Sketchbook Project Progress

The sketchbook project is coming along well!  I am hoping to make this sketch into an encaustic piece some time this summer.  Tried it in acrylic, but it wasn't quite the right feel.

The Sketchbook Project

I am participating in a fun art collaborative called the Sketchbook Project.  The premise is you are provided a sketchbook, which you fill and mail back.  At that point your sketchbook is part of their traveling library, and you can also choose to have it digitized on their website.  Pretty sweet.  Here's the blurb from their site:

"It's like a road trip, but with sketchbooks.

Every book created for the project will embark on a 

cross-country road trip to visit state fairs, festivals 

 and as many Waffle Houses as your book's little stomach 

can handle."

I've been attacking it pretty readily.  You folks get a preview of some of the pages as they're completed.  And who knows, it may travel to somewhere close to you next year!

Git 'er Done

Latest painting finished!  Wicked stoked, I've sat with it for weeks at this point.  It's nice when your brain lets you decide when a work is done.

Done.  Hazzah.  On to the next one.

Persuasion

New Painting, New Website

Working up a sweet new website with my current artwork/fine art based.  Leaving the illustration base behind for now. 
Speaking of current, I have a new painting I'm working on, and am totally stoked about.  It's not quite finished, but I'm putting on here because I'm in love with it.  Thanks for looking, will be changing the website over in the next week or two hopefully with a link to this blog.  Exciting stuff!

New Project Idea

Finally finding some time to make some artwork.  I am only in the idea stage, but I would like to create kind of a Plexiglas-sculpture-painting.  Something big.  I am liking the layered look, but I think etching into the Plexiglas would be preferable.  Not quite sure how to do that, I will be looking into home safe acid etching over the next few days.  I built up a small facsimile this morning.  Pretty amped on it.

Good Habits for the New Year

I do believe that if you allow yourself to pay attention, that helpful suggestions or themes will manifest themselves and even repeat in your life.  In this sense it seems lately that the Universe has been suggesting I reevaluate my relationship with my artwork and mend our differences.  Not an easy task.  I have begun by establishing a sort of morning constitutional with the drawing board, a pot of coffee and the Beirut Pandora station.  It's been good so far.

One snag I have not been able to figure out is the encaustic studio issue (ample ventilation, something not possible in my apartment setting).  To keep forward motion I have been attempting to gain the effect of encaustic layers through other mediums.  The experiment today was acetate and vellum, which was a learning curve but ultimately successful. 

charcoal and acrylic on vellum

So this was a doodle on vellum (fyi: the difference between the two is vellum is opaque while acetate is transparent).  I enjoyed the painting, but didn't like that the loose vellum was wrinkling drastically.  So I stuck it on my acrylic painting on top of an acetate layer.  (And I did paint it a bit pinker.)

acrylic, charcoal, acetate, vellum, not finished!

This is beginning to look like something I'm pretty excited about.  A lot of the detail work and the shine from the acetate gets lost on the blog of course, but for lack of a studio/studio-mates to share it with this will have to do.  I ultimately want layers of line work in these pieces.  This has been an intriguing method to achieve a degree of this goal.

Also today I worked on #2 from my last post.  Now this particular painting has been pissing me off every time I looked at it, I was very unhappy with it.  I mentioned it to a friend of mine who commented that it was surprising I was even trying for abstract.  That's when the lightbulb went off and I threw that goal out the window.  I re-attacked #2, and now it's something I can be much more proud of.  Not done, but it looks waaay better:

I have no idea why these shapes keep reappearing with me, but I love them.  This still needs a few more hours of work, and the colors are a bit sickly in this picture, but I am so happy to have this appearing here to show progress from earlier.  Looking forward to where these pieces will end up.

Choices

I've been thinking quite a bit lately.  Specifically, I've been spending time pondering the ideas of free will, mental construct, perspective, choices, how learning happens, value, honesty, and how these all relate.  On that note, I promise this will be light reading, don't be scared.

sketch

Let's talk about mental construct and perspective, these go hand in hand.  Perspective is essentially the lens you view the world through; the judgements you are likely to make dependent on past experiences and social pressure (i.e. this person is pretty, they must be nice.  That person wears american flag parachute pants, they must be uneducated and shop at Walmart).  Now, a mental construct is more tricky, it has more to do with personal experiences, character and a belief structure.  Contrast person A who is likely to lend a friend twenty bucks and generally believes people are trustworthy with person B who distances themselves emotionally because they've been hurt one too many times and generally believes people cannot be trusted.  Two opposing lenses/perspectives, significantly different mental constructs and gut reactions when presented with the same situation.  (Behaviorism yes, tho I will allow that it is rarely this cut and dry.)  Without knowing much about a person, it is interesting how much is understandable by studying their typical reactions to things.  In most cases, without waiting for proof or result, we all react according to our mental construct.  So what do your typical responses say about you?  Honesty with yourself is key, yet is supremely challenging.

Now let's switch to the question of value.  To be honest I've been stuck on this idea lately.  Not the idea of how much value something has, but where it is one garners value from.  Let's talk in examples.  I am a bartender, and have worked in the service industry for approximately ten years.  In relation to the American Dream, I am not that high up on the food chain.  No way to climb a corporate ladder, become an expert of my field, I don't make tons of money, barely have health insurance and job security...actually I am in one of the more demeaning industries; anyone can do my job.  Despite this, I find value in my work.  To answer the question of how much value my job has, I couldn't judge - there is probably jobs out there I am better suited for.  So where does the value come from?  Specifically for me it would be social interaction with a wide audience and a certain element of flexibility and challenge.  This is an exercise in answering the question 'why.'  I think it is a great way to learn about oneself and others.

Now comes the tricky part; how do people relate to their value system.  I think it stems from history and mental construct.   There is a heavy influence here from our survivalist nature.  But the interesting part is that values and perspectives are choices, and therefore are learned.  As in the case of Pavlov's dog, the more a person is exposed to something (without further input or consideration) the more their reaction will become fossilized (to use a term from my grad readings).  Not that this is unchangeable; arguably a person with an open mind, aka willing to entertain the whys of opposing perspectives in relation to their mental construct, could end up changing their value structure.

These thoughts inspired me to make one of my first successful abstract pieces.

With this in mind, where is your value?