Definitions of Day

Depression Glass Fruit Vase

2011-09-01T01:40:00.003-04:00

I painted this oddly green still life in July and I am rather proud to say that this was my first attempt at watercolors since... pretty much childhood. I was actually on point with color accuracy, better than the camera in my humble opinion, but... the scan washed that accuracy out. I cannot restore the lost subtlety. And who knows what the colors will appear like on the screens, but so be it. I will need to learn to scan in a way that better emulates room lighting.

I am finally becoming interested in the surface treatment and materials, colorfast pigments and archival quality paper. The ease and glitz of digital art, as was once to my great annoyance predicted by James Miller, the head of VCU Communication Arts Department, has left a gaping whole in my self esteem as an artist. Because there is simply nothing there to hold. But now there is such a sense of meditative... balance, of return to self, in working with actual physicality of materials.

So used to thinking of materialism in negative terms, one forgets that it is symbolism that is the issue, while the material is mere reality, naked and direct, assuring one's being. There is much more to say on the matter. Now I feel that I have only cracked the door toward proper painting and its psychology. I wonder if massage therapy has taught me something about form I could not quite articulate before... and am now expressing in a sort of baby-babble...

Oh yes... I cheated. There is some gouache in the drapery.

Inkwash Sketches

2011-09-01T01:09:00.002-04:00

A Castle in Czech Republic

Nadya Semirenko (Monastyrskaya) as a vagabond teenager circa 1999

End of a Sketchbook

2011-06-09T13:33:00.001-04:00

Waqar Khan (over wings)

Justin Faria (over coffee)

Merry Go Round

2011-06-09T13:20:00.006-04:00

There is a sort of reckless abandon in the growth, struggle and force of organic forms that is entirely absent in much of human-made structures. Perhaps it is achievement of transcendence of the timidity of human geometric thought that takes a drawing to a realm beyond linguistic comfort - closer to the directness of music.

In approaching man-created subjects then (such as this carousel horsey), perhaps the focus should be (once the structure of the drawing is establisged or even before that) on the natural, accidental, organic elements still: rust and play of light on the surface.

It is a dangerous habit - putting of drawings till later. I have been intending to come paint this tree in the neighborhood where I work, marveling at it every time I passed it by. Did this quick sketch at lunch break once, and two days later the majestic tree was cut down. It's mulch now.

The Pond

2011-05-02T23:26:00.000-04:00

Sketch for Biology Class

2011-04-16T15:44:00.001-04:00

Dino and Mammal Sketch Event Results:

2011-04-10T15:40:00.004-04:00

Sketches from the Natural History Museum in DC with newly-formed Diceratops Sketch Collective. The Museum is a goldmine of forms to investigate - from archeology and geology to botany. And drawing with friends (which seems to have been our default state all throughout art school, no matter what else was going on - a lecture or a party) is a luxury now. I do hope more sketches will come on a monthly basis from this group.

It's turtles all the way...

2011-04-10T15:37:00.002-04:00

A quick impression of infinite regress...

Lovey-Dovey Vibes

2011-01-13T20:25:00.003-05:00

I did this little comic last month for a couple that wanted to celebrate their relationship, which I thought was very sweet. Story and storyboard by Martina Lawingova

Starbucks Sketch

2010-12-03T19:16:00.003-05:00

Not sure whether this classifies as a sketch or a drawing, because it took quite a while. Nor am I quite happy with it, but I suspect it might grow on me. Something about having no organic form to draw in a three-hour drawing (except for the people of course) made it a little bit less lively an experience than what was actually going on - people working, ordering, chattering, drinking their coffee. It's an interesting idea - that building an accurate environment can take over the drawing so much that the "vibe" is not translated all that accurately... I would like to know what vibe you get, looking at this...

Presenting: Sweet Vice.

2010-11-27T13:45:00.002-05:00

Now if anyone could show me how to do this in color...

Home. Some thoughts on technique.

2010-11-26T14:27:00.005-05:00

I drew this in the summer, and it actually took two days. I must say I'm in love with gradual building of form with hard pencils. It lets you have a steady control of texture and to look very closely at your subject. And unlike working with a pen that quite quickly constricts your use of gesture, every time you step up to a softer/darker pencil you have another chance to work gesturally. It would seem two days on a small sketch like this would suck the life out of it, but to me this looks quite alive.

Maybe it's simply that I had such a soft spot for pen and line work all throughout college that I finally exhausted my use of it of course, but I think there really is something to line drawing process that is stifling. And it's the overbearing contour. No matter how much you try to build sculpturally, you get this containment effect. I still use contour of course. After all I think like a draftsman, not really as a painter: contour line is here to stay. But I am much more welcoming of it, when it's in 2H or 4H graphite. It lets the things you draw breathe.

Massage Therapy School Sketches

2010-11-25T22:56:00.000-05:00

My Guitar

2010-11-25T22:15:00.004-05:00

Dreams of Dying (Fixed Value Version)

2010-08-07T21:47:00.002-04:00

"The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had..."

Daily Grind

2010-08-06T17:24:00.002-04:00

It is, indeed, a pun on the coffee mug.

