Marker Portraits

I am still refining my marker portrait skills-- one thing I love about markers is the challenge of being unable to erase. If I make a mistake (and trust me, there is no art making without mistakes) then I just have to find a way to incorporate the mistake into the piece, kind of like improvising when you're playing an instrument. 

My goal for marker portraits as I continue making them is to draw people with their eyes open for once.  I notice I tend to draw people while they are doing things so they are either looking down or away. To draw open eyes, I would need someone to really sit for me and not be doing anything else but looking at me. It is hard to get people to do this. 

Here is my friend Aaron, rocking a bowtie!

And here is my neighbor Hannah, 

though this sketch doesn't actually look very much like her. 

I want to try again.

This is my sister wrapping christmas presents!

These are little cartoons of me and my sister, though I didn't capture her quite right.

This is another one I'd like to try again.

I also did drawings of some cool antiques I saw around my house in Ithaca.

I call this one Shur Shot Plus One Extra Line

And here is a record player with a fancy leaf-shaped vintage lamp on its head:

I'll be doing more marker drawings as I visit Tucson this weekend! 

STAY TUNED!

Every Day Sketches and all that Jazz (or Blues as the case may be)

Someone gave me this sketch book as a gift. It has spaces enough to make one drawing every day for a year. I have been mostly diligent about drawing in it regularly since December 23rd and it has been an interesting exercise in generating ideas. Making this many unique drawings really forces me to call upon every idea I have and then when those run out, pull more out of the recesses of my brian or search for new inspiration in my day to day life. 

I was originally not planning to post any of these drawings, but then I thought, "Eh, why not?" Some drawings function more like a personal journal, so those I will not post, but here are some of the best of the ones I am willing to put out into the world:

This one is based on a photo taken on my friend Helen's birthday. 

That's me and her with some Os Gemeos graffiti in downtown Boston:

You may notice that some of these drawings take up multiple spaces in the book. That is what happens when I miss a day. I would rather make one giant drawing than try and catch up by making a bunch of small ones. I have missed as many as four days and had to make whole two-page spread drawings!

I have also started going to weekly Blues Dancing nights in Cambridge! It is totally rockin' and I am having a blast. The people are groovy and the music is hot. As an observational artist, I am always torn between wanting to dance and wanting to draw people dancing. I have the same problem when I play the sax because I like drawing musicians. People make such interesting shapes! I want to know what it is like to draw those shapes. I did a few gesture drawings at last night's Blues Dance.

People move too much for me to do anything finished (and I wouldn't want them to stop because dancing is the best!) but even so, I managed to get some sketches down:

In conclusion, I think if I want to really draw people blues dancing, 

I just need to work from photos. 

Vegas Selfie

My post for today is a little self portrait I did in Vegas. It is cartoon-me standing in front of a fantastic mural'd door at the House of Blues. The whole venue is decorated in folk art and covered in murals and it is pretty incredible. It was a nice breath of fresh air after all the glitz of the rest of Vegas-- equally elaborate but a completely different aesthetic. There were also benches made out of/decorated with license plates, bottle caps, and pad locks! 

And speaking of the House of Blues, The Cat Empire will be playing at the Boston House of Blues in June and I am SO EXCITED! I'm going to dance my face off, just you wait! Who is coming with me to this concert?! Everyone? Fantastic! 

Portrait with Striped Scarf

I just finished this portrait moments ago! You know what is difficult? Photographing wet paint. You know what else is difficult? Painting hands. This is a self portrait with one of my favorite scarves. 

Sticking it to the Man

I have finally completed a project I have been working on for a couple of months now. It all started when a certain photo studio corporation for which I used to work promised me and the rest of my co-workers commission for our largest sales during the Christmas season on top of our hourly wages. Just an extra incentive to sell more stuff. We worked our butts off off only to be denied our commission thanks to a loophole that corporate conveniently set up for themselves. My co-workers and I were incredibly angry and disappointed.

