Blue

    I'm calling this Blue, for now.  So far, it is the only drawing of this series on this color of paper. 

    When I was traveling last summer, I saw some wonderful drawings by A. Durer done with charcoal on grey or blue paper. It had been a long time since I had worked with the technique, and it made me want to do it again. 

    I also wanted to loosen my mark making and invite randomness into my process. Since this drawing, I've tried (mostly) to let the randomness happen. When it does, I feel the most free.

    

 

Trane Sighting: It had been three months

A dream image from about a year ago.

This was the image that convinced me that pastel pencils had real possibilities for mixing color. I was so surprised by how much using them felt like painting.

 

Studio Visit

This is the current state of my drawing table. It looks a mess, but I actually know where all those pencils belong.

    My new drawings are all pastel paintings, and these are the two kinds of pastel pencils I am using. One is the Cretacolor brand and the other is Stabilo CarbOthello. Both are amazingly soft, blendable colors. I can paint with these in much the same way as I can with acrylics on canvas, but this is much faster, and not so precious.

 

Love, Loss and Drawing in the Age of AI

I've just about made up my mind to start posting again. 

For a little over a year, I've been on a journey of healing and recovery from a devastating loss. That loss, as well as some of my recent experiences in other cultural traditions, has changed pretty much everything.

Before this all happened, I was very concerned with the fast growth of AI, and its methods for culling images from the internet. As my dad would say, I think the horse is out of the barn with that issue, and it's really the way of the world now. 

Before all this happened, my life was open-ended, with vague expectations of how it should unfold. Now, there are definite ways in which it will not unfold. I wouldn't have chosen this path, but it has forced me to look at the paths that are left to me.

Now, I'm more conscious of what I will leave behind, and what my life will have amounted to.

Posting here will be some sort of proof. I don't have any enthusiasm for marketing, but it would be nice to know that my work can be found, if someone were looking for it. Even if they are only robots.

I have not been idle in my absence. At this point, I have nine new drawings to share, all in a fairly new medium for me. Working on them has been part of the process of folding this loss into my life on the way to creating a new one for myself. It's a painful process, but I have hope that one day I will again find some joy.

Pro tip: if you know someone who is grieving, give them a nice box of colors and some paper. It works wonders. That and a nice furry companion. I now have a tribe of five of them :) This is Miss Ripley, the Sprite.

For My Shining Star

 

Myth Makers

    I'm very lucky to be a part of this gallery show at the Ferris Fine Art Gallery. The other two artists are my good friends Kathleen VandeMark and Carrie Weis. My new painting is in the show, and when I get a good photo of it I will post it here. It was a big push to finish it in time, but it felt like good workout. Doing that cleared my easel, and now I'm enjoying considering the possibilities for the next one. 

Happy New Year.

     

 

I might be having a moment

 I've been at work (both at school and at the easel) because, even though things are crazy busy,  I have a show opening to be ready for on January 9th, so this is no time to snooze. I do have something to post, or will soon. However, I've run into a snag that I will have to resolve before I share my new painting.

     All semester, I've bumped into articles about A.I. apps like DALL-E and others that will create art for you based on verbal prompts. This means that anyone who can string some words together can access the skill to make an image that illustrates those words. The image is compiled by the app's access to images that are part of art history as well as popular culture, the news and whatever other source of images it can access. It is my understanding that DALL-E and similar apps are limited by programming with a standard of ethics, so that images not in the public domain would be inaccessible to them. So far so good.

   But now, I've heard of a new app called Lensa that has not had the proper upbringing, and it considers any image on the internet fair game and gives no credit to the originator of the material. 

   I have always wanted to share my work and information, because that's what art is about. Sharing is one of the ways we grow. But, geez. If my work is going to be scattered to the winds and diluted by all the other work that is available to the apps, then I'm not sure I want to join the party. I have to decide about it before I share more work.

   I have a feeling that A.I. art will change everything, whether individual artists want it to or not.