a formal feeling

Have been thinking about Emily Dickinson a great deal now today, especially after reading her a lot yesterday, specifically the poem After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes. Here's the final stanza:

This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow --
First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --

Am thinking about how she uses the em dash...as both a pause and a breath, both a breathing out and breathing in, both a connecting thread (e.g. to the next line)/point of potential, as well as a repose or blackout. Feel there's a strong relation to the way I'm working with some of my drawings, attempting to invert the positive and negative space, back and forth.

Here's the rest:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes --
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs --
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone --

This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow --
First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --

Happy Birthday, Mr. President

Been doing a lot of ink washes lately. This one and many of the posts following are some of the washes. I've been pulling stills from scratchy videos posted on youtube. Here's Marilyn

women drawings

Vivien Leigh, at the moment of a camera's flash, accepting her Oscar for her role in Gone With the Wind.

Judy Garland, right before her last performance.

Letters to a Young Artist

I love this book, put out by Art on Paper.

"A lot of the stuff I learned about art and being an artist did not come from visual artists; it came from writers like Keats (in his letters) and composers like Ned Rorem (in his diaries) and oudoorsmen like Ray Bergman (who wrote about fly fishing for trout). So read as much as you can and get into the thick of life whenever you can -- learn a foreign language, learn things about other people, go places and do things that have nothing to do with art -- because it's the stuff that has nothing to do with art that has everything to do with art."

-Joseph Grigely

And, a few pump-up words of advice from Xu Bing:

"I have always thought that to be an artist, the first thing you must do is clarify what art is and what its principles are. Specifically speaking, you must identify what an artist does in this world and what relationship exists between yourself, society, and culture. And even more specifically, you must determine your particular commutative relationship with society...

Everyone has strengths and limitation. Those who know how to work also understand that whatever limitations they meet can be transformed into things that are useful to them. Using a limitation well transforms it into a strength. Wherever you live, you will face that place's problems. If you have problems then you have art. Your plight and your problems are actually the source of your artistic creation. The majority of young artists who come to New York to develop their careers are eaer to enter the mainstream. But, they have to spend time working other jobs to supposrt their costs of living here. It may seem like you are wasting time that could be used for creating art, but you needn't actually worry about this too much. As long as you are a true artist every field that you are engaged in outside of art circles -- living and working -- will produce treasure, which sooner or later will be used in the creation of your art. It is not important to plunge headlong into this mainstream system. "

The Ginger Years

The beginning of a collaboration between Joanna and I. Carrot Top meets a new top.

Rauschenbergian

I work every day and I never know what I'm doing...If you know something you have a responsibility...I don't think any honest artist sets out to make art. You love art. You live art. You are art. You do art. But you're just doing something. You're doing what no one can stop you from doing. And so, it doesn't have to be art and that is your life. But you also can't make life and so there's something in between there because you flirt with the idea that it is art. The definition of art would have to be about how much use you can make of it. - Rauschenberg

Sleep of Reason

A drawing done by looking at and attempting to draw Goya's Sleep of Reason etching. I white-out imperfect or inaccurate lines, doing this again and again till the white up builds up and I can't draw over top of it anymore...

I reflected that all things happen to oneself, and happen precisely, precisely now. Century follows century, yet events occur only in the present; countless men in the air, on the land and sea, yet everything that truly happens, happens to me. – Borges, Garden of Forking Paths.

Abstracted still from Roman Holiday. Here Audrey is looking through the trees at some distant lights.

Paparazzi videos

Watercolors drawn from youtube videos of celebs being followed by the paparazzi. I pause the paparazzi videos whenever there is a camera flash -- which would both illuminate and obliterate the figures. The first watercolor is Naomi Campbell (at the left). The second is Lindsay Lohan

LaVerne Krause show, week 11

Here are some images from my show in LaVerne Krause at the end of winter term. It was a series of ink washes/drawings (extracted from Goya's Capriccio etchings) paired with large format photos.

Capriccio |kəˈprē ch ēˌō; - ch ō| a lively piece of music, typically one that is short and free in form. A painting or other work of art representing a fantasy or a mixture of real and imaginary features.

More pieces from the LVK show

psycho etchings

This is an etching based off of a still from the film Psycho, and I'm employing some Goya (Disasters of War series, the Capriccios) etching techniques to it - the way he uses aquatint and line.

I'd like to do many more of these, but this is all I've got so far

PSYCHO studies

Took film stills from Psycho, i.e. scenes surrounding the murder of Marion, compiled them in photoshop and messed with the opacity of the layers. Then I rotated it clockwise... Now it looks like a Rauschenberg.

I've been studying the Psycho film very closely, pulling out film stills from it, relating it to some of Goya's work - his compositions, how does Goya (master printmaker) create anxiety in the picture plane as compared to how Hitchcock (master filmmaker) creates anxiety.

Francisco Goya studies

Not sure what to do with this, but I was playing with compiling Disasters of War prints in photoshop, adjusting layers and whatnot. Maybe I'll make a drawing from it

large format prints

These are a few prints I've made from 4x5 negatives, using my view camera.









cemetery (jesus) confronts budweiser distribution plant




















double exposure still life

my brother-in-law