Starting out!

My starting ideas for this quarter have come from work I completed over winter break. As I showed in class, I did primarily portraits and figures sketches, both real and stylistic. Two of my favorite drawings I made as a pair, called "The Lovers":

Along with a supporting nudge from my friend Ting, I started to think about masculine and feminine identities in terms of sexuality, specifically my own. I'm now planning on doing a piece related to the idea of having both masculine and feminine traits to my "being", but I don't think I've defined everything out for that yet....

I recently bought a set of Micron pens for an illustration job, which came with five 3.5"x3.5" paper squares called "Zentangles". As a warm-up this week and starting point for the quarter I decided to do a small drawing project based around images that are reoccurring in my work.

Each of these is worth approximately 1.5-2 hours of drawing time. I wanted to challenge myself to do something small scale, since I usually work fairly large. My focus is on practicing depicting value, texture, and form better than I have before. I have two squares left to illustrate, and my hope is to have a sort of "codex" of images that I use in my work. I also want to play with the dialogue the images create when they are displayed for others, evident in the way they are arranged on the wall and in what order. 

As a side note, I started reading John Berger's Ways of Seeing. I'm finding this book valuable in terms of learning exactly what it describes, different ways you can see, and how I can apply this to the material I am researching. From how we see bodies in relation to our own, how photographers see and frame the world in a lens, to how women are seen as subjects in fine art, Berger urges the reader to consider the many ways sight and seeing affect our perception of images and the world around us. 

My goals within the next few days is to finish my "codex" as well as Way of Seeing. I have two ideas for sketches and/or paintings, and I have a rather large blank canvas in my studio that is teasing me to throw paint on it. I'll be back with an update :)