Summer Reading & Recent Art

I've been piddling around the house, doing more reading that arting recently, as I re-read Harry Potter for the umpteenth time. This has become a Summer Reading ritual of sorts for me and it's always amazing how much I either forget year to year or discover in the depths of the books. On this read-through, I'm finding myself short on patience with the Boy Who Lived, finding him to be more irritatingly self-centered than on previous read throughs. I'm nearly done with The Half Blood Prince, so I doubt my opinion will change this go-around, but next Summer will most likely be different.

Much like my art, my current moods tend to flavor my reading experiences. So right now, external forces have irritated me enough to cast poor Harry in an unfavorable light. Ah well, there's always the solid love I have for Snape to fall back on. That will never change, fear not, Fictional Boyfriend!

All that aside, I have made little pockets of time to sketch, paint and work in my art journal - which has once again, been sorely neglected.

First off, is a wee body sketch in the Moleskine.

Several years ago, I doodled my first person in my sketchbook like this one. At that time, I was sitting on a bus heading towards the Metropolitan Museum of Art for my Art History class in college. A friend was sitting with me and we were chatting while I doodled. It started with a form, that I fucked up while shading, that I had sketched out with an inky Pilot pen. I decided, rather than scrap the piece, I'd work with the fuck up to shade her in. And thus, this style of sketching started for me.

Some people have remarked that it looks like musculature, and that may be true, but it's highly inaccurate, because I don't try to follow the patterns of musculature. So much as those of light and dark. This newest one ended up getting arms in the end, but I sort of wish I had left them off. I liked her better without them. Ah well, that's what sketching in the Moleskine is about to me though; experimenting, letting go and not really caring if it looks like shit in the end.

My much neglected altered journal got some attention the other day. Now, before you feel horrible for the poor thing, let me explain the cause of my neglect. This book has been my journal for over 5 years, it is 500+ pages long and the 1960's pleather spine of the poor thing is threatening to burst open like a cicada shell should I stick any more ephemera on to its pages! After speaking with some friends the other night (thank you for your input, guys!) and looking up some tutorials on how to remove and re-attach the covers with a larger and less flimsy spine, I'm confident that I will be able to finish the book instead of leaving it with 160 blank pages.

And so, I pulled it out, opened it up and drew an immediate blank as to what to work on. Never to be forced to put something away by lack of inspiration, I pulled out an envelope I keep s collection of small word cutouts in and chose a word at random to serve as my jumping off point. The word I drew? "Drowning".

At first I had dark images going through my head, but I pulled paper scraps and images from my collection based on what appealed to me and let the page shape itself. The images were laid down and I was content with just that, but as I cleaned up my collection of paper a page from Homer's The Odyssey caught my eye and as I scanned it, the phrase "Wine-Dark Sea" and word "husband" leapt out at me. And so, the phrase on the page came to be:

"I escaped to the wine-dark sea, there my husband awaits."

A wee bit eerie how it came back around to drowning in the end, romanticized or not, huh?

And last but not least, a finished piece that I started back in March. She's watercolor and Micron pen on watercolor paper and heavily influence by the work I've been doing with acrylic over the past year. The same style doesn't translate as well to watercolor, but I like her just the same.

Her name is HeartSight, for those curious. :)

Letting Your Hand Wander

During my time in school, sitting in art classes and working on projects, it was a very serious affair. Art was always approached with an intended goal in mind before you'd even laid down your first mark on the fresh paper. Sure, you might sketch a few ideas out on newsprint to figure out spacial proportion, composition, maybe even scratch some color in to form a road map from blank page to masterpiece.

But doodling? Nope. No doodling. We drew from our minds as well as from life in front of us, but we always knew "what" we wanted to draw while we worked. If the budding young artist sitting beside me asked 'Hey Danni, what are you drawing?" I'd respond with something like "An apple tree at sunset, with a girl sitting beneath it reading a book" or "That vase filled with brushes, as a study of light and shadow on glass as well as transparencies." All very specific and structured.

And you know what? I was perfectly fine with that. I still do that with some of my work; sitting down with a clear idea of what I'd like to create and why and working on it until I'm happy with it. It's easy for me, laying down sketches and color and getting from point a to point b. That's how I've always worked, it's how my mind and my hands have been taught to communicate.

When I took Big with Dirty Footprints Studio last year, it was an incredible challenge for me to let that go. To approach the blank page and let loose - to scribble and add color and let my mind and my hand wander. To let my intuition guide me rather than my head. My inner critic had a field day with it; she and my intuition have some trust issues.

It was like doodling on a grandiose scale and I didn't doodle. Had never done so and in fact was positive that I couldn't do so because when presented with a sketch book or other small portable pad of drawing paper, it would collect dust. When I had attempted zentangles and mandalas they weren't what I'd call zen or relaxing at all! The desire to make them look awesome, to make them just so and my inability to let go of creative control made them abject failures for me.

But, while I was taking this class I forced myself to step outside of my artistic comfort zone and take a leap of faith. I surrendered myself to the process of painting fearless and wonderful, powerful things started tumbling from my head. All manner of shapes, symbols, colors and people poured on to my paintings, memories I had tucked away to forget about. It was healing. It was cathartic. Most of all though, letting my hand wander without my emotions getting in the way was freeing.

And now I doodle and sketch constantly. On scraps of paper, envelope backs and most recently in the little hardbound Hobbit Moleskine my best friend gifted to me over the holidays. He said it was for, "you know, ideas or maybe sketches. Whatever you want to put in there." And it sat untouched as I pondered how to start it off perfectly.

After a week of it collecting dust, I stuck it in my purse and carried it around with me for a bit. During a break at the day job I pulled it out, having forgotten the book I was reading at home, thumbed through it picked a page at random and started to sketch. Who says you have to start at the beginning anyway? And now that Moleskine and I are inseparable.

And it even has my first mandalas in it. They aren't "perfect" but they're exactly what I needed.