Sunday, January 27, 2008
Week Five Theme: Profiles
Week Four: Faces. Visual
This is the first portrait that I've ever actually completed. I've always, always given up, before. To do this portrait, I had to learn something--I had to learn that in fact, when doing portraits or acrylic paintings, I can't just slap the paint on the canvas in interesting ways the way I do with mixed-media collage. To get this far with a portrait--I've tried before and been so frustrated with how goopy things were--I actually got on the internet and found video tutorials on using acrylics. I tried different methods of blending color to get a skin tone. And then I sketched and layered on the color. I grew frustrated with my first attempt and re-distributed the color over the canvas. Then I liked the "burlap" textured affect that came up.
I don't think this turned out particularly well, but I had fun doing it, was glad that I pushed through the resistance, and felt like I learned some important things about doing more realistic renderings of a portrait when using acrylics.
Week Four: Faces. Photo
Dammit. Had to cheat again and use an older photo because I just did not make sure I had enough time to do some portrait shots today. I decided, though, that if I used an older photo of a face, I would make it one that was very different, an oddball shot, rather than a straight shot with the portrait lens.
Week Four: Faces. Writing.
Expectant. Skeptical. Disbelieving. Preoccupied. Distant. Hostile. Eager. Anxious. Worried. Not-good-enough thoughts. Bored. Excited. Interested. Possibility. Exhausted. Tired. Angry. Amused. Silly. Blank. Unreadable. Smiling. Happy. Easygoing. Caring. Concerned. Hopeful.
I look around the room and read these expressions on their faces. It overwhelms me sometimes, to take it all in. To think that I might play a part in their lives--or, worse, that I might not. I stand in front of the room, this person who is supposed to have answers, and I am afraid that the answers that I might give won't be of any use to them. That, like the rules of the English language, the exceptions to the rule will get them. I miss their faces. I miss the way they would light up when I first arrived in a room. I miss the way a student who struggled in the class would wait with anticipation to get their test back, and as I walked around the room, passing out tests, I would sometimes feel their anticipation, too. Their faces are so readable and yet not.
I have written a million times and in a million ways about what it is like to stand in front of that room and see those faces. I've never yet hit on anything that captures what it is really like. Words aren't enough. It is unlike any feeling I've ever had, to walk into that room at the beginning of the semester and know that it is my job to be a steward of sorts, and to feel so afraid that I might not be up to the task.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Week Four Theme: Faces
Because I'm a portrait photographer, I admit that this week I'm especially excited because I love, love, love capturing the expressions on people's faces. And that said, I want to keep in mind this week that I can do other aspects of faces--faces of buildings, different expressions (maybe one person with 4 different expressions??), the faces of animals.
No clown faces, though. Clowns are creepy.
Week Three: Hands. Photography.
Well, then.
Since I'd slacked on the photography end of things for the past two weeks, I decided this week I needed to go the whole hog. That means--actually making a very real project out of the photography that I'm doing. So I brought this card to Berkeley, stood outside of Cafe Gratitude, and asked people if I could photograph their hands. You can see the results at:
flickr
Week Three: Hands. Pre-Planning
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kateswoboda/2204551291/
Week Three: Hands. Visual
A self-critical part of me wondered if I was copping out. I did a sketch of the hands when I was doing pre-planning, and then liked the hand that I drew and decided to re-draw it and then shade and color more for my visual. But was this copping out? Clearly it is the most literal interpretation of hands, and not as interesting or original as claws. Well, so be it. This was what came out. The color was an accident--I'd intended to layer yellows, blues and reds to make a flesh tone, but applied the pencil too heavily with the blue tones and then had to compensate in other ways.
Week Three: Hands. Writing.
Mis Manos queridas, My dear hands.
Lately she had been grasping, holding on more tightly than she would like to admit. It had been a life of nail-bitten fingers, cramping joints. Caffeine at two a.m., cigarillos smoked covertly in the dark shadows alongside buildings, as if to do so were an illicit thing. Better this than clawing at his face, his dear smooth face. Better to ravage her own with smoke and grease-laden food. The photograph she kept in her jacket pocket was a sepia toned picture of his hands. A friend had taken it, focusing only on how he cradled her jaw between his palms.
She stamped out her cigarillo on the sidewalk, wished it was his heart. He could cradle someone else, now.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Week Two: Visual. Animal Life.
The most successful part of this week was this painting. I consider it successful for several reasons. One: I am intensely uncomfortable with any sort of illustrative painting, mostly because of grade-school experiences with art teachers or peers who did not encourage me around illustration. Basically, I tend to think "I can't do it." So to experiment not with mixed-media and found art, but with directly trying to create an image, was huge for me.
