me focus the thesis of the portrait, though they are esoteric, even absurd and stiflingly personal to read. Of the Inventory made for Gu, the words:
INCARNATIONS
CIRCLE
BOUGH/FINGER/ARM/TRIBUTARY/TENTACLE- were chosen.

Gu’s upper-body and face were inarguably going to be the mast of the picture, and carry the symbols. I say ‘inarguable’ without a proof. It was just a motion of gut.
That was really fun, challenging but wonderful. The supporting photos were taken one day shortly after we woke up, and so Gu sported thick eyelids and waxy bed-head.

INCARNATIONS became Gu’s twinned profiles. They began, in fact, as a spin on the iconographic assembly of Vishnu’s avatars. They are often portrayed one after the other, radiating from his head. This plan was radically simplified to Gu’s mirrored ‘sides’.
(It is interesting to note, too, that Gu’s profile has remained fabulously constant all his life. In ‘half-time’, Gu at six looks much the same as Gu at twenty-two. A digression at the philtrum, causal of his moustache, is the only tell. It’s cool.)

DRAFT I OF V
CIRCLE is for Gu’s center, his steady axis, his Whole, the unification of his worlds. Sometimes in life these things appear intermittent, but their foundation abides there still, however stealthily.

...TENTACLE is for Gu’s fragmentation, his divides, the segmented factions of his personality. They look alike but they are not the same. They are each autonomous but feed to a shared hub, and do not see so much as they feel. They possess a grace, gentility, and poetry that seemed analogous to the octopus. One tentacle forms a lemniscate.

There is no title yet. But I think it will be Gu’s name.
It was a real trip and I loved making it.

Lowenstein Dreams of Bigger Things

2010-04-29T19:00:00.000-07:00

PT. I

Master, Master,
Where's the dream that I've been after?
- Metallica

At last. Fate, good will, and a laundry list of dues paid have afforded me a tremendous gift.

In August, I will begin attending The Graduate School at The Pennsylvania State University, pursuing a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Painting. I've been awarded an assistanship, which covers my tuition wholly and grants me a stipend. Reawakening my scholarly zeal, and with any lick of luck, I will attain my degree in two years.

So in the two-and-a-half months until I uproot, I am again devoting my summertime to artwork, for hire and for myself.

PT. II

In first glutting the dearth of blogged artwork, Summertime Ghooseberryade 2010 sets out with a triumphant commission. The nobility and sincerity of both the subject and the hirer, as well as the profundity of the task, mark it as one of the most important things I've created.

Daniel, who is a musical innovator, brilliant songwriter, and warrior with axe in hand, approached me last month regarding a portrait. Daniel is not only my dear friend but also my return-client, and I was elated to work with him again.
The subject of the portrait was his own dear friend, a wonderful, accomplished, and exemplary person, Kris Nadaud. Kris, a firefighter, passed away last winter: a loss not only to those who knew him, but to the greater efforts of good in the world.

Our dialogue in April disclosed that Daniel was arranging a benefit concert in Kris' honor, and planned to premiere the portrait there. I completed it one week prior and shipped it to Ohio, where Daniel put a frame to it. At the concert, on Saturday, May 29th, the portrait was unveiled as one principal motion of commemoration and, I was told, succeeded.

18"x24"
PASTEL ON 'BLUE HAZE' COLOURFIX PAPER

This has been humbling and deeply gratifying for me. I hope my career holds many more opportunities like this one.

She's a Cut-Up.

2010-01-22T08:57:00.000-08:00

'Once the word gets out that a pirate's gone soft, it's nothing but
Work, Work, Work, all the time.'

For two years, I have been weaving this long and cumbersome braid of piecemeal artwork into something of a respectable portfolio. This month I lit and sealed the fray; I finished all the drawings and paintings I'd begun, and photographed everything. I'll share only one real piece today.

Door No. One: Electric Lady maryLand

HANNAH {cornflower}
43"x30"
CLICK FOR FULL IMAGE

Hannah was rendered in watercolor, gouache, Aquarelle pencil, and water-soluble crayon. She is CORNFLOWER for her rich blue eyes; for the softness and tenderness of the flower opposed by its riotous color and arrowlike petals. It is also called "Hurtsickle". The word jibes with Hannah's mods (few of which are seen here, sadly), her sexuality, and the wholesome, natural calm of her beauty.

