Art Bash Piece

Our group project is fight.

5.

4.

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1. Start

Keep on drawing.

Who Needs T.V.?

When you have art, T.V. is suddenly so much less interesting.

Workup sketch for a self-portrait.

If anyone's out there, tell me what you think. I must become perfect so I can form Team Awesome and take over the world with my animations.

I Am In Love

I know last post, I said I wasn't in love. Well, now I am. It's with my old boyfriend. Two years ago, I left him to go to UF. But recently, he's come back into my life in a very big way. That's right, you know who he is. Art.




Is it weird that I feel that visiting Ringling in Sarasota has changed my life dramatically in some way? I feel like I'm falling in love. The campus, the programs, the curriculum, and especially career services all together seemed like the perfect package that I've been missing in my life for all these years.




Maybe I'm jumping into it too fast, but I want Art to love me back. I know he cheats on me with an awful lot of other people, but I'd love to get him to look my way. I want to be the best - personally, professionally - with him.




So help me god, I am going to do at least one 18" X 24" life drawing per week and apply by January 15.

Whoa Nelly

My heart is beating quickly. My hands are shaking. I'm so nervous and high-energy right now, everything seems to be blowing by me at light speed. No, I'm not in love. I'm an Art Director for The Fine Print that has an interview tomorrow at Ringling in Sarasota who also should have already been done with costumes for her WARP class, but isn't yet.


AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH.

Here are some of the reasons I think I'm going to die from overwork:

Truth and Lies Use Their Silver Tongues to Eat the Eggies

I made this piece after I decided that I was an alien. People do the strangest things, say the strangest things and act out the strangest things. I'm afraid that it's too complex for me to understand it all. It was the first time I realized that some people and things aren't worth the energy it would take to try and understand them.

What I do understand, however, is missing pieces. Sometimes I have input for a conversation that doesn't fit into the social puzzle. Tea and vagina. Sometimes there are people that act crazy but make me think that I am the one acting irrational. Or maybe I am crazy, because I don't always fit in with social norms. Sometimes communication just isn't possible between people no matter what they do, because life experiences interfere somehow.

The Eggies are me, but so are the Truth and the Lies. I feel that I am one of the ones alienated and separated, but I also do the same to others. My theory is that all art is a self-portrait somehow.

CD Cover Design

This was for my digital imaging class, designed for a band that is kind of imaginary right now. Rae is planning to get an acoustic guitar. Then we'll be in business. I told her we should use it if we ever made an actual CD, and then, being the responsible and logical individual she is, she proceeded to tell me about copyright issues with appropriated images.

Well, whatever.

Humanity I Love You

Walking to class, I realize that I have never seen anything in my life. I stop for a moment, the colors whirling around me, and feel slightly dizzy. As I'm looking down, panting, trying to catch my breath, I realize that the gravel has the most beautiful ripples on it, like ocean waves from an airplane window. When I look up, I feel even more woozy.

Sun on bricks, on my face, warming it like a hot blush. Yellow paint like snake skin shedding off of an old building. A vine crawling up the side of a Subway. The dappled shadows that trees cast on the ground, crackling and flittering like mice and amoebas across the lined cement street. A guy walking by me, holding a joint with dreadlocks in his hair and no shoes on his feet. One cloud. The sky, oh, the sky, just like that time mama gave you a whole pad of construction paper and a crayon named "Periwinkle Blue."

For a whole minute, I merely sway in the breeze. The wind smooths my face. Tiny pink flowers.

It is in moments like this that I am reminded of a poem by e.e. cummings singing to me quietly in a low voice, like little dreams, "humanity i love you."

Art School Minutes

Ringling College of Art and Design

• Credits probably wouldn't transfer for animation.
• Credits would probably transfer for illustration, more flexible program. Concept art is done, but no actual animation.
• No animations in the animation portfolio.
• Tours and appointments for portfolio review available during the week. Call and schedule an appointment before going.
  

Lady Madonna

"I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful."

-Louise Bourgeois, Untitled

Sneak Preview

As you might have noticed from my facebook status, I am currently a staff illustrator at a start-up alternative magazine called The Fine Print. The last few days have been hectic because I'm on the layout and design team and everything is due on Friday.

This blog post is a preview of my illustrations for the magazine, as well as a plug to get anyone who reads this blog to read The Fine Print so I can continue to make fun illustrations. The Fine Print is free, so I am reminding you that you don't need to pay in order to get this...and so much more. September 3rd, people!

Ants. (Arranged)

We'll cast some light and you'll be all right.

Although I have done a great deal to cover the white space on the walls in my room with prints by Mucha and pictures of Jesus with Alannah’s face over his and drawings of the Swamp Beast from last year’s Japanese class, there are still some blank spaces of white on my walls, above the gray smudges of my footprints.

I don’t have enough things yet to cover them. I refuse to use anything that is less amazing then anything else I have put up. My standards are a little high, I guess.

Still, I’ve come to enjoy those blank spaces. I think they remind me of how young I am, how much I still have left to do and learn. I will have so many more memories to hang on my walls. I’ll fill them up until there is no space left. Then I’ll be ready to die.

For now, when I look too closely at the blank spaces, I see roads and crossroads, experiences I haven't had yet, places and people I want to be. They shift off into the distance like mirages. I’m sure if I turned around, I would see paths already traveled. I never turn around, though. I’ve learned to think that it is better to look ahead than behind, better to leave someone staring at your back than to be left staring at theirs.

I want to walk straight into those blank spaces. I know I’ll find the things I’m looking for.

The Empty Town

A chronicle of loneliness.

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,

Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror?
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

-W.H. Auden

What I Saw Today

"If we imagine the eyes as navigational devices, we do so in order not to come to terms with what seeing really is. Seeing is like hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangled in the passions - jealousy, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked in affect - in pleasure and displeasure, and in pain. Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism."

-James Elkins, "The Object Stares Back"


Today I saw a movie. Today I watched myself hurt a friend. Today I took photos of empty streets and manikins for my assignment on Community. Today I wanted to see my parents, but instead I saw Jesus. A man walked by and told me that he was flying, because he was not on the cross and his arms were outstretched. He was strung up next to some animal bones on a fence, caught by a wire around his waist.

I took pictures of him, and wondered if he could fly away.

I Find It Hilarious That I Am Screwed

I went into the Ceramics Lab today and, lo and behold, the four six-inch ants that I had been lovingly crafting all week long were completely bone-dry. This means I can no longer alter them before they hit the kiln. It means I have to start over again to get the eight I was trying to make. The plastic looked as if it had been moved, too.

Did I mention this is all due Monday, and so are my prints for Photo class?

At least the amoebas are having a grand old time chilling in outer space.

I refuse to explain myself.

The Sleeping Woman and Other Nonsense

The most beautiful woman I have ever seen is in my Ceramics class. She is not a student. She is not the teacher. She sleeps, with her eyes closed, on the top shelf of the cabinets, in the back left corner of the studio. You can see her, from the collar bone to the top of her head. She pushes her neck out from over the edge of the cabinet. She is peach-colored, with a spray of white shooting from her neck to her eyelids. Flecks of pnemonia blue dot her complexion.

Above her perfectly curved nose, above her gently sloped forehead, is the abnormality. Her skull is caved clean in. Chunks of it sit inside of her empty head. She doesn't notice. Never will.

She sleeps quietly on, waiting, as she has been since Prometheus and Epimetheus took clay from the riverbed and carved all of us.