I've been having a difficult time with writing recently so I decided to use some of that time to do some visual art. The paintings have been fun - I think I might continue to do a few more of those and then see if I can get a panorama. At first I was thinking about trying to do the painting equivalent of an ambigram, but decided against it for now - I might still try. I also might flip them all upside down anyway - it takes on a kind of Boschian feel when I look at them that way, like something from the Hell portion of the Garden of Earthly Delights triptych.
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| Red City I |
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| Red City II |
A while ago I bought a set of rapidographs. I had a set when I was a kid and I really liked working with them. I can't remember what brand they were, but this time around I got Koh I Noor "official" rapidographs. And I got them out and got them ready and then didn't do anything with them for eight or nine months. When I finally decided to use them, two of them, the biggest and the smallest, had developed some kind of clot that I just could not get out - tried soaking it in water overnight, etc etc. The only thing I didn't try is a sonic cleaning and that's because I do not have a sonic cleaner. But no luck. Finally I just thought, screw it, I'll buy new nibs for these, and then I learned that they had been discontinued. Such is life. At any rate, the two medium thickness nibs, .25 and .35, worked well enough for me to just use those, and I may poke around to see if I can still find replacement nibs for the .13 and the .50.
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| Hypnogogia |
I often have these incredibly vivid hallucinations when I am falling asleep. Usually it takes the form of strange, monstrous faces and creatures surrounding me. It scared the hell out of me when I was a little kid, but now I kind of enjoy the show. At one point I started trying to write them down in poetic form for a sort of weird ass artpunk monster manual (see the Propheticum Somnium Hallucinationes if you are interested). What made it tricky was that I had to allow myself to get deep enough to experience that hypnogogic state, and then rise enough to consciously transfix the image in my mind so I wouldn't forget it. I stopped doing that but am considering starting the practice again.
I didn't realize you had visual art skills, these are all really cool.
ReplyDeleteThanks Max! I am not a particularly talented visual artist by any means, but I enjoy doing it. Writing is super-cerebral for me, playing music or visual art is a little more somatic and meditative. I think in one of the conversations we had we discussed how investigating one discipline can sometimes help you make non-linear progress in another. Sometimes switching my creative mode produces a breakthrough in whatever I'm feeling blocked in!
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