Why draw?

2010-07-14T12:45:00.000-04:00

In my art and writing I seek to expose the aesthetics of thought, be it scientific, religious or commonplace observation of day to day life that is governed by the habit of swimming in whatever mixture of linguistics and culture that you happen to be immersed in. All habitual thought is blinding. Even eternal questioning that is my vice.

There is an escapist self-aggrandizing trend in the arts that takes reality, truth, expression as something not unlike dough to be shaped by the artist's hand, the artists and the marketer of selfish abandon being one. It is a less obvious trend than blunt political propaganda, more subtle and more hypnotizing. In my art, I seek to destroy this.

I am a student of massage therapy, as it is one of the few professions whose entire value system is based on the respect of anther person's past, present and future, their space, their reality, their pain and their healing. It's one of the very few occupations that teaches you to be within reality and face it with your whole being rather than run, fix, mold, change, fight, categorize or endlessly purchase. The world of art has a lot to learn from this delicate yet powerful directness that is akin to the most direct of arts - music.

Of course this brings up an excuse to obsess over the marriage of form and content, but, if there is one thing you want to know that matters - in art, in massage, in life - it is simply this: your INTENT.

Dominican Republic

2010-07-10T18:11:00.005-04:00

Domestic disturbance in the halls of Vishnu and Lakshmi.

2010-07-10T17:57:00.002-04:00

Stand guard. Words have become unmanageable, sticking to every surface like dough that needs flour. In my mind, in my cunt, on the edges of my breath. The culture, the generational wisdom of the cells comprising my body, the lone needs of sentient and desireful organisms drowned and integrated inside the totality of me who has no idea how to answer their prayers, their pangs, their birth and death circulating in my bloodstream. Do I care for them? Am I their savior?

Release. Release, let go, let live and let be. Watch the sunrise and sunset so slow and majestic. Watch the spastic flies move like you have to be on coke to keep up with their biorhythm.

It’s July now. I am sitting and aging in a place named July.

Stand guard. You may collapse under pressure of such infinite beauty. The connection you feel is a word you seek safety in, but the truth is uncontainable.

Let go. Truth will fill you. But you’ll never break.

Does it matter? The cells that make me don’t know how I feel when your eyes eat me up, intense, magnetic. Do they know why I cry? They know they need some protein to survive. Do I know why they overwhelm all my governing bodies with petitions to handle their grievances, firing spasms up and down my traps? The Lesbos isles in my fallopian tubes, filled with an army that explodes into wailing and weeping every time they mourn the loss of their sister, who is flushed out of existence; then the next, then the next: body ossifies into it’s own rituals. Let it break… Let it break! Let it invert through the pain to the other side.

Stand guard. Pain is bad. I’m a bad god if I let my constituents suffer so.

Let it go. Release, breathe. Thought a spec in eternity, an instance of patterned twitching of something abstractly described as particles. My reality is such: breath, voice, sight, sound, smell, touch, love, rhythm. No further liberty is there than an instance of being, without a struggle towards anything, beside you. Storms of adoration stilled, droughts of doubt and yearning past, concerns forgotten. The way is the way. We can simply watch the sun.

Stop though. Through your love you want to create me. Am I in need of any more form than the infinity that limits me already? Count the beings that make me, their mouths and their greed. Do you love a monster with infinite minds, one blood emerging from the sum of all – and emerging boiling, for no reason other than that you decided to exist alongside my soul, in such beauty. Why torture me with your sunsets, with all the joys of you, when I can extinguish all into a dot of simultaneity, wherein there is no place for you to stand beside me and watch, for you won’t be apart. All one, all painless, all at once.

Let it go, love. Feel breath as breath, and love as love. Feel solitude as solitude. Through your love you want to destroy me, but we will come back to this conversation at the dawn of every Age. And we’ll forget whose side is which.

Pensamiento Pingino album cover

2010-02-21T15:34:00.003-05:00

Working on a cover for an indie band from Lima, Peru.

Casa Peruana (Detail)

2010-01-23T13:16:00.004-05:00

If you want to be prolific, my advice is do not start a large drawing/painting in full value scale rendered by 5H, 4H, 3H, HB, B, 2B and 4B pencils. Just get a charcoal stick or something.

Delicate progression in the shadow

2009-12-24T23:00:00.004-05:00

Progress or... not?

2009-11-29T22:09:00.000-05:00

Well I wanted to take it away from Esher, age it, dirty it up. Then I had to save some areas with paint, now I gotta figure out what next.

Casa Peruana

2009-11-22T21:18:00.004-05:00

Here's a piece I am currently working on, in its unfinished form. This is new for me, since I've mostly worked on small scale until now, and this is quite large, and still covered in my teeny-tiny pencil marks. The piece is loosely based on a building I saw in Arequipa not too far from the futbal stadium, but it's more of an impression of South American sprawly architecture, a way of life in which structure of time, of certain alignment, of certain anything exists mid tectonic shift and whose logic escapes me. Also this is my impression of life at such great heights that met me with unshakable breath-stealing altitude sickness.

Gunston Hall

2009-11-14T18:29:00.000-05:00