Instances of Resistance and Daily Drawings

I haven’t had much time to get around and visit the galleries since teaching has taken up most of my recent days. The teaching has been good because it reminds me of the importance of foundational skills such as drawing and painting. The two are so much a part of my underlying experience that I don’t even think of them as separate skills in their own right. I rarely practice pure drawing or painting, and yet I often take for granted the ability to call upon them at will.

So… teaching has prompted me to uncomplicated my process a bit and do something I’ve wanted to do for several months: daily drawings. I’ve also wanted to combine the daily drawings with the Instances of Resistance project, but wasn’t quite sure where I would take it. Until a few days ago, I only knew that I wanted these isolated pieces of rogue plant-life to have a simple, candy-like preciousness to them. (I guess that would be the nostalgia I tend to play around with.) I also wanted the feral plants pushing their way up through the cracks of human construction to have an almost caricature persona and to leave a graffiti-like imprint on the ruins they inhabit.

Below are some drawings from the last few days (digital photo prints on Bristol Board that I’ve drawn over with an 8B pencil):
Instance graffiti #4: 11 feral plants, 8 twigs and 1 cross-beam in brick ruin

Instance graffiti #3: 9 feral plants in brick ruin

Instance graffiti #2: 3 feral plants above archway

Instance graffiti #1: 12 feral plants among others in brick ruin

July First Friday

First Friday was a couple of days ago and was one of the most enjoyable. I always have fun, but this one in particular was exceptional. Met a lot of cool people and had some great conversations. Thanks to everyone who stopped by.

Unfortunately, I was so busy socializing that I didn’t get time to move around the galleries, look at all the art and talk to the artists. Hopefully, I’ll be able to see some of that work later in the week.

Aerial Fragments

Below is a detail of what was originally a 5' x 6' canvas that I dyed by pouring fabric paints and fiber dyes onto raw canvas and then filling with fabric paint in between the pours. The process and rationale is similar to what I did here. I finished painting and dyeing the canvas in 2005, but have been periodically cropping and tearing smaller works from the original canvas (the scale and proportions of which needed some alteration). This is in fact a detail of one of the smaller fragments. I'm still cropping and playing with the proportions. Sometimes I'll begin this type of alteration by cropping photos in Photoshop.


West Coast Fragment #7: Water and concrete, 2005-07
30" x 30" (detail, 15" x 24")
Dyed and painted canvas with hand and machine stitching

And here are some of the earlier fragments torn from the same large canvas.