Sharpie on paper. That's it. I don't want to get carried away with colors and canvases and specialty drawing tools. Stuff turns into more stuff, art gets overly stuffy, and nobody can relax. I want people to relax. To feel air, space, and comfort.
Keeping my drawings simple is one way to say, "Hey, you don't have to have a lot to be a lot." http://www.flavors.me/wavular
I know this is kind of all over the map, but I wanted you to see how Wavular came into being.
There's a collage from my summer working in acrylic in Ghana (97), a photo from my study abroad in Japan (95). And the digital pic? It's inspired by a trip to the the ice bar at Hotel 27 in Copenhagen (07).
dk
This is a very, very large topic, isn’t it?
What about it makes us sit up square and pay attention?
How do we engage ourselves in the pursuit of artistry? What stands in the way, what wins, what falls away? Is life itself a process of learning and unlearning, at times a long, slow hill, at others steaming with velocity?
A pursuit of something greater, larger than ourselves?
The creative process goes like this:
The fingers of distraction recede, the pulse of something urgent begins to drum more insistently, more powerfully, more forcefully than its hitherto murmur of quiet, ruffled parsimony. Sanctimony.
The insistence then regales, resurgence and mammoth color fly out into the face of you, the art-maker, and divvy and draw and drown and deflavor, then wipe the slate, start again, until we are all each saturated with a coin of certainty that this, this here, this now, this prime factor of sudden awareness, that this mix is it. The arrival. The story. The ending.
The finale.
And, perhaps it is anticlimactic.To devolve into the simplicity of not being in the flutter, of being instead a sidelined, circumference-dweller, is tough. But it is here where we spend most of our living moments.
In the ordinary, the slight new variations in a landscape or a city, or a bird-feather drawing made by a child we love. The now, the here, the present. This is where we gather our pantryfuls of inspiration for future work, the color of promise, and fervor and an attempt at reaching up higher than our limbs allow into the skyward cosmic up and up.
Why?
To access the floating pilot of supple hope and promise and treasure that is our want for a better life, a warmer humanity, a cleverer ending; we are each awake to the wide world of discovery and possibility, eyes wide open, underwater, pressed to the starlight of a phosphorescent dance.
And then, mesmerized, we partake in the rhythm, the motion, the story, the gait. It envelops us wholly and we succumb with neither resistance nor remorse. The flight is rapid.And upward we go.
Flying full sail, cheek at the wind, keeping and floating first with a tiny cloy of resignation, then, as if a heron’s swoop has transferred us, we leap full-soul into the unknown and the westerly and the far and the out. We dance uncluttered, unhindered, untrained and yet surefooted. For these are the sandals in which we first felt love in our breast, felt joy at the light at the base of our spines.
Mesmerised, this winter curtains off the black, and as suddenly as we have arrived, our number’s ended.
The feathers recede, the edges of our new world blur and become unintelligible, our bright faces lose some merrymaking countenance.
But not all—no, not ever all.
The last hint of wonderment stays with us through the retransference, as we emerge backlit by the Purpose of our Next Creation into the modern certain space of the here, the pleasant present.It is here, with pen or brush or digital pixel or hands or eyes poised, our methods already learned or intuited in this very minute, that we proceed to Make.
Scrumptious.
So nice to see it's still there, and to be able to walk (when it's warm, of course) to whichever art show that happens to be on at the moment.
This is a sketch for something I've been doing that may or may not make it into my upcoming March 4 show at Raleigh's First Friday.
What do you think?
I Went to the City (And There Was Nothing There) is inspired by a trip to New York I made last October.
I once thought the city is where you wanted to be, because cities attract lots of artists, writers, and thinkers. But on my trip this time, I didn't feel the same about the so called 'Capital of the World.' In fact, I didn't feel the same about cities anywhere anymore. I'd been to Tokyo just two months before the New York trip, and Seattle the month before that. Maybe it was that quick succession that made it so clear to me: in the city, there was a lack.
A lack of energy. Inspiration.
The stuff that I used to think made art possible.
But maybe I'm cynical? Or is it the Internet era, which takes up the time we would otherwise use to find real-life, spontaneous conversations? Does virtual life substitute for encountering people and ideas whose paths we may not have crossed?Maybe it's just an inevitability.
It'll be at Fragment in Raleigh.
Part of First Friday Art Walk there in MARCH!
