Pulling punches and Portraits

More work on forearms and portraits. Tackling long-standing weaknesses in my figure drawing repertoire. Sharing drawings online makes me accountable to a ‘greater’ or ‘more public’ self – it forces me to ‘move forward’. I appreciate how time-consuming all the scanning and commentary is, at least references to same by sketcher colleagues with weblogs. These are all pages from the Glenys Mann The Artist’s Notebook Project event (Fibre Arts Australia); the A5 visual art diary notebook is slowly filling up and my deadline is end-February 2011. Since Glenys’ colleagues are in the textile/art cloth community, my sketchbook is somewhat outre. No ideas for surface design of textiles there. Ultimately of course my sketchbook is due for filing on the shelf along with all the other earlier ones, so it has to be essentially ‘me’, part of that long personal journey.

Additions to the sketchbook have been desultory over the last few months because priority has been given to temari balls and most recently yubinuki. The notebook however includes my current preoccupations: male portraits, male figure drawing, male cellists, foreshortened arms/fists, with the odd reference to analysis of patterns for temari balls thrown in. Since I have retained all my photographic reference material, I may end up simply repeating the same subject matter over and over (to see if and by how much I improve, perhaps). I could always mirror-image the entries of the first half of the sketchbook, copying from the same sources in the second half of the book in reverse order. No-0ne would know except me.

Not included in my sketches has been my ‘holiday’ of stitched biscornus while I give temari balls and yubinuki a bit of a break. The current searing heat of midsummer and a week away from work/commute – the metro/bouleau/dodo routine – is traditionally a time when I ‘do something else’. I am slowly getting back to Riven Phoenix’s Structure of Man, which I know lies at the heart of my future progress in figure drawing and will mark a revolutionary step away from the tonal copying I am doing to a decent structural underpinning in what I do. The inspiration of USK will make itself known eventually too, especially since my workplace is so close to a large Sydney cemetary.  The Brooklyn Artist’s Sketchbook Project, and other Net references, seem to prefer the small 3×5 and larger 5×8 moleskines/visual art diaries. I have a 3×5 moleskine to hand which should become my ‘public’ face (I show no-one my sketchbooks normally because of the contempt in which the public/strangers hold male figure drawing); it might become the vehicle for pen & ink and form a springboard to w/colour and work with markers. The moleskine I’ve always considered somewhat too small (for the sort of work I normally do), but I experienced a life-changing moment and a profound new respect for this size notebook, when I saw a group of them, with sketches of clouds no less, all done by J.M.W. Turner (or was it Constable?) at a blockbuster art event at the National Art Gallery in Canberra some years back.

Who knows if this will grow legs and walk…

So, the idea is that I post out to gay artist colleagues a blank Visual Diary, the recipient fills the artist’s sketchbook, posts it back to me for a temporary exhibition of all the books here in Sydney Australia and then I re-post it back to the artist so s/he can shelve it alongside all their other sketchbooks.

Yep, it’s been done before, but the basic idea is a good one: to get (gay or GLBTQI) artists to share their sketches and ideas, to assemble primal, unstudied/pre-studied, visual responses to their environments, to revive lost or discarded drawing skills, to play in an otherwise serious, cataclysmic world. Participants don’t have to be professional artists who create every day for a living. Those of who have been around the block a few times know the value of daily drawing. This isn’t a competition or intentionally an exercise in glorifying the lost art of pencil drawing. Ideally it will appeal to those who draw infrequently or doodle but spasmodically who yearn to improve, to develop accuracy or fluency, submit to the gentle discipline of daily drawing as part of their life’s routine – manga artists, comic drawers, textile artists, potters, designers, those who have never put pencil to paper before but are intrigued by the simpliciyt of the act.

The original American model for this exercise was of course Someguy’s 1000 Journals and involved A4-sized hardbound sketchbooks. I’m currently involved in a similar ‘event’ involving a A5-sized sketchbooks, which personally I’m finding cramps my own particular drawing or sketching ‘style’; I prefer A4 to get a good pencil or sanguine/conte pencil drawing session going and for large gestural hand movements A3 is a minimum.

In terms of logistics, I’ll start looking around for buying sketchbooks in bulk and work out the cost of postage (twice) domestically within Australia as a guide for covering costs. The guiding financial principle will certainly be to cover costs; this not a profit-making exercises or a drama queen’s status-climb to Become Known. A post office box address seems the way to go, if only to lighten the load of my poor postie, as well as the obligatory blurb and Fine Print (timeframes, don’t return empty books, don’t turn the book into something it’s not). A small exhibition in February 2012, ideally in time for Sydney Mardi Gras, with a double-page of each on view, Chrissie Cotter Gallery Marrickville perhaps (though I’d need cabinets rather than the standard wall space), will put our joint efforts out there for other would-be sketchers to get inspired, to perhaps include drawing as part of their daily life.

In terms of personal commitment, I’ve yet to set a timeframe. December 2011 sounds too far away; it shouldn’t take participants twelve months to fill a 120-page sketchbook. People interested though should have a good chance to join in after the word gets around a bit. Finishing the book completely sounds not unreasonable. Returning it in its original size is a proper principle too, since this is not an exercise in the book becoming transmogrified into a bookbinding project or installation. Media remains without constraint (pencil, pen, pastels, chalks, mixed media); the same goes for content, respecting those laws which routinely govern sexual content, race, ethnicity, religion, &c. and generally sticking to the principle of Doing No Harm. In terms of risk analysis, I have to give thought to those who will abuse the process and develop contingency plans. The “gay” isn’t meant to be restrictive, but more of an indicator of how we see the world – the whole post-modernist thing about community and hybridity and the local and personal history and private journey.

I’ll post my own drawings here on a regular basis. There’s nothing like ‘going public’ to galvanise the mind.

References

1000 Journals (Someguy), 2008 DVD. Direected by Andrea Kreuzhage. Region 1 only. 88Mins.

1000 Journals Project by Someguy. Chronicle Books, 212pp. ISBN-10:0811858561.