Two: The direction this image went in is, obviously--strange! I first had the idea to do this while doing the pre-planning work in my journal. Something in me said, "Yeah, go with that. Try it out." And so I did.
Three: This week was just...awful in terms of creating and feeling like a decent and competent human being. I felt like a total hack the whole time. I had to keep reminding myself and reminding myself that the whole point of doing Across Mediums is to create work that is hack-ish if need be. They are not all going to be homeruns. I kept working on this piece in spite of feeling like I had no idea what I was doing. And I derive an odd satisfaction out of how it turned out. It's strange and funky and fun, clearly influenced by Maira Kalman's book, "The Principles of Uncertainty," which I am re-reading, and it just was fun to make.
Week Two: Writing. Animal Life.
is that moment
when I become an animal.
Like turning a knife blade over
that second when the fold
of the blade
catches on the light
and flashes
before exposing the other side.
My anger, primal
greedy,
blood-filled and raw.
My mind toys with that flash of light
how it happens so quickly.
I become not myself.
I become someone else.
I become that which my anger wants to destroy.
It would seem that every sense is engaged
waiting to pounce
in battle.
But in fact I am
serrated
dull
unable to make a clean cut, after all.
Unable to wield my weapons like a true warrior.
It seems to me that when
I become like an animal in that way
I am doing my own blood-letting
doing my enemy's work for them
because in this battle there is no passion
only the loss of self-control.
Week Two: Photo. Animal Life
Dammit, Jim! I cheated (again). Yesterday afternoon the boyfriend and I took a mini-road-trip out to some bay area suburbs. I was hoping to find an area that was perhaps woodsy and where I could snap photos of animals. Some of you who are more in the know are probably laughing already. From Oakland to Pittsburg, CA, it's nothing but scenes from "Over the Hedge." Tract housing, the same ubiquitous corporate businesses, and the like.
Thus, I provide you with snapshots of a cat that I stalked over the summer, while it was stalking something else. What I love about this cat is the fierceness in his eyes, the alertness. He's a cat that lives at Green Gulch Zen Center, and I don't believe he belongs to anyone in particular but rather he is cared for by all. I'll be adding a few more shots of him to Flickr under the Across Mediums set of photos.
Pre-Planning: Week One
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kateswoboda/2189778045/
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Week Two Theme: Animal Life
Week One: Plant Life. Writing.
It's not the leafy stuff that is important. In my life, I tend to want to focus on the flower, and not on the support beneath that flower, the germination, the dark, damp places where "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower" (Dylan Thomas) hides out.
And what is that force? What is that primal human urge that pulls us from our beds in the morning? I'm finding that I've spent most of my life saying that "If I could just do what I wanted, then I'd be happy." I've rebelled in every possible way from the monotony and the routine, the "get up and live in such a way that you are part of a machine" stuff.
And yet, having the freedom I have now, I'm so often struck by--terror. Living on autopilot made it easier for me to not examine what that "force that through the green fuse drives the flower" was all about. Living on autopilot made it simpler. Having to ask that question--because it essentially gets down to "What am I living for? What do I wake up for each day?"--is scary.
I am alive because of the dirt, the muck, the roots that have so firmly grounded me, now. I am alive not because of the pretty foliage that I have put on display, but because there is something enlivening about getting down on my hands and knees and playing in the dirt. Potting something. Getting messy. Watching what shoots up.
Week One: Plant Life. Photo.
I have to confess that this image is a cheat. (!!!!). My plan was that I would have an actual designated photoshoot time in which I would go out and shoot images for this project. As it turned out, this past week I was sick, detoxing, and then later in the week it was pouring down rain and there's no way I'd take Le Bebe (the camera) out in such horrid conditions. So I went through old photographs that I'd taken at Green Gulch Zen Center in Marin, and found this one, which I've never before used or published. It was awesome to review those lush, green gardens--since we're just now getting into icky gray rainy weather here in the Bay Area, I especially appreciated the reminder that spring will come!
Week One: Plant Life. Visual.
This is the part that I was least satisfied with. I was working on a painting of some kind with a tree. It didn't turn out well. But I found that when I scanned the painting in, there was something that interested me about the way the scanner captured the threads of the canvas, my pencil markings, the way the paint was slightly uneven and outside the lines. So I ended up cropping just this piece. Who says I have to make it an entire, cohesive painting? Not I!
