raw & polished

today i had the distinctly unsettling feeling of my stomach knotting up, as i waited for my paycheck to make its way through the financial ether from Wossamatta U to my credit union. that was... fun. not.

last night, i caught myself avoiding my easel the way some women avoid mirrors on a bad hair day.

Technorati Tags: dexter brown, painting, portrait, puppy

even putting the mail down on the drafting table the easel sits on, was an effort, because that required getting close to the easel, which was reprimanding me for not painting. i didn't want to work on any of the paintings i'd already done, because i was tired of looking at them, as one might get tired of looking at the scene of a car accident. i want to paint something new, but don't have it quite right in my head yet.

"The Motorsport Art of Dexter Brown" (Robert Edwards) is a book i saw on saturday, and i was really struck by the portraits dexter brown does -- none of which are posted online anywhere, annoyingly -- they've got this sense of motion and dynamic life to them that i haven't seen before in portraits. also, there's bits in the portraits that aren't very rendered out, but rough. i described it to a friend yesterday as like a brick wall that's got some bits plastered over with venetian plaster, very smooth; and some with just plaster, and some where the unfinished bricks show, and some other places where the exposed metal going through the bricks is apparent. and none of that makes any sense unless you've seen his portraits. sigh.

at any rate, one of the reasons i like the portraits is because they put me in mind of how we only have bits of our personalities that are fully rendered out, polished, ready to show to the world. so many parts of ourselves are rough, and raw, not meant to be seen by others... and yet, they're usually more visible than we think. i generally prefer to only show others the parts that are polished; my paintings, my poems, my writing, my designs, my photos -- i don't like showing the unfinished parts. i like to have more control over the image i present to the world, and trust very few people with who i am in my entirety. even around someone i trust a lot, i still get paralyzed with fear when i'm revealing a side of myself i don't like; say, my incompetent side.

let's take a typical day in art class, for example, where i'm floundering through learning a horde of new skills and feeling very conscious of not being good at what i'm doing, and that my incompetent side is showing.

1. ron walks over, and gives me good advice.
2. i look at my painting, and my throat closes up. my communication skills decide they've urgently got to go alphabetize my hot sauce collection.
3. 'mmm,' is usually about all i am able to force out. sometimes i can manage a grunt that i hope comes out as appreciative, but sounds like 'nrrgh.'
4. ron looks over at me to see if his good advice is sinking in.
5. i grunt and nod. if i'm really doing well, i can choke out a 'cool.' on a blindingly good day, i can add 'thanks.'
6. if i am forced to talk about my work when it's going badly, i'll tear up. unfailingly. go, me.
7. i inwardly sigh and wonder how i ever managed to convince anyone i'm articulate.

we repeat this process about four times during the course of a day. whenever in the class chatter a topic comes up that i do actually know something about, i leap on it like it's the last lifeboat on the titanic, and try to demonstrate that i am not a total moron by having an opinion or useless fact on the subject. which, now that i think about it, probably has the unintended consequence of the class thinking i'm a git.

this certainly isn't a new experience for me -- i did go get myself a creative writing degree -- so it's not like i'm not used to exposing my feelings through an art. but in writing workshops, this didn't happen as much, mainly because of the rule that the person whose work was being discussed by the class was forbidden to speak. if you spoke, you got asked to leave the room. so no one noticed that i was dying a thousand deaths after i'd read my poetry, as all i had to do was sit mute in my chair and sometimes nod. i quite liked that rule -- it kept people from saying, 'oh, yeah, i meant to do that,' or 'i was going to do that, but...' or 'well, i did this because...' or any of the dozen other excuses people give when they're defensive. sometimes i forget that the studio does not have this rule, and catch myself muttering, 'shut the fuck UP and listen!' under my breath.

at least, i hope it's been under my breath.

