Drawing Club
Something new is happening: Drawing Club!
Birthed from the brain of Nicole MacNeill (who makes these really great drawings that straddle the borders between cute/scary/funny/deep…I really really like them…), it’s a thing where we all send out a drawing each week for eight weeks.
What I made for Week 1 (and sent to illustrator Becca Stadtlander [check out this one!]):
What I made for Week 2 (and sent to founder Nicole MacNeill herself):
Sorry about all those links. When I get excited, I make a lot of links. You know how it is. “Look HERE! And look at THIS, too!”
I’ll post Week 3′s drawing when I decide what it is. I have a few things made, and can’t decide if I want to send one of those, or make something else.
OK, let’s complain about movies for a minute! I saw Inception, the new Christopher Nolan movie, and I’m still a bit pissed off about it. It takes place in an alternate present where people can enter each other’s dreams in order to steal secrets and implant thoughts in their minds. Leo DiCaprio leads a team of dream-crackers who are trying to convince a young heir to dissolve his father’s corporate empire. So they enter his mind and create a scheme of dreams-within-dreams to try to make him do it.
I thought this was going to be a movie full of over-the-top, imaginative visuals, bizarro physics, and fantastical situations. But a lot of it was just military/spy-esque men running around shooting at each other and downhill skiing with guns and having car chases and sneaking around fancy hotels. UGH! These characters have some really boring dreams! Yeah, there were some nice moments–ones not included in the trailer, which made me eager to see the film but also spoiled the surprise of the majority of the inventive visuals–but for a movie taking place almost entirely (or completely? dun dun DUN!) within dreams, very little of it felt dreamlike to me. A lot of the “hey, only in the wacky world of dreams could this happen!” stuff felt weak and kitschy. Maybe kitschy isn’t the right word, but…I wanted weird, queasy, unsettling, quick-changing, dreamlike quality, goddarn it! Not just, “ooh, a trick staircase like in an M.C. Escher drawing! ‘Cuz you know how weird those things are! Remember Labyrinth?”
I could go on. Sorry about how I’m staring to froth. I just want to complain about the movie’s “rules” for a little bit. A great deal of time and attention is paid to the supposed rules of the dream-time. If you’re in someone’s dream, you can’t change things much, or all these people in the dream who are figments of the dreamer’s subconscious will begin to attack you. Time in dreams passes more slowly than in real life, but at a regular rate; if you have 5 minutes of sleep time, you have an hour in the dream, and if you go into dreams-within-dreams, the conversion rate still applies, so you can calculate exact relative times in different dream levels. (How convenient!) If you are killed in a dream, you wake up, but if you are under heavy sedation in real life and die in your dream, your mind goes to an infinite limbo-land. Etc etc.
Basically, all this and more makes dreamwork very limiting and constrained. Oh, you wanted to do fantastical things in the dream? Nope, sorry, that would be changing the dream, and we can’t have that! Because the subconscious-figment-people will attack you! And THAT is certainly a necessary plot contrivance for a movie about dreams! Ugh.
Also, the music sucks and the whole thing lacks “atmosphere.”
For a better version of a related idea, see Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, which is, I think, far more dream-like and evocative.
But, who knows…maybe I would like it more if I saw it again.
Also, I think I’m fixating on the “dream” aspect of it too much, because really, a lot of what the movie is about is memory, not dreams. And a lot of the situations felt dull and conventional in a way that seems more memory-like than dream-like (and, quite a few scenes were actually of memories accessed lucidly during dreams, not pure, straight-up dreams). I think if I’d gone into this movie feeling like it was about tampering with memories, I wouldn’t have been so harsh on it.
Sketchbook Project, 2
More drawings from the & In One Another sketchbook project (see first post). I’ll be adding these to Indweller today & tomorrow.
