Masterpiece Blogger Presents: Blog Art Theater <curtsy>
Going to use my best New York City Brahman class voice. Ahem!
What you can see here is an assemblage of shapes reminiscent of Wassily Kandinsky’s artistic compositions during the Bauhaus Movement. Using only lines and shapes on a napkin canvas, the artist (moi!) is able to capture the spiritual transcendence over the general gloom of her soggy sandwich during her lunch break in the teacher’s lounge. As the artist tested the structural integrity of the ultra soft napkin, she excavated through the depths of her subconscious as she dug beyond the veneer of the first napkin layer, a.k.a the mask, only to find the darkness of the expo marker revealed. John Keats would probably refer to the carefully rendered art on these napkin leaves as the vale of soul-making if he were alive in this century. The anguish and the struggle to burst forth beyond the confines of the preexisting structures that exist in the shapes, representative of societal structures, is evident and yet the minor attempt for the self to burst forth through the napkin and through the structures that trap her merely resulted in imitating the structures that already exist. Beautiful and tragic! sigh. Moving on…
Resuming my New Yaaawk accent (pronounced ‘axe-cent’):
Yeah, it ain’t bad! What’s the score of the World Cup teams?
Happy Friday! Went to a street sale and bought a used copy of the movie, The Fountain. If you haven’t seen the movie, I highly recommend it but it might take a few views to really get what the director is going for. The whole movie is based on the desire to find eternal life. One man in present day, finds it through his medical research. One woman in his past life finds it through creating in death. After she dies, her body deteriorates and it nourishes the tree. She becomes the tree. The birds eat fruit from the tree so she becomes the birds, and so on…
That movie led me to thinking about Fibonacci’s number sequence which is a pattern found in all things including nature and human beings. In made me feel like we are all one, people and the natural world.
So anyway, I began to draw stripes on the arm of the man which is holding a striped branch that he took from the tree behind him. I wanted a repetition in the complex striped design in the tree to be reflected in the human arm and the branch (the tree’s metaphorical arm).
Maybe I’m putting too much thought into this napkin piece. It was lunch time when I drew this, once again. The napkin came from the best deli in East New York that makes something called a Jacked Up sandwich…hot, melted pepperjack cheese on honey turkey and the works.
Napkin drawing has been a great way for me to distress at work so I’ve been doing quite a bit there. I’ll do my best to visit some other parts of Brooklyn for my next one.
Doodle & De-stress, everyone!
Sat down with my usual Earl Grey Tea at Megabites and drew this odd little creature. A local artist who displays his art pieces within the diner noticed that I was drawing on my napkins again and said something really interesting,
Artwork is it’s own language with it’s own psychic landscape.
He’s absolutely right! Wouldn’t it be great if we could have one whole conversation using illustration rather than words?! What if Congress used this method?! We would not need lawyers or politicians to interpret the archaic legalese way in which many of our laws were written. The Tower of Babel would be made whole again. Yeah, I don’t think it would really work but one can dream. Still, I like the idea behind using art to bring meaning to something which words fail to illuminate.
Well, those are my random thoughts and doodle for the day. Cheers to the waitress who got to the doodle first after I left!
I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
-Zhuang Zi (a.k.a. Chuang Chou, Zhuang Zhu, etc..)
Was watching the movie Inception while my boyfriend slept intermittently on the couch. He’d wake up with some vivid dreams and I would tell him that he’s still dreaming just to mess with him. Both the movie, his dreams, and this butterfly I began to draw all afternoon reminded me of this Zhuang Zi’s quote.
I remember reading Zhuang Zi’s works when I took an Asian Philosophy course during my undergraduate years. Maybe life is just a dream. Some of my dreams bring me such epiphanies that they feel more vivid than my waking life. Usually, drawing puts me into a dreamlike state during my waking hours as I let my subconscious produce an image that surprises even me. Other times, I search for some inspiration so I can plan out my drawing for the day, like today.
Near Pratt University in Brooklyn, there’s a lady who sells her extensive art book collection every Saturday morning down the street. I finally bought one from her. It’s called, America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White by Paul Hulton. John White sailed to the New World and illustrated what he found here. I borrowed one of his illustrations of the “Swallow-tail Butterfly” for inspiration. Took a fine tip Sharpie and tried my hand at pointillism again for most of it.
Enjoyed a nice rainy visit to my local Brooklyn Botanical Gardens for the Cherry Blossom Festival! People walked, took pictures, and no doubt, many of those lovely pink, flowery trees will go viral. Why do we love them so much? Aside from seeing some bright, beautiful colors after a very long, grey winter, there is a deeper symbolic meaning behind them. It’s supposed to be a reminder of the vivid beauty of life but also it’s frailty. These flowers never last long and pink petals will often be found raining over everything until they are no more. They symbolize our own beautiful, temporal existence.
Now, I’m about to get really corny, so bear with me. I wondered what were the pink petals of my existence? I imagined it was the napkin doodles. Each of my Cherry Blossom petals would have an intricate design and a few tea stains before they drifted off into the river of nonexistence. When I was younger, I would have liked to believe that my art or my writing would lead to a life of immortality, my legacy would go on beyond my physical existence on this Earth. But maybe it’s good to feel like it’s all temporal. Then, we can live each day with new vigor and a desire to create or contribute again and again rather than feel like we are simply done.
Simply put, I am happy to continue the conversation of life, the random meanderings, and the occasional napkin doodles, even if it’s to share with a few people or no one at all. It’s the momentum of existence, not the static power of a legacy that gets me up every day in morning. That being said, I was very pleased to see that others have contributed their pink petals of existence with doodles at this festival as well. See below…
Illustrators, unknown. Found at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens on 4/26/14.
So go out, create, and continue to build your own Cherry Blossom Tree, one petal at a time.
Brooklyn Doodle 