Several weeks ago, I found myself at an impasse with a piece of writing I was working on and decided to pause on it for a bit and do some visual art instead. It's not something I have much skill in, but I almost always enjoy it. I find it meditative; it clears my head of the garbage that accumulates otherwise. I stumbled upon an album title I liked recently - Worship is the Cleansing of the Imagination - and it seemed to me that this was the same idea (that of meditation cleaning your head out) expressed more eloquently. Switching to a different art form when I'm kind of "stuck" can really help free me up, but I never paid much attention to the why - but after seeing that title it seems to me that it may be that just moving the garbage out gives me more room. At any rate, I've continued to do some visual art, and thought I might post a couple more.
Project number one is simple, pen and ink on 8.5" x 11" paper. It's another of my hypnogogic monsters (for more on that see this earlier post). This guy showed up a couple of nights ago and spent a bit of time prancing around in my brain before fucking off to who knows where.
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| Hypnogogia II |
Project number two is growing in complexity. I posted a couple of black and red paintings of city skylines silhouetted in that same earlier post. I did them on little 4x6 pre-prepped cavasses. Those (the canvasses) are really cheap, so I grabbed a bunch more of them and have been doing them as interchangeable tiles. I'm going to do more of these, but I was at a decent place to take a few photos so I did. I don't know why but I am kind of fascinated by the possibilities of this project - I want to do some tiles that are portrait (vertical) as well since 2 portrait mode tiles are 12" high, they will need to be bordered by 3 landscape tiles. I might apply magnetic backing to all of them and put them on the fridge - assuming the wife will let me, which is unlikely! Anyway, the below piece has ten panels. There's been a little digital manipulation to fil in gaps between panels or minimize edges, but overall the photos are pretty faithful to the original pieces.
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| Red City Silhouette V |
I also think the whole thing looks really funky upside down but it still conveys the experience of a city skyline. I might ultimately orient it that way. I don't know why but I get Bosch vibes from it - they look a little like a child's version of the buildings in the Hell panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. But there's something / someone else' work that makes this seem familiar and I can't place it!
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| Red City Reversed I |
I like the way these are coming along! I actually don't think I realized, or had forgotten, that the red and black cityscapes were being done on canvas. Looking at them more closely I can see it, but they have a kind of digitally-generated look, like being really clean shapes. Or in some ways they kind of remind me of the art style of Batman The Animated Series or Batman Beyond.
ReplyDeleteFull disclosure: there HAS been some digital manipulation of these, but I would say it is fairly minimal. The lines owe their straightness to masking tape, lol. Even with that some of them are a bit off - either cause I was clumsy or careless with the mask or because the camera was tilted slightly when I took the picture and then straightened as best as I could. I think I'm going to do somewhere between four and ten more! Thank you for having a look and leaving some feedback - now I'll have to get Batman Animated Series or Batman Beyond on the List!
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