blackdenimgumby's photostream  

Two minds galloping towards each other at high speed collide to a flickering result.

30"x40" graphite on paper

30" x 40" graphite drawing

Working late at school tonight. Doing a large scale graphite project, hence the multiple dirty pencil shots. It's a very messy medium. And then salt in the wounds by pendulum came on my iphone and I was the happiest lady ever.

24"x36"+ oil on unmounted canvas

I struggled with this one for a while- and I'm still REALLY unhappy with it (I furthermore find it sadly un-smooth up close due to all the corrections I kept making) BUT... upon working on it, as well as some small drawings this weekend, I came to a huge realization which made my current dissatisfaction "worth it"... that the reason I struggled with this and similar paintings I worked on recently was that what I connected to about them was the process of abstracting and improvising, and the way in which I used the medium was NOT intuitive to the way I naturally abstract, the way it is with pencils (where I slowly layer translucent shades upon one another)... in this painting I mostly painted nearly opaquely, with the exception of the umber underlayer... My revelation was that I would attempt a painted abstract landscape in turpenoid-diluted nearly transparent layers and see if this allowed me to improvise naturally. Then, today, while drawing the picture which was the result of the last photo's dirty, graphite-covered hand... I had revelation #2... even better than revelation #1 and hard to explain briefly but it basically amounts of introducing a second medium to a pure drawing and using it at the same time. If you're interested you'll see the result of this revelation in an upload soon to come. I'm incredibly excited and have high hopes for it helping me get where I want to go artistically... w00t

The poor piece of paper... I maimed it. Total carnage! Hopefully the drawing, when complete, is prettier than my hand! I think the big graphite stick blends in and looks like one of my fingers!