Mood:
quizzicalTopic: art in progress
Getting warmed up for my art class starting this Friday. I've been painting in oil for over a year and this is a return to craypas drawing. Don't really know where the Geodone is leading me. Am I scared I'm going to start producing crap? Yes. I'm scared that I've lost a creative edge.
I'm happy with the tree and the three creatures under it but the bicycling couple seems rather indistinct to me. I don't know if that is o.k., or if everything in the picture needs to be sharply defined. But I wanted the bicycling couple to look like they had a lot of light shining on them. When the eye sees a lot of glare or reflection the sum total of the image is blurry and indistinct.
"It Land" looks childish but a kid couldn't have drawn it. They just do not have the ability to do something so dense. Maybe one or two figures by themselves, but not the whole combined and a kid definately couldn't do the couple on the bicycle. The couple is fantasy but it is an adult fantasy, not a child's. Ultimately a child wants to make something "real". Adults can look at what was done with entire childish seriousness and feel amused because all the child is only capable of is a version, or approximation, of what is real - but the child doesn't know that. I guess this picture is dense too in terms of color changes and texture changes. It started with a loose pencil sketch where I didn't commit myself to too much detail, hoping that once the craypas was in my hand the detail would come straight to the paper with the color.
If I saw this at a flea market I'd probably buy it for five dollars. But it doesn't resemble any artwork that I'm currently aware of. Maybe that is a bad thing. Artists who draw like this get ignored. Maybe someone who is locked up in a mental institution draws something like this in their art therapy class. I can't shake the shameful feeling that my illness is somehow coming out on paper here.
This piece took three days to make and shows the "direction" my art is going to go in the near future. If I'm going to make more drawings like this one I'd better get my courage up today by looking at some outsider or primative artwork in books in my library.
