fishing / junk

3 weeks ago, i went to PAFA for a weekend workshop with Odd Nerdrum. i didn’t quite know what to expect at first. i hauled a 2 bags full of painting gears to philly and i didn’t even paint once. but guess what? it was still worth it.

so what did we do in this 2-day workshop? most of the time, we watched him paint a portrait of a his student, from start to finish. it took him about 9-10 hours (1.5 days. we actually had the option to paint along side with him, but most people didn’t want to miss out on watching him paint). there was also a performance of Curatoriat (a play he wrote), a slide lecture and a critique session of workshop participants’ works.

here are some notes i took (not meant to be a comprehensive summary)
…………………………………………………
some materials he used in class:

PALETTE:
in the workshop, he used a small (less than 12″ on the longest side) homemade oval shaped palette cut out from foamcore. it was tinted brown.

***

COLORS on the palette:
(Old Holland brand)
-Titanium White w/ a tint of Old Holland Blue (which he pre-mixed into a tube)
-Briliant Yellow Light
-Yellow Brown
-Madder (Crimson) Lake Deep Extra
-Brown Ochre (Deep?)
-Green Umber
-Warm Grey (which he pre-mixed from Ti White/ Brown Ochre/ Green Umber)
-Mars Black (warmer and less harsh than Ivory Black)
-Scheveningen Orange? (I think that’s what he used. but i was surprised because i thought this color is fugitive)

***

CANVAS:
He used stretched linen canvas with an unusual weave:

Preparation (his student demoed it in class):
size the canvas with rabbit skin glue. (PVA glue can be used as a substitute)

Priming the canvas:
Materials
-Framer’s Whiting (ground chalk)
-Linseed Oil
-Galkyd (just a little bit, to speed up drying time)
-Turpentine (just a litte bit; and do not use OMS)

you can apply this ground to acrylic gessoed canvas. but Nerdrum said that when using home prepared canvas, it’s already beautiful before you start. you don’t have to fight the ugly flatness of commerically prepared canvas.

***

BRUSHES and PAINT APPLICATION:

***

MEDIUM
from what i saw, he didn’t use medium much. but the medium he used was 50% “cooked” linseed oil (not sure if that means stand oil), 50% turpentine.

***

OTHER TOOLS

-smoked glass filter (to see value/contrast)
-color gels (to see what an area would look like with more yellow, more green, etc.)
-mirror (to check accuracy)

***

OTHER NOTES ABOUT HIS PAINTING METHOD

***

SOME OTHER THINGS HE TALKED ABOUT (which i am paraphrasing from my notes and to the best of my memory, so please don’t treat them as quotes):

…………………………………………………

he gave a whole slide lecture on art theory and kitsch. but i’d rather not go into it here because my fragmented notes will not do it justice. but nerdrum did discuss his views at great length on his website.

i have to say that after the workshop, i have deeper respect for Odd Nerdrum. for some reasons, i expected him to be a little more arrogant. but he struck me as a genuinely humble painter (and a very opinionated one, of course). he was also really generous in sharing his knowledge. he even let us pass around his sketchbook (which was amazing) and take photos from it. i just don’t want to publish any of it (and also the finished portrait) without his permission.

all in all, i think it was a great workshop. would be even better if it were 1-2 days longer, so we could paint and get feedback from him after seeing his full demo. of course, how much i really learned would only be evident on my future paintings. but since i got back from the trip, i got so caught up with work that all i painted was a oil sketch of a mushroom…and trying to let the imprimatura show through just made it looked like it had too much chilli sauce.

oh well, i will just keep trying.

i went to see Live! Light on Life - A Tribute to B.K.S. Iyengar at the City Center Theater (new york) on friday. the event kicked off with a documentary on B.K.S. Iyengar’s life, followed by a really amazing yoga ballet performance by advanced yogis, then a Q & A with Iyengar and Mira Nair. the climax of the event was at the end of the Q & A, when Mr. Iyengar stepped to the front of the stage, and said, “everybody sit straight!…” and he guided us through a short meditation and…well, you just don’t get to chant OM with 3,000 people very often. that’s a great way to end the event. i was so moved and inspired that i practiced my asanas after i got home.

i hope to practice more diligently from now on. actually doing yoga has been really helping me to become a better artist, in so many ways that…would deserve a new post!

anyway, here is a page of yoga poses gestures i did last night, all done from memory.

