Painting Project #2

Here is the finished product of my second painting project!
Project: must have one aspect sticking out from the surface at least 6 inches.

Neverending Wednesday

Last Wednesday was the first Life Drawing drop-in session! It made for a long day though, working at 7:45am, class at 4pm, then life drawing from 6-9pm. I was deeeefinitely a little pooped.

But here's what I got up to.

2-minute poses

2- and 5-minute poses

5-minute pose  

20-minute pose

30-minute pose

With the short poses, I started off using my hands as well as one of my clay tools. For the longer poses I decided to use my hands only. This limited the amount of detail I was able to create, but I found the mark-making and texture to be much more interesting.

I decided to play around with omitting parts of the body. This started with the omission of the heads, mostly because they are too heavy to deal with while the clay is in a wet stage, but also because of the amount of detail needed to make a good face. Mine end up looking cartoony in this format. So I played around with ways to resolve the issue by including only parts of the head and face to see how it would turn out. 

The jury's still out on that one, but hopefully with more life drawing sessions and experimentation, I will turn out something that I would like to pursue further. :)

Agile hands.

Last week I alluded to something that I'm working on that involves life drawing. I'm doing a ceramics directed study this semester, which is a course in which I create my own projects and goals under the supervision of a prof, who in my case is Scott Leaf. Last year, I'd attempted a ceramics directed study, but the topic I'd chosen to focus on lost its value to me and I was struggling with the amount of independence needed to accomplish things.

More than halfway through the semester, Scott had a very serious sit-down with me to talk about refocussing. He asked what I was passionate about, and the one thing I could think of was the drawing class I was taking. So we talked and I started thinking about how I could incorporate drawing into my ceramics studies. I decided to prepare clay and take it with me to life drawing.

These are only a few examples of what I came out with that night. From 30 second poses, to 5 minutes, to half an hour, I used up all the time creating as much as I could, and I had discovered something great. I loved it!

Three days later, the teachers went on strike. After a month of my pieces being wrapped up as tightly as they could be, locked away in the art building, we were finally back to classes. I ended up dropping the course for a refund so that I could retake it in the fall and have an entire semester to focus on this new topic, to get as much out of it as I could. 

Since life drawing hasn't started yet, I've started a study on hands. These are all life-sized, if not slightly larger, some modeled from my own hand, some from other people.

Weeee!

Drawing Life

I've never considered myself to be a very good drawer. Taking things out of my head and putting them onto paper has always been a struggle. But when I draw what I see, I feel much more in my element, and ever since starting drawing classes in university, I've absolutely fallen in love with drawing the human form.

Last year, my third year, I was in the final drawing class needed for my Visual Arts degree. I loved coming to class (yes, at 8:30 in the morning!) and setting up for a session with a model. I continually found myself staying later than the end of class to put finishing touches on my drawings, and swelling with a feeling of accomplishment.

These two in particular are ones I felt very proud of, and I'm hoping to be able to continue them as a series soon enough. The dark lines are ink drawn on with a stick or the back end of a paintbrush, coloured in with soft pastels.

It's this mixing of media that I've become increasingly compelled by, and though I won't have any more drawing classes in university, there is luckily a Wednesday night Life Drawing class that will start by the middle of October. It's there that I hope to continue experimenting.

I have many plans... but more to come on that soon enough. Stay tuned!

Henna Journey

This weekend, I had the chance to start reading a book about henna that I took out from the library, Mehndi: The Timeless Art of Henna Painting by Loretta Roome, Mehndi being the Indian version of henna. Before now, I'd only flipped through it to gather some tips and look at the photographs to use as a resource in my own henna ventures. However, even just reading the opening chapters has already made an impact on how I view the medium and my own practice of the art.

But first, a little background for you. My relationship with henna started when I lived in Doha, Qatar, a tiny country in the Middle East that sticks out into the Arabian Gulf like a hitchhiker's thumb. I lived there with my parents and sister from the age of thirteen until I was sixteen. While there, attending an international school with a majority of Qatari students, I was exposed to henna mostly at school cultural events. One Christmas, a neighbour of ours brought some over and showed us how to use it. My natural interest in art led me to be intrigued by the improvised form of creativity, and we bought and used henna several more times over our three years there.

