I chew-chewse Pavel Tchelitchew

It'll be interressin' to see how many people get to this page by Googling "Pavel Tchelitchew".  Anyone banking on NONE?  Bueller?  Anyone?  Shirley? No, I doubt it.

Not for lack of being awesome, of course.  Pavel's awesomeness, that is.  Here's where I'm supposed to expound like a good an informed blogger who's wise to all things art historical, but the truth his he's entirely new to me, and that's definitely the point!  For class we have to make some laughably non-thinking project on anyone who's drawn anything at all in the last 200 years, and fortunately I found this guy among all the articles.  Caught my attention immediately with a tree that is not a tree....

Yes, that's more like it, and what do I know about the guy?

He's Russian, influenced by macabre Romanticism, has a very popular painting at the Tate, lived from 1989-1957 (died young at 59), not terribly well-known, worked on set design for ballet, had a few shows in Paris and London and the MoMA, had a thing for astronomy, alchemy, childhood motifs and interior/exterior body landscaping (sublime veins and the like)... and I think I'm in love, you guys, at least for today.  

Idle thoughts, special guest appearances...

One of the things I love most of all about drawing is the unexpected nature of it.  

Start working more often in cafés?  Surprise musical guests will start showing up in your hair.  Or sushi might come to life if you happen to be idling next to a fish market (and call me a bad vegan but I love that salty smell of ocean and deep-sea creature).

Also café-born:  In the midst of a particularly perfect morning listening to french chanteuses and battling the august heat waves with a shaded window seat and a humble cup of joe,  I managed to distill two Very Important Thoughts I wasn't able to put into words before, regarding the way I work.

No. 1 : The act of drawing can be a litmus test for personal Truth.

When the lines become genius, impassioned, something more than I expected at the outset - I pay special attention to whatever I'm thinking about at the time.  It's usually important.  Okay, it's always important.  Or it's very very zen.  Is that not important?

No. 2 : Dream deja vu is a good sign of properly tapped intuition.

Just what it says.  It's pretty common for me to get little flashes of a previous night's dream while I work and I think now that just means I'm being subconscious enough.  

Obviously these insights won't apply to everyone's art!  But if you work in a pretty free-conscious style you might understand this I bet.

So I was in hiding...

... and now I am not.

Right now I am drawing little pen-pieces again, quite like the feeling I had while making Planetjam (which you should go buy and support wee little artsy me and my ever-growing need for canvas space even though I totally can't find places under my bed for all the finished works, egad!)

There isn't really a theme except for whatever's brewing just below the surface of my head, so the titles of these two are really more of a happy surprise than anything premeditated.  Fire and Water are the most passionate of elements, the sexiest and the most unpredictable... it's a small surprise that they're my favourite to try and capture in pen.  

With a few more of these finished I'll be printing them out onto lovely cardstock and selling them for a reasonable bit of pocket-copper at the BOOM-CHIX-A-BOOM sidewalk sale/benefit event at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, August 22nd and 23rd, it should be a hoot of a hootenany!  All my other zines will be for sale as well, and I'll be sharing a table with the lovely Amber of Ambeau Peanut Butter, + friend.  Hope to see you out in the sun-rays! 

(a poem)

WOOSH WOOPER SUPER-NATCH-O

oh no he's bought the owl!  and it's hungry

I used to collect matchbooks with one match left

in the behind of my bookshelf

just in case the sky got hungry

and went AROEIWOINRWNGAOEIROWIR *ping*

Stolen or Given Away?

I've lost you, painting.  *weepsniff... oh well*

This is what happens when you procrastinate about picking up your artwork from studios at school... I managed to find 4 of the 5 that I made this spring, but unfortunately not the largest one.  And my favourite one.  It looks like that picture up there, except more refined, and with huge white wings, and I don't even have a picture for my portfolio!  That might be the worst part.

On the other hand, ephemerality of art, right?  I'm not actually crushed, I guess.  Onto the next works...

Speaking of works and ephemerality -- I worked on a delicious batch of vegan Carrot Cake Cookies while working on a drawing piece for Fatigue Magazine, and both turned out beautifully.  (the cookies are ephemeral because I ated them!  the submission because I am handing it to the editors on sunday)

Hope everyone's having a happy May so far!  I know there're readers out there, regardless of no commenting, so to all three of you, I wave and send a virtual cookie, can you smell the cinnamon? :)

make a drawing from 8 reference photos, okay

My last drawing assignment for Uni got an offer, as in, a classmate wanted to buy it.  A good omen, yes?  Oh yes!  I should say so.  Some small part of it might be the antique frames, which are admittedly gorgeous and make my disparate doodles less... disparate.  Actually, this whole thing had a magnetic kind of cohesiveness, for, if you look at it a certain way, doesn't it look like a dragon kind of creature passing by the windows?  That's the idea, anyway.  It's a sum of parts, and if you go to the Flickr link you can see exactly what each piece was.

Working title might be something like "how to turn a pedestrian drawing assignment into a work of meaningful art", or something, whatever, I'm terrible at naming things, generally.  Names are pretty bollocks, yeah.

The girl who offered to buy my piece?  Made this.  I fell over, a little bit, inside, when I looked in her white diorama ceramic sculpture-thing.  There were marshmallows, bird-like marshmallows making silent tender conversation in stop-motion video at the end of that dream-like music-box-sized corridor.  And she wondered if it was Art with a capital A, and to that I say -- Bollocks!  This is gazing inside someone, something, and if that isn't worthy of the A, I'm out of the game.  I ran up 3 flights of stairs and back down to the basement floor just to grab my camera and remember this.  Enchanted....

post-soleil. the setted sun?