Door No. Two: Getting Carded

When my brain was fried from larger projects, I busied my hands with small niceties. I love to make Christmas cards with private jokes or quips, and among them this year were these two. For my boyfriend, a watercolor/Aquarelle pun-portrait of my bear, Buddha Bearce. For my sister, my re-imagining of a painting seen on Mel's bathroom wall in Flight of the Conchords, depicting a 'dicephalic' Bret and Jemaine. Complete with Business Socks.

+ + +

So, now I'm taking some time, basking in a ray of relief and accomplishment. But hard work and earnest efforts are always close to me. Then again, there's Jackyl's way -

"See the bird on the barstool, she's waiting for a jerk
and if she likes the way he looks
she'll put his ass to work."

Grindcore your Pigment Destroyer with a Mortrid & Pestilence

2009-08-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

I thought I had a bottle of ink. I was sure of it.
Sumi ink, in a rotund green phial.
And I really needed it.

I rummaged through my linen closet - a misnomer save the five woolen blankets that inhabit the lowest rung, dissociated for their terrible itch - wherein I store a huge cardboard box of supplies, up top. Mostly things I don't use, the offal of school years, like solvents and Gojo and rabbit skin glue. I knew the ink wouldn't be there, and it wasn't.

Round bottle, green plastic, with the Japanese label. It should have been on the card table, sitting among its ilk with the pens and markers. There was no ink.
I had no ink.
[Cursing.]

Two shelves from the Great Box you'll find an assortment of lotions, hair spray, a brass dish of safety pins, and other means pooled of Sina's life and mine.
Staring. Thinking.
There sat a bottle of Heel & Sole Black Leather Dressing, an unpleasantly odorous fluid polish, black as pitch. I sometimes clean up my boots with this stuff, when they've scuffed or the hide has greened.

There is no ink. I won't go buy ink. So why not?

I poured half the bottle of leather dressing into a little bowl and added some water. It reeked. But it worked.

KIRSTEN {hoarfrost}
38.5"x27"
TEN METAL POINTS IF YOU CAN TELL WHAT SHIRT SHE'S WEARING!

And that was the birth of Kirsten's nowhere. The dressing became the murky void that anchors her likeness on the paper, and this in turn was the birth - or the death: the end of the evolution - of Kirsten's portrait. A real background, or lack thereof, was the last part to be finished.

Ahoy to new and novel media.
My Microns and I hadn't found each other in a long time. I had never used pens and markers outside of live studio.
And of course I'd never painted with leather polish.

To brown and deepen the polish, I ground up two small bricks of cheap charcoal into the bowl. Little grains of shimmer whispered and hushed through the wash.
Then I wanted a little smattering of white pigment. Something with a powdery constitution; something like ground chalk, but I had no chalk to waste. Confectioner's sugar? No, that I would keep only for beignets, and I do not make beignets. But I did have flour.
Three pinches, thrown onto the wet polish, and misted with fixative.

Oh, to be rich. But the art of limited means is a dying one, and it keeps my brain ticking.

So there she is - the second P.Y.T. in Electric Lady maryLand, the beautiful, formidably smart and shapely Kirsten of terrific class. Every girl in this series has a word. Kirsten's word is hoarfrost for her icy eyes, the searing cool of her comportment; for the cleanness and clarity of her face, the fineness and symmetry of her bones, and the fresh crystal of her smile.

Vinnie Vincent once put Kirsten's way to word:

"Hey, metal leather Cathouse queen -
love sugar, she's dynamite.
Hot little pistol, living dream;
a bad Missus, she's
skin tight."

Blaugust * B-Logiest * Blogist

2009-08-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

I am currently generating art in such quantities with such fervor that is very nearly obscene. Yow. This is the most committed I have been to my art, and to my ideas of myself as an artist, in years.

Abetting this end is the influx of hired work that I have been shouldering – and there by the grace of G-d go I – which keeps me monetarily afloat. I have been better regarding my business with earnestness and consider its place in my future; SEE ALSO: NEW, DAUNTING, SELF-PROMOTION, SELF-WORTH, TAGGING PRICE, SCARY, WORKULA. As they always do, commissions wake me to the fulfillment I know in my personal work and activate my hand to make both. So once I’m stirring, I’m spinning.

MY FAVORITE FOR-HIRE THIS SUMMER
18"x24"
PASTEL ON COLOURFIX PAPER

I'm looking into sundry MFA programs and starting to amplify my portfolio. A key component in the impending Big Bang (alongside the growing hair metal series) shall be portraits I’ve just begun, of girls I’ve met in my eighteen months here. It will be Electric Lady maryLand.

