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.

"i am sick" zine finished!

/\ also a drawing inspired by sky gardens, dante's hell, and the letter w

I made a zine last week and finally got it printed today! I don't know why I always end up making these things in a whirlwind flurry - this took me an evening and a half, and it came out pretty naturally. The naturalness might be due to being feverish and wonky the whole time I tremulously held that gluestick, but I wouldn't have it any other way. In fact I stopped when I felt better enough to leave the house, which left me with exactly 16 pages of ranting and diagrams and love songs to lozenges.

I'm also partway started the next issue of Underwater Cigarettes, which might get a name change along the way, but it's still looking to be the same sort of structure, that is crazy pen drawings leaking onto stream of consciousness writing and so forth. I would give my teeth for a typewriter or a printer! But I would also settle for giving away my jaw. I have killer TMJ right now. Not that anyone cares, but it hurrrrrts. :(

Okay, okay... montreal art. I saw a movie at Articule last Saturday called La Grande Bouffe. Oh my goodness it was fabulous!!!! It was about these four frenchmen who decide to eat themselves to death, which naturally requires hiring prostitutes to notch up the decadence. We're talking feast after glorious feast after ridiculously mindblowingly rich and rare feast, with greasy roasts and vats full of "puree" and always always these strange over-iced gateauxs. Oh, and it was funny as well. And there was a love story. And the funniest bits were so horrible. It won at Cannes in the 70s and I'm of course recommending it from the tippiest bits of my curling-in-horror toes.

I suppose the important bit is that Articule needs a new floor though. It really is the sweetest little artist-run center that ever existed 4 minutes away from my house. I hope they make enough to replace it, and if they continue these events with the movies and vegan squash soup + toasty almonds on top (and grilled cheese that I couldn't eat but smelled nice) I think they will.