Corvus

In this post you will see 3 pictures of the stages of this piece. I’ve been working on it since my last post.

This piece was a step in a new direction for me. I would like to try some more like this, which bring together portrait and abstract. I spent a lot of time staring at this piece at its different stages. In fact for days, I would stare at this piece from different angles in my room and squint at it until I began developing a kind of fear of working on it. I was intimidated by the permanence of ink on paper and also unsure of where I was going with it. On Thursday or Friday I had had enough of this starting match and decided what I needed was some more pen weights and shades. So, on Friday I went to the Waterloo Art Store and got a few Tria Pantone markers and various pen weights including a 005 Micron which I love and remember from my hand drafting days in school.

If you have read my other entry on this blog called Crow you will know that my neighborhood is currently home to a very large flock of crows. Yup they’re still here. It’s probably because of our lack of actual winter. I guess they’ve kind of stuck in my head and I see them wherever I go. The other night I was walking back from the grocery and I looked up at the tree tops and there were so many of them nestled on the bare branches, a slightly darker shade of black against the sky. So I guess the piece comes out of that experience and my general fascination with them. They’re very intelligent birds and I playfully think of them as a bit more sentient than the average bird. Check out this link if you want to hear more about The Intelligence of Crows by Joshua Klein.

As always, thanks for your interest in my work.

Final Piece

Step 2

Portraits

This is something I drew tonight from a picture I took of myself. Notice that it looks nothing like me. I like drawing portraits but i hate doing them in front of people because I feel like I’m inconveniencing the model and I get a mad dash of performance anxiety. At the moment though I’m enjoying the experimentation. I admire artists who do really evocative portraits. So here I am trying my hand, first with some studies, and later with the full piece i have in mind.

Tomorrow I’m going to my first live figure drawing class. I haven’t drawn from live models since I forced my friends in high school to pose for me. This will be very different and though challenging – very good for me. I’ve always enjoyed figure drawing. My A-Level art portfolio focussed primarily on figures. People can be very stupid about nudes however. In high school there were many inane little girls who thought my nudes were naughty or perverse. It’s the most riduculous thing to me when people can’t look at the bare skin of a human being without garbing them in shame.

Crow

There is something going on with the crows in this neighborhood. You don’t expect to hear or see birds in the winter, but there is a really large flock of them living in the trees around here. The flock covers the bare branches like some strange fruit. I like the sound of them though and they’re kind of fascinating, especially as I’ve never seen so many at once. 

This mandala came to me all in one go when I was sketching the other night. I had the idea in my sketchbook for a few days before I put it on paper and then I drew it all in one night. I think that it is one of my favorites so far. I didn’t really intend on it being a crow. I’ve called it Crow more because I spent a little time this afternoon taking pictures of them in the trees.

The photo at the bottom is one of the pictures I took. The birds cover more trees than the ones shown in the photo, just to give you an impression of how bizarre it is to see so many of them.