To make myself feel better about the whole situation and get some risk free, completely legal revenge, I hatched a plan. You see, this photo studio chain offers online coupons all the time. One of these coupons is a free portrait collage (an 8x10 print with multiple photos in it, comes in a variety of formats. $30 value. No purchase necessary. Limit one per day per family). Can you tell I have sold these before?

It is essentially a bait and switch. You get people in the door who think they don't have to spend any money, take awesome photos of their kids, then they say, "Awwwe, well these pictures are so cute I'll just have to get a couple sheets!" Ta DA! We now have your money. BUT you actually can just get the free thing and walk away. In fact, you could theoretically go in every day and get one. Without spending anything. This is really, really annoying for the photographers whose job performance evaluations are based on how much they sell, but for the customers, this is pretty great.

I had calculated that I would have had at least $200 worth of commission coming my way had corporate not gone back on their agreement, so I decided to get about $200 worth of free collages. I would fill the collages with pictures of me doing ridiculous things in ridiculous costumes. When I talked about this with friends, they generally wanted in on the action, so some collages have other people doing ridiculous things in ridiculous costumes with me.

I have completed my goal. I feel pretty vindicated. Here is the end result:

Please note the bottom middle photo in which Becca is strangling me. Priceless.

The obligatory Harry Potter theme photoshoot. 

Yup I walked to the mall in a cape. I am a true Earlham kid.

Western theme, with a fence obviously.

50s house wives!

Pajama party!

...So I feel like I got my revenge and everything I did was completely legal! ...Except posting pictures of the collages online. Technically I can't reproduce these images because I don't own the copyrights. However, if this company tracks down this blog and calls me out on it, I will be really surprised. I imagine they have better things to do, like finding more ways to suck money out of both their customers and their employees.

Hooray!

Living on Borrowed Fame, and Girrrl!!!'s move to Wordpress

I check the site stats on my blog frequently because it is really exciting to me to know when people looked at my blog and how many and where they're from and all that jazz and I was psyched to see the spike in popularity of my post about self portraits.

I thought, "Woah there! I'm so excited that everyone likes my self portraits so much!" but upon closer inspection, I discovered that my blog is coming up when people search for Frida Kahlo or Pablo Picasso because I reference their self portraits in the post. I'm sorry Frida! I'm sorry Picasso! I'm apparently just jumping on your bandwagon of artistic fame. 

On the plus side, I also discovered that my blog comes up when you google, "art history and Harry Potter" and that just rocks my world.

My other bit of news is that Caitlin's and my comic, Girrrl!!! has moved to Wordpress, which looks way more slick and I think it will allow us better image quality. We have posted the first two chapters there as well as our brand new third chapter! Please check it out!! 

In chapter 3 we are introducing a few new characters, including Captain Cluck, pictured at the lower left of this sketch that isn't actually finished:

And here are my initial sketches for two of Captain Cluck's trusty minions, Gravy, and Biscuit:

Want to know more? Well I guess you better go to Girrrl!!!'s new website!

And just to give you greater incentive to go see it, I will tell you that you will also find some photos of me falling off of a chair. They are hilarious! See you at wordpress!

Self Portraits; Portraits of the Self

For this post, I want to write a bit about the self-portrait. Self-portraits can say anything from “this is my face” to “this is my soul.” Sometimes people think self-portraits are a bit vain. Only someone who was really narcissistic would paint his or her own face over and over, right? No way man!

You see, faces are both really interesting to draw and really hard to draw. Hands too, and feet, but we’re talking about faces! If you are painting a tree for example, and you screw it up, no one knows. But if you screw up a face? People can see it immediately. Our brains are designed to recognize faces, so if a face looks wrong somehow, everyone can tell. Of course, some artists, like Picasso play with that and make CRAZY faces on purpose, and that is awesome, but I would argue that you should probably understand how to draw faces at least sort of realistically if you want to create a successful distortion. Don’t believe me? That’s what Picasso did!