Sketchbook Project, 1
Earlier this year I participated in a 60-day-long sketchbook project. About 30 people, I think, ended up doing it. We were all issued the same Moleskine sketchbook and were provided with a brief “assignment” (just a few descriptive words) to make a picture for each day. Some of the assignments sounded pretty straightforward (“Twenty Beasts”; “An Animal”; “Your House”) and others were more open or just a little ridiculous (“The Devil Wears Pasta”; “It All Gets Real”; “Someone Else’s Problem”).
I’m slowly scanning some of my favorite drawings from the sketchbook and posting them on Indweller. I did treat this project as a sketchbook, and didn’t try to make some great Work of Art everyday, so these are kind of loose.
Super Heroes
I like drawing goofy comic book characters. Especially Doctor Doom.
I just posted these @ Indweller.
New Old Ones
I just added these to Indweller:
Indweller is my Etsy shop where I post pretty much whatever random stuff I’ve made; Bergmansbear is kind of “formal” and all landscape-based oil paintings, while Indweller is much more about ink and watercolor sketches and weird little characters.
June 15th
Last night Justin and I made watercolor paintings of “caveman witchy people profiles” as a kind of fake assignment (I like having assignments and challenges). Justin’s been doing a lot of these kinds of characters lately and I wanted to take a crack at it. I interpreted the assignment as caveMAN and made this guy:
Justin made a few paintings/drawings and left this one on my table (it was basically monochromatic). He said he didn’t like it, or something, which is crazy because everything he makes is funny and good. So today I colored it. Sorry Justin! But I think he was OK with me doing that.
Oh, I never posted images from my sketchbook project, did I? No, I didn’t, seeing as how I’ve managed to only make ONE prior post to this one. I’ll have to do that sometime.
I am actually still working on some little landscape paintings. I was just working on some today; below is a crappy picture I took before I started painting today. I think some (er, two?) are now “done.” Now I have to wait for them to dry, maybe I’ll varnish them, and then prep/finish the beveled panel edges. So, it’s gonna be a while…
Many Faces
I should be going to sleep, but I got caught up staring at my favorite Flickr album to date: the faces of participants in Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present” performance, which is closing today at the MoMA.
People came to the museum and sat across from Marina every day that the museum was open, all day long, starting on March 14th. The basic rules for participants were to maintain eye contact with the artist and not do anything obnoxious (apparently, one guy tried to attach a mirror to his face or something, and was escorted out by security) for as long as they wanted: a few minutes or a few hours.
It’s the kind of project that I imagine lots of folks would sneer at. “Just sitting there? Just staring at each other? That sounds so pretentious and boring. And it’s not ‘art’.” But isn’t the purpose of art to connect with the viewer, to transmit some kind of experience, to change people, even for just a short while? Flip through the portraits of the sitters on Flickr. Everybody is fascinating, and so many (in just one moment of their session, which could be hours long) are clearly having a deep, emotional reaction, simply sitting in that special setting across from Marina Abramovic.
It’s a funny thing, this performance piece, for someone like me who is “into meditation,” where the whole idea is that you sit and notice (notice, for example, your breathing, your posture, the sounds in the room, the thoughts popping up in your head), and in that simple act of sitting and noticing, you can be bored, you can be angry, you can be distracted or sleepy, but every so often something in you settles down in a weird way and everything sort of simplifies and sorts itself out and becomes precious, and you feel overwhelmed with a kind of wonderful nonspecific love and tenderness. These moments are why I stick by art and music, too, because I’ve also had those moments while making things and while viewing or listening to things other folks have made.
It’s funny, the things that move you…I love it when it happens unexpectedly. I think it’s a big reason why I want to make things: sometimes the magical stars align, and you surprise yourself by making something that makes you cry, makes you feel super tender and emotional. I think I’m kind of addicted to that feeling. I love it and I want more of it in the world. Yeah, sometimes more “predictable” things can bring it on — images of suffering, or images of love — and then there’s those times when you don’t know what the heck is going on, and you are inexplicably moved for reasons you simply can’t explain. Is there a word for that experience?