lineation, semiotics, minions, and panaché

i spent an inordinate amount of time over the last two days writing up a very longwinded answer to someone's question about a poetic device, lineation -- which, as it turns out, isn't so much a poetic device at all, as it is an exercise in semiotics. semiotics is a subject that most of us exist in blissful ignorance about, yet delve into multiple times in the course of our daily routines.

simply put, semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and how we derive meaning from them. umberto eco did his best to inflict it upon an unsuspecting public in the name of the rose, but it didn't make the conversion to film. i won't go into the longwinded answer i gave, because it's quite boring to anyone who's not curious about how lines and feet of poetry are broken up, how we derive meaning from syntax, and other obscure things. but, i did enjoy dusting off the linguistics and literary criticism books, and doing a bit of research. sometimes i miss that other side of academia.
in other news, i'll soon have a new minion. i look forward to no longer wrangling 65+ projects at a time, and cutting it back to something sensible like 30. the trick of doing so many things at once, is that they're not all in the same stage at once. it's like a very complicated juggling pattern. you send one proof out to be reviewed, as you sign off on another's matchprint, as you meet with a client to begin yet another. however, even the ones that i'm mostly done with have a way of coming back for some attention, like feral neighborhood cats, so i never feel relieved until i officially close the file and throw the job folder into my growing pile of Things I Should Sort.
the paying freelance work i've been doing is good, though i'd like more of it. if you know of anyone who needs graphic design, web design, technical writing, editing, photography, or illustration done, please send them my way.
art class is going well; going down for a day of drawing before the day of painting was helpful, mainly because i could see some real progress on the paper. discovering i could indeed manage to get something i didn't hate accomplished was gratifying. simply copying from photographs is a very poor way to learn to draw, because you don't get any practice in translating a three-dimensional object or scene into two dimensions on a surface. you learn next to nothing about anatomy, and instead just blindly put down values and shapes without knowing what those values and shapes represent. art is all about semiotics; what do the marks one puts down correlate to in reality? what are the concepts that go with the marks? if you never take the time to look at the reality you're supposed to be rendering, how can you make any sort of sign or symbol to represent it?
one symbol i've been thinking about recently is the white plume of panaché, as i've been rereading rostand's cyrano de bergerac, and hoarding the dvd of the 1990 adaptation from netflix (with the outstanding anthony burgess translation. alexandrine couplets!). one soliloquy in particular sums up my life of late:

S'aller faire nommer pape par les conciles
Que dans les cabarets tiennent des imbéciles ?
Non, merci ! Travailler à se construire un nom
Sur un sonnet, au lieu d'en faire d'autres ? Non,
Merci ! Ne découvrir du talent qu'aux mazettes ?
Etre terrorisé par de vagues gazettes,
Et se dire sans cesse : “Oh, pourvu que je sois
Dans les petits papiers du Mercure François ?”...
Non, merci ! Calculer, avoir peur, être blême,
Préférer faire une visite qu'un poème,
Rédiger des placets, se faire présenter ?
Non, merci ! non, merci ! non, merci !

i might not have climbed as high as those around me who have been handed their positions in life or who abdicate their independence, but i can say i climbed alone.

call for entries

Communication Arts has put out the call for entries in their annual photography and illustration competition. you know, the one that's the most prestigious illustration competition in the world. yeah, that. i'm thinking about entering, and looking back over my body of work from the last 12 months.

...that was a good laugh.

the deadline's march 13. i've got roughly a month to come up with something suitable.

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on that same topic, in order to not suck nearly as much as i do now, i'm going to be spending my alternative days off going down to Studio 2nd Street and working on my drawing skills. the places i'm currently spending my energy are all good places, but there're just too many of them (improving my painting skills, improving my drawing skills, karate 3x a week, meditation class once every 2 weeks, studying for the CCNA, improving my photography skills, paid freelance work, and working on building my portfolio... and then of course, my real job). i've got to cut something out besides sleep, but i don't know what, exactly. the problem with self-improvement on so many different fronts is that it's extremely slow progress on each front you attempt.