Freedom in the Sketchbook

I want to express the liberation I have found in using a sketchbook. It has unlocked the fear of making a mark. Our teacher has recommended using poster paper and for beginners like me, it is a useful option: cheap and big.

However storage is a problem due to the size, and because it is so big I feel pressure for each one to be a finished piece. I look at some of the works or exercises I did on poster paper and they seem over-sized and clumsy.

A sketchbook on the other hand is unassuming and intimate and by its nature, suggests exercise or study, which for me makes experiment easy.

Play

 

It's interesting how much of learning about art is learning how to be aware. Awareness of light, color, form etc. and our reactions to them is a constant theme and is a seductive aspect of the process. The pictures above are from a class on texture. It works for me as record of techniques I practiced, some of which I would love to explore further. When I first did this, the brown was off-putting but after a couple of weeks, I look at it now and find the results quite pleasing.

{Re}Happening 2014

Attending the {Re}Happening was a little like slipping into a dream. Through the darkness people wandered in and out of vision and earshot. Every now and then a familiar face would float into my line of sight, but they didn’t recognize me and I let them pass without approaching them. Walking was hard, the ground uneven in the velvety night. If I am hungry at night I often dream about food, usually cakes or ice-cream. These dreams seem to always involve me not having enough money to buy all the things I want and I wake up ravenous. At the {Re}Happening ice cream and cake was free. If there is a heaven, I want it to be like this. Not only because of the free treats. I cannot think of anything more wonderful than going from place to place to experience art projects that were wild and wonderful, meditative and inquiring. Often flawed, but that is part of it. I cannot do justice to the evening merely through descriptive writing. Experience is everything. I will keep trying.

Doing Cubism

 

Here's some advice. If you're interested in trying Cubism, don't do what I did and use as one of your subjects a perfectly cylindrical biscuit (cookie) tube. One of the essential ideas about Cubism was painting a subject from different angles. Great. Except that cylinders are more or less the same from every angle. The picture I did is growing on me. I need to finish it. I think the little cowboy hats with the very British word 'Jubilee' are funny. The ties from different angles look like search lights, which could not have predicted being the result when I started. I may post the end result here.

Good times.