In the summer of 2007, a year after having returned from Qatar, I started a booth at the Campbell River farmers market. I made a sign, which my dad got laminated at Staples for me, and I used the cushion set my parents had bought while we lived overseas, which required sitting low to the ground much like in the carpeted and cushioned tents that are traditional in the Middle East. The booth was quite well received and ended up being very successful.

After a couple years of only using henna occasionally for personal use or with friends, I wanted to become a part of the Nanaimo Downtown Farmers Market. In 2010, it didn't work out because of work conflicts, but finally this summer I got everything together and became a drop-in vendor for the 2011 season.

Although I did know a lot of general information about making henna, applying it, and how to care for it, I didn't know very much about the cultural practices of it beyond that it is used most commonly on the hands and feet of women, it is most traditional to improvise floral or plant-inspired designs, and it is very often for wedding ceremonies. This information I gladly share with my customers, and most of them are very enthusiastic about henna and that I choose to apply it in the more traditional way of improvisation. However, the environment of the farmers market itself lends to me seeing customers for under 10 minutes because of how quickly I apply the design, explain how to care for it, and then send them on their way.

After starting to read this book, I'm coming to the realization that this fast-paced form of henna is very much against the entire traditional practice of it. Henna is supposed to be about a woman's growth in the point in her life where she is joining hands with a man and becoming a part of his family. It is also about her journey as a woman, and her exploration of these things through the medium of henna. The author puts it beautifully when she says that "Mehndi is a language. It is not just a beautiful art form. It asks the woman to have a dialogue with the universe, and it provides the words by which to have that dialogue."

The author stresses the importance of time, care, and contemplation. I find that when I apply henna on myself, which I do often as practice and as a means of testing and demonstrating for customers, I find it a good way to take time, slow down, and relax. However, it does sometimes cross over into a state of hurry and stress when I'm preparing for the market last-minute.

As I continue to read through this text, I'm hoping to gain an even more well-rounded understanding of the cultural implications of henna. I hope to be more sensitive to the time-honoured tradition and hopefully share that knowledge with my customers as I continue to learn and grow as an artist.

Henna isn't tattoos. It isn't just about having a nice looking design. Of course, bringing it into the Western culture changes it no matter what. But I think we can still take note of a thing or two from those who have practiced it for centuries: Henna is about taking the time, and taking the journey.

Beginnings.

Yesterday, I watched a video that was posted online of a valedictorian's graduation speech. I was thinking to myself how hard it must be to come up with something original when it deals with the exact same issue that valedictorians have had to talk about year in and year out, at every high school, in every community, in most countries across the globe, for decades past. Think about all those clichés that just swim around in the pool of ideas, waiting to be plucked out and inserted into the speech that bursts forth nervously out of the mouths of those on the brink of freedom.

There. I even did it.

But my point is, I was trying to think of a way to start this blog without having to deal with the clichés of saying that I'm new to this whole "thing", or admitting that I haven't attempted blogging since gushing over-dramatizations of my twelve-year-old life to an unsuspecting, and probably indifferent, cyberspace. Or  having an overly positive conversation with an audience that doesn't even exist yet.

Beginnings are as hard as endings. That's the main thing valedictorians want to get across, I guess, although they generally aim for the more positive way of saying it. This beginning, I'm hoping, will not only help get me out there as an artist and all-around creative person, to share my process and my ideas and my final products, but to also provide fuel for all those things. To get me excited about the projects I undertake, and to provide an environment in which I can share and learn and grow from every step of the way.

I've always been the type of person to jot things down in a notebook or on a loose scrap of paper. I hope that this blog will provide a way to organize some of that jumble into something I can keep track of. What you can expect to find here will be documentation of ideas and inspiration, school or personal projects, and past work in photography, drawing, and ceramics. I would also like to keep track of the henna design work that I've been delving into with renewed interest since starting a booth at the Downtown Nanaimo Farmers market this summer.

So here we are, grads (I mean... bloggers). Standing on the brink of a new beginning. A new adventure. A new challenge. Will you hold my hand (making sure not to crush my fingers by grasping too hard), let the wind tousle our hair, take a deep breath, and jump with me?