Here is Picasso's self portrait from 1896. He was 15 years old. Jealous of his mad skills? Me too.

Here is Picasso again in 1907-- He was 26 and already a cubist badass, getting inspired by African masks and whatnot.

And here is another self portrait from 1972, a year before his death. He was in his 90's. I hope I am still painting if/when I make it to my 90's.

So anyway when artists want to practice drawing or painting faces from life, we either need to pay a model to sit still for upwards of forty minutes, bribe friends to sit for us (to which the usual response, particularly from college students is: “Only if I can do homework while you draw me” and then you have a sketchbook full of pictures of people looking at books), or our third option is to grab a mirror and paint… that's right! A self-portrait! It is basically free, you get eye contact, and your model is willing to sit there as long as you’re willing to paint her. Artists are often willing to put themselves through things that we would not want to put other people through… Like sitting motionless with the same facial expression for three hours.

Aside from being a staple of every middle and high school art curriculum, I also think that self-portraits can really be benchmarks of where you are as an artist at any given point (see Picasso... again). I think they sometimes say more about you than you realize at the time you painted them. I hear that half the subject matter is how you paint it.

To illustrate this, I’m posting some self-portraits of mine through the ages. Enjoy!

This one came from the same box as the work featured in this post, If you hadn't already guessed. 

I think I was about five? 

Middle school art was pretty horrendous, so lets skip to high school...

 Yes, it was my anime phase. As you can see, I secretly wanted to be a magical anime girl. Specifically THIS anime girl: 

It's Skuld from Oh My Goddess! Also, I wouldn't have said no to dating any one of these guys. Look at how 80's they are!!

...But alas! I wasn't actually an anime super heroine. I was a boring old three dimensional high school student... But I COULD draw myself as a cartoon super heroine, and that's the next best thing, right? Right.

My alter ego is making a more super hero-y pose than my super hero self. Hmm...

So then in 12th grade, I took AP art at my high school and painted more realistic things... 

with real paint and everything.

This was my "dramatic angle" portrait.

Now, if I remember correctly, I did this sketch during my freshmen year at college.

And here is my first self portrait in oil ever! This is the face I make when I am painting. 

I collaged some bits into it too.

And this is me painting the previous painting. I like this one better.

Here is a sketch I did at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. It was during my semester in New York, which was miserable. I went to New York directly after spending an awesome and glorious semester in Mexico, where I learned about murals and socialists and graffiti! After that experience, the Met just seemed so elitist... Thus, free the art! 

And finally, you can't talk about Mexico and self portraits without referencing Frida Kahlo. WHAT. A. BAMF. Frida Kahlo was known for her surrealist self portraits (though I believe she never really thought of herself as a true surrealist. She was painting her own experience in the most raw and honest way she could, and I find her paintings stunning and provocative. Like this one, done in 1943:

In fact, after I saw the film about her life starring Salma Hayek (which I HIGHLY recommend watching if you haven't already) I was inspired to draw some semi-surreal self portraits of my own, not in the style of Frida Kahlo so much as in the same train of thought, that is trying to tap into something deeper than just my facial features. They are sort of a mix of my old cartoony style and my current art skills:

This was based on a dream I had where I literally binged on salad and then cut my leg open and bled salad greens instead of blood. Weird, right?

What is art? And more importantly, are Sears Photos art?

I know I said I would make these posts shorter from now on, but I think we all knew that was just a promise I couldn’t keep…

As you may or may not have already known, I spent this past September through January (read: Christmas season) working as a photographer at the Sears Portrait Studio. Photography is not a medium I had ever worked in before so it was a very new experience for me. Working at Sears got me thinking quite a bit about portrait photography (naturally; it was my job) and, more broadly, the most beaten-to-death dilemma in the history of higher education: What is art?