This one's rising.

Well, I made it until noon.  Noontime, sun at the zenith.  I captured it with a masking tape circle on the floor, which is actually an enso really.  No, really.  I had a 76% urge when I showed up to not even open my pencils at all and fudge everyone out who happened to show up with that trick.  To be completely honest, it's probably more powerful to expect a huge drawing performance and find only a bare floor with a circle on it, than to see some art student draw yet another random project in the hallway.  It's like those monks who whack their disciples over the head to shock them into enlightenment.  Much more penetrating.  Much more better.

That said, I like my sun.  I think I'll fill the rest of the page later on at my leisure, over the summer, to be a giant flaming flower planet-thing.  And I need to figure out how to attach the little mirror without hurting the paper.

I also found out this morning while reading up on Shinto for class, that Amaterasu - the epic-ly epic primary Shinto Kami of the sun -- is often represented with a mirror! (!)

I love Amaterasu.  Ever since I heard about the legend where she hides herself in a cave, until getting tricked outside to bring light back to world, well... I thought she was neat.  Female deities are soooooo often associated with the moon, but not this girl, no, she was flaming from the get-go!  Her brother Tsukiyomi is the Moon Kami.

"when you want to harvest these just use a razor with delicacy on the edges of their travel compartment"

Everything's swirling together for the finish line: 1 more week of school left, and 1 week of solid studio critiques to look forward to.  My projects (my babies!) are just about incubated, grown solid limbs, hot off the presses (so to speak).  The booklet was the most nebulous until very recently.  I actually wasn't sure if it would come together at all, but an inspired format change to the font was the missing element it needed, and I got happy with the layout late last night.  *wipes giant anime sweatdrop from off of head*

I just have to figure out how to print it at a higher quality than a usual casual zine, give it an appropriately surrealistic-yet-delicious name ("Apocalypse Popcorn" ?), and then my first art-book will be done.  Go life accomplishments. :)  

Also, happy happy: I got more mail in my metal conjuring box!

A girl named Sailor sent me a postcard full of my favourite things: children's book cutouts, maps, paint names, bubble-balloons, blood cells, and.....

Beautiful bugstamps!  I'm so grateful, these look like treasures.  Thank you, Sailor!  I'll leave them in their clear cage for now, save them for a world-saving letter, or perhaps save them forever, chittering behind the plastic making talk-time with Waldo and the swatch called "New Spring" :)

I do love mail correspondence... I picked up a bunch of free pastel boxes today, I think I'll fill them with small neat things and send them around the world soon.  AFTER school is done being stressful, that is.  Oh, I'm gonna go apeshit with the sparkles and reality tv after this week is done....

I think it's entirely possible to evolve into a foolproof machine

Imagine if you might... the top floor of this building is a dislocated airport atmosphere, an ice age wisp-moment, a lavender ghost shark air-quarium.  It'll be my home for a full day of drawing, all my pencils scattered around me as I slowly, slowly grow a sun in graphite, flames licking in slow motion to fill a gigantic paper on the floor.  My temporary home and magic carpet ride, ha!  

If I could extend this to a 24-hour performance and watch the nightlight twinkle in all colours of the city all around me, all alone in the sky........ I would, oh I ..... all for the want of an after-hours pass. :/

This will still be glorious, though.

like 64% of art students, I have a thing for little sparrow-y city birds and tangled masses of branch

These are some friends of mine.  Accidental videos are the sidewaysest!  I mean the best.  

O HAI

Oh, and Montreal is pretty much designed to climb all up over at a moment's desire, if you can take a bit of dust and the moderate thrill of kicking your boots against the side of old buildings at people's head level.  We saw had the most epic-ly boring evening right after, with stolen birthday cake and deliberately terrible karaoke and Eddie Vedder's ghost channeled into a roots rocker and it was AWESOME.

I also totally wasn't kidding about the birds.  They were having a little tea party this morning in the lot behind the arts building!  So springy, wish I'd had some breadcrumbs in my pocket, even if it is a strange thing to carry around.  I know it's not the most amazing picture in the world, but actually if you look at it for more than 4 seconds it starts to become quite beautiful, like a cloud of smoke or daydream of park light... oooweeeeooooooooooo.  It was kind of a moment, and I also got a big kick out of taking pictures of presumably nothing, a couple steps away from the art hang, because regardless of how eccentric it might look, in that general vicinity bird-picturing ranks a modest LOW in weird behaviour.  

I even have a relevant drawing to post.  tweet!

on lizards, and wizards

"All that I made before the age of 65 is not worth counting. At 73 I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At 90 I will enter into the secret of things. At 110 everything -- every dot, every dash -- will live."
- Hokusai

I've been feeling inevitable lately. Full of piss, vinegar, and only slightly sick from the intense effort of living to the fullest. I even managed to sleep last night! Finished 10 watercolours for draw studio, which I'll post later for sure. My performance art class is also looking to be that class that actually teaches something about art (there's always one, if you're lucky). I skipped ahead in the online syllabus and found some links to Miranda July on Youtube, which made me squee, because gosh darnit I think she's adorable. Yeah, I know, whatever, she's a privileged art-heiress, but I think her work is actually really sweet, and anyone with eyes so freaky crystal blue just has to be good, right? Of course.

Keep watch for some performance art going down over here, too... I've got ideas up the wazoo, which actually surprised me but I think I might take to this like a fly to jelly, so to speak. It's just too ripe for, well, anything. I will not mail you real spam in the mail, though, I promises. :)

I'm back!

Hmmm... the layout needs work. Stay tuned...