Aokigahara

This piece is from the spring of '10 and was my first attempt at total creative control. I don't do well without an assignment. If I'm given parameters, I can flourish within them, but when I have no limits, I'm just completely overwhelmed by possibility and nothing's ever good enough.

Over winter break I did research in order to have some idea of what I wanted to do for the class, and I read about a forest in Japan called Aokigahara, which is apparently the 2nd most popular place to commit suicide in the world, after the Golden Gate Bridge. There's even numerous signs in the forest urging people to reconsider and seek counseling, etc. This forest reminded me of the forest of suicides in The Divine Comedy, which led me to woodcuts depicting the forest of suicides. I basically just fell in love with the idea of depicting the human form as trees. Unfortunately this is pretty well-worn territory and usually executed in the same way (person standing vertically, arms raised and becoming branches). So then it was a matter of seeing people in sad, twisted trees and not having them up and down with arms raised, blah blah blah. This then led to hours upon hours of searching for good photo references and lots of frustrated sketching. Then the sketches look better than what ends up painted, cause I kill my work just a little bit when I paint it. I even did a color study that was really close to what I wanted, but then I basically disregarded it when I went to paint. So yeah, color's bad and forms aren't as good as they were intended to be. It's far from perfect, but it's at least getting closer to what's inside my twisted little heart of hearts.

Watercolor on cold press.

Life Drawing

This is from Spring of '10. I took three semesters of Life Drawing, and this is my favorite piece. My professor liked to recycle old drawings left behind by painting over them with acrylic. He usually didn't do anything fancy, just black or sanguine paint. I think this one had been prepared by a previous student. The funny thing is that this drawing only took me 20 to 30 minutes. It was one of those rare times when your brain shuts off and everything flows out organically. I also really like how rough it is: you can see the under drawing in vine charcoal and then just a suggestion of form in white conte. The composition isn't totally stagnant as it usually is in my life drawings. It's very hard for me to let things just be rough and open and show some amount of expression in the mark making, and that's why this piece is a rarity and one I love looking at.

Vine charcoal, conte, and acrylic on cold press.

Pattern

This was a pattern assignment for painting class from fall of '10. I'm not really a pattern person, so this was actually a struggle until I stopped trying to make a pattern and just find a pattern that was already there and that I liked just fine. This is an extreme close up of frost on a windshield. This is another watercolor on canvas fiasco, but it was my first and I used less Gesso, so the paint actually soaked in somewhat.

Watercolor on canvas.