The first of them is Ava.

ALMOST DONE
PASTEL AND WATER ON COLOURFIX PAPER
19"x27"

I know that in my world, Maryland is imbued with a lot of private significance. It was and is still my New Life and embodies a big turn in my narrative, the inauguration of my definite and adult self. I fully Became here, and I built something here.

I find Maryland extremely interesting, too, for it connotes a sort of limbo to me. It middles on the map, as it does politically, as in every way. It is culturally without, forgiving the crabs; in weather as in demeanor it is too warm to be Northern and too cold to be Southern; even then, it lacks any braggadocio, ala Texas, or notoriety, ala New Jersey (but for Baltimore!); it is both farmland and concrete and has all four seasons, none to renown; it is somehow like a non sequitur.
It attests to no overarching identity, has no common conviction about its people or values, and takes true communal pride only in its enthusiastic implementation of Old Bay seasoning. To me, Maryland is pleasantly neither here nor there, grandly shrugging about itself, emitting a sincere, regular kindness.

But that is not to say that I don’t love it here. I absolutely do.

Pockets of subculture, rooted pretty simply in unorthodox music and dress, supplant a statewide culture and are a rather customary and celebrated thing. (In this way it is reasonable that Maryland houses the greatest Renaissance Festival in the country). Maryland feels adolescent to me, but I don’t mean that cruelly. It is youthful, creative, and amicable, and Becoming itself all the time.

The girls I know here came in great numbers, knit in this network of alternative aesthetics and ambitions. They are the color on the gray terrain. I want to draw the individual and the shared strain of these origins, environs. It should be interesting.

With that, I'm out.
- Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack,
I went out for a ride
and I never went back...

March of the Valkyries.

2009-03-31T23:00:00.000-07:00

I have always in some manner imbibed my media. Today I ingest chalk dust, collect it in my hair, and find it etched in the maps of my fingerprints. (My nails never have and never will enjoy a manicure, which is a solemn bummer.)
This has all forged a very interesting tactile if not unhealthy relationship between the drawing media and me, and I do regard them with some tenderness. My work is affected and informed by my tools. They're like a vehicle I drive.

I possess little talent for sculpture or carpentry,* but do feel awfully smug about the handiwork displayed here. I devised this pastel "filer" of a discarded stretch of black foam-board and duct tape. You'll note the totally superfluous labeling on each sty of chalks, segregating like colors (in the tradition of so many dystopian societies) and mitigating the rate of "muddying" – such that you don’t pick something up thinking it's pale yellow, and end up laying a thick stripe of blue-base purple all over DLR's face. Fair colors readily become encased in brown and gray dust, and this is always and only to David Lee's detriment.
* I have, however, become an awesome cobbler. See also: nearly a decade of high-tongued combat boots and busted side-zippers.

Mess is so integral to pastels, that I am deeply gratified by putting them in order.

Anyhow, begat of the exchange with the medium is another whole entity with much realer citizenship: the work - in my case, the person in the picture.
Throughout the winter of 2007, I was working on a portrait of one of my best friends, Erin. In step with the picture's very slow progression, we developed a nice rapport. I'd wake up on Thursday mornings in my TLC-Creep pajamas, and nod to the armless or otherwise absent Erin; I'd tie my hair up, get a chocolate stout, and sit down in front of her. After a few minutes of examination I'd take to it, mending and marking, et al. It's not interaction (for that we have the real-life Erin, an ebullient babe whose inimitable sultry voice was failed by the very silent portrait) but there is some tacit discourse there, an affinity.

That's all really a much larger notion, I guess. What I'm here to tell you is that the 72" of David Lee Roth currently cohabitating with me is almost fully realized, so to speak.

"What if the artists ran the TV?
All the ads would be for fine Scotch whiskey
Glenfiddich, Glenlivet
The whole single malt family."
- Crash Test Dummies, When I Go Out With Artists

Your Monthly Duckbill

2009-02-27T06:52:00.000-08:00

Periodically, on the arm of Charlotte Murray Fremaux (one of my most valued artistic advisers, who happens also to be my aunt), I attend the Go Figure! life-drawing studio at AI Washington. The studio is monitored by the awesome Marie Dauenheimer of the Illustrators Club and sees a regular turnout of other IC folk. Aunt Murray funded my own attainment of IC membership this winter.

