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Tag: nature

  • From the Sketchbook #1

    From the Sketchbook #1

    As of late, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Fauvism movement of the early 20th century. Matisse & co. certainly got it right when they embraced painting and artmaking from an inner child’s POV.

    I’ve been on a real artmaking kick as of late, driven by the need to fill a page with color; to see ink drench page with hue. Like the fauves, to make art as I did when I was a child–perhaps because we’re living similar times. Not to hate on tech, which has, of course, its good moments. But we’re also hypersaturated with perfectly polished images. Making art from a “naive” mindset is almost the exact opposite of commercial hypergloss; it is simple, direct, and freeing.

    Somewhere along the way, I also picked up a set of acrylic pens and they are extremely cool! I especially loved making transparencies with them, and have just been having a blast in general.

    To encourage myself (and hopefully others) to sit down and make art–whatever that ends up looking like, I’ve decided to make a mini exhibition of sketches, titled simply “From the Sketchbook #1”: https://windma.net/gallery/from-the-sketchbook-1/

  • Five Ways to See a Rose

    Five Ways to See a Rose

    Woke up today in the mood for a bit of doodling. I don’t consider myself a particularly good draughtsperson but I’ve also learned to grow fond of my style. The artistic journey is like that, I suppose: sometimes it’s not about transforming your style into something “better” but something that you learn to enjoy and see as your own.

    Other times, it’s not the precision or the perfectionism of what you draw (or make, in general), but how you approach it that matters.

    Take these roses, for example. They’re just sketches; they’re not meant to be masterpieces, and that is okay. More to the point, they are observations: five manifest observations of a rose, an object that we know from nature.

    “A rose is a rose is a rose,” Gertrude Stein once said. The verse is evocative of the timeless and ever-present nature of an object, sans associations. We can think of a rose as part of a bouquet, part of a vase or part of a bush but it is first and foremost a rose. Alternatively, we can think of a rose and, with each enunciation, a different variety of one. The rose that I imagine the first time might not be the one that I imagine the next; the rose that first came to mind might not be the one that came to yours. So it is with roses, and everything else in nature.

    A rose is a rose is a rose. Each rose captures a moment in thought, a moment of perception, a moment in time. No two roses are alike; in the mind, the rose becomes infused with the ink of mood and memory, if not the fragrance of time.