Let me start off by saying that I’m pretty sure the photos I took were mostly NOT art. The point of the Sears Portrait Studio is to take your family/children and create a personalized product. The concept behind Sears photos is not to express what is in your soul, or make a visual statement about humanity, but rather to make the customers look picture perfect so that everyone they send holiday cards to will be super jealous of how cute their kids are. Sears photos (at least MY Sears photos) tend to take people and capture them in a uniform and commercialized way. To me, that is not art, BUT I don’t think that is true of all Sears photos or photographers.

Sometimes, when there was a lull in the Christmas rush and I could take a break from saying things like, “Let me tell you about our platinum collection,” I would ponder, “so, when IS Sears Photography art?” The short answer, I think, is: when an artist is the one doing it. Yes, I am opening up this controversial subject. What is art? What makes someone an artist? This tends to be a pretty personal question. Everyone seems to have his or her own answer and I have found that the more you study art, the less clear it becomes. Also, since I brought up this whole complex subject, I am more than willing to hear what you think is art and whom you think are artists. Please let me know if you want to contribute to this discussion!

So, according to me, Sears Portrait photographers are artists when they have gained a certain fluency in their photos. I think of making art in the same way that I think about learning a language. When you start to become fluent, you pick up on the smallest grammatical nuances but when you are a beginner you don’t understand a lot. Details are over your head, and you probably have trouble manipulating the words to create large varieties of sentences.

With art, whatever medium you work in, when you know what details to pay attention to, how to use the correct tools to make the work come out the way you want, you are able to understand what needs to be done to improve the outcome, and get the subject matter to cooperate, you have achieved fluency in that artistic medium.  When you are fluent in a medium, it gives you complete control over what you create. And when you have that control, all of your choices become intentional. Intention and fluency: those are very important factors when it comes to art, I believe.

My manager at Sears, Jen, was fluent in her photography in that way. I believe that is what makes her an artist and not just another commercial portrait photographer. It was SO cool to watch her work. She had a natural sense for lighting and body positions, not to mention she has the super power to make kids do whatever she wants. On my first day out of training, I was supposed to be taking photos of a wretched four year old who wouldn’t do anything I wanted him to do and he ended up rolling around on the floor of the studio for about 25 minutes whining, “whyyyyyy do I have to dooooooo thiiiiiiiiiis?” After watching me struggle, Jen popped in and finished the photo shoot in about five minutes. She got about eight different poses from the kid, each complete with a lovely smile.

She is a child photography genius. Her work is beautiful, and I think she really is able to capture children in their playful and spirited elements. Her photos are so, so, so much more than images of kids forced into cuteness by crazy parents. When she photographs large groups, she knows just what to say to get everyone to warm up to her and she is truly able to get photos of genuine moments and connections between people. Not to mention she is completely in command of what happens in her photo studio. You can check out her work at: Studio 7 on Facebook or Studio 7 Blog

I never achieved that sense of fluency in my photos. I think part of the issue for me is timing. Photography is so much about timing—You use the camera to grab the image of this one moment in time. In painting, you have as much time as you need but you have to create the whole world. So, I guess you’re a photographer if you have an eye for catching the right place and the right time and you’re a painter if you spend a lot of time making the right place. Both of course require a discerning eye and a sense of aesthetics.

Though I will say that having this job made me so much more aware and appreciative of photography. I think in this age of photo shop and digital manipulation of images, people often forget what it takes to get a truly brilliant photograph and I love that sears has made me think so much more about photography as a medium.

Finally, returning to the “what is art?” question, maybe I’ll just go with the answer one artist I interned with in New York City gave me: “Art is anything anybody says it is… But that doesn’t make it good art.”

Now, I will leave you with some Sears photos from my personal collection. You may decide for yourself whether they are art or not.

 

 These photos are of my oldest Ithaca friends and me being silly.

So, this one at least is definitely art.

Three other of my awesome Ithaca friends and I got dressed up for the most 80's photo shoot you could possibly imagine. This background is so outdated and horrible that during my staff training, Jen advised me not to tell customers is exists. Naturally when I came in for MY photo shoot, I HAD to have it.