In my final semester of college, I enjoyed the further tutelage of another deeply valued artistic adviser, Clara Lieu, in her course Drawing in Color. We rendered figure in varied media (crayon, pastel, etc.) and of them I was least familiar, but surprisingly successful, with colored markers. I lost all those drawings, though, and the markers themselves. So, for this week's Go Figure!, I bit the gristle off my wallet and bought fourteen Prismacolor and Shin-Han Touch double-ended markers and a pad of vellum bristol.

SWORD OF THE KING

The model was lean and taut; her briefer poses remarkably steady for their gymnastic quality, her spine continually a site of geometric poetry.

I love making gesture drawings. Bee-Tee-Dubz, this is how I draw:

THIRTY SECONDS

It's a real delight to not be so dirtied up by the medium itself. A half-hour of wielding pastels or charcoal and I look like a refugee foot-out-the-minefield. The bristol feels like what I imagine a seal to feel like. This promotes a sense of affection with my paper that can only be good for the drawings, aye?

TWENTY

THIRTY-FIVE?

THIRTY

It was a lot of fun. I don't choke up with the markers I suppose because they are so new, and have no entanglement with my assumed "identity as an artist", or whatever. And graduating exorcised my petite ecoliere's fever to prove my worth and talent. In a word, borrowed of Britny Fox -
"Well, here they come: girls from the school
breakin' the rules, hot on the loose."

I don't feel tardy.

2009-01-03T19:43:00.000-08:00

This morning, subsequent to the departure of the longhair who is first in my heart – mein toller Hengst, Alex – I attended to the longhair second on my personal docket, David Lee Roth.

The latter is of course a two-dimensional chalk drafting on a freestanding hollow-core door that stands 72" tall in my dining room. For a few hours, perched on a step ladder in my slip, I corrected my first faulty imposition of structure in Diamond Dave's face (lengthening his maxilla, repositioning his right eye, broadening his jaw) and spottily treated the rest of him.

DETAIL
14.5"x18"

I've drawn portraits of David Lee before, when I was about thirteen. In spite of some practiced familiarity with his face, acquired in a lengthy spell of teenybopper infatuation, it's very hard for me to ad-lib it. Because unlike the pictures I made as an amorously suffering teen, I'm not copying a photograph. I'm quilting together this portrait from video stills, segments of copyrighted photos, and an understanding of his face/physique lent by the wholes of the aforesaid means.
My light and color are thereby hampered and are shaping up only gradually.

GEAR

The hollow-core door was procured at Home Depot. Daddy escorted me there and was the brilliant one to assign the doors to my purpose. They are lightweight with a thick edge, smooth, perfect, no holes, no hinges, no nothing. And cheap.
I have two right now; I'll need three or four times that to complete this series.
The one that wears the progressing David Lee Roth was prepared with ArtSpectrum Fine Tooth Colourfix Primer in Leaf Green Dark, applied by my sister, Brittany, and I, with a huge sponge roller. The next door has a date with the same mud in Sand color.

BRITTY (ROCKS AND) ROLLS

David Lee Roth was first drawn with vine charcoal, then with acrylic paint mixed with Golden Acrylic Ground for Pastels, now with varied soft and hard chalk pastels and occasional acrylics.

So what is this all about?

A series.
I'll give you the dissertation next time.
*WINK!*

"Hello, me. Meet the real me."

2008-12-12T18:26:00.000-08:00

". . . in my misfit's way of life." - Megadeth

Well, I'm up now.
I have woken, and I have posted.

The last time I etched word on the face of the internet was, I think, two years ago. I recall being so pleased with one "Friday Night Painting Playlist" I'd made – which was then a weekly installation in my solitary use of the Machine, to soundtrack Friday evenings I'd spend oil painting on the floor in the room I tenanted at Rob & Rachel's in Rockville, MD – that I thought to share it with the world via a MySpace Blog.
I don't think the Playlist elicited nearly the measure of excitement I had hoped for. Of course, it probably included a lot of Beau Nasty, BulletBoys, Dangerous Toys, and KISS.
I no longer have a MySpace. And I don't oil paint anymore. Rob & Rachel moved out to Virginia. But I still turn to hair metal for musical mascot, in the drafting of the huge pastel portraits I make nowadays.
In fact, hair metal now occupies an unprecedented seat of importance in my work, the development of which I plan to track in this blog.
No work today, though. But like AC/DC advises,
"Stick around, baby. Stick around."