(10/15/05–fountain pen in sketchbook)

(july 2004–florence, italy)

…

Bush, in shift, asks Americans to drive less

“Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.”

“All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.”

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it, begin it now.”

–Goethe

for some reason, quite a few of my favorite painters worked from photos (or camera) a lot: Vermeer, Degas, Lautrec, Alex Kanevsky.

figuring out why you like about a particular artwork can tell you a lot about yourself. so i keep asking myself what is it about these artists’ works that draws me in? at first it was obvious. my first answer would be that they all capture a moment in their paintings. but is that all? if that’s the only reason, then wouldn’t photography* be a more suitable medium?

rather than just “capturing a moment” in their work, i would say that these artists created time, not just a “moment”, but many moments–past, present, future all rolled into one. when people talk about realist (whatever that means) paintings, they always like to talk about capturing 3-D world on 2-D surface. but what about the 4th dimension–TIME?

these days, i am thinking about everything too much in terms of space-time dimensions, superstring theory, holographic universe etc… it is always stimulating when i find connection between the different things I get interested in. (like yoga-art, chinese ink painting-comics etc. etc.) then again, everything is connected, right?

*interestingly enough, my favorite photographer Henri Cartier Bresson was trained as a painter. he gave up photography in his later years and went back to drawing. he said that his passion was never for photography in itself. also, my favorite graphic designer Tibor Kalman didn’t even consider himself a graphic designer…

…but I will resume posting regularly in a coupla weeks.

actually i have been taking a break from comic work this summer. i have been doing a lot of “blind” drawings and quick oil sketches too. in short, i am actually doing a lot of things i’ve never done before…just don’t have time to scan and post them and really write about them in details, as i hope i will soon. (ever get the feeling that every few weeks you move on to a new phase? i have been feeling like that since the beginning of this year. pretty scary but exciting)

later later

(a crop of my doodle page, chinese brush & ink on utrecht printmaking paper)

i’ve picked up my brush more often lately (yeah i am studying chinese ink drawing, i will show you some samples soon) so i started doodling/ sketching with it. i drew my feet over and over and then later i realized they all feel kinda different. you might say that the top and middle pair of feet have different styles.

a lot of people asked me about my style(s). they look at the art in my book or my site, and usually the first thing they say is, “are they all done by you? the styles are so different!”

i actually don’t think about styles much. i never want to have a distinctive style, or even one medium/genre that i work in. The tools i use, the music i am listening to, the thing that i was drawing, and sometimes the artists that inspire me, the mood i am in…my drawings reflect all these things.

i like to make art because of how it opens and expands me, so why limit myself to one thing? i just want to flow freely, to explore aimlessly. drawing is immersing myself into what’s around me–and hopefully the “me” dissolves in the process. the “I” always get in the way of good art. being too concerned about “my style” is a really egoistic thing. i draw or paint in order to let go, so why be attached to a “style?” that’s why i always have trouble with this dreadful thing called “artist’s statement.” the moment i define myself, i am already limiting myself.

this thinking certainly won’t help me market myself as an artist….too bad.

* * *
“I’m glad I haven’t found my style yet. I’d be bored to death.” - Degas

okay i didn’t get to walk around much at MoCCA (which feels like months ago. has it only been 2 weeks?) so it is not a best of the fest review. i did manage to pick up some comics (and finally had time to read them!) so i just want to share some of my favorite finds.

Strawberry Ghost #1 by Helen Parson
i don’t think helen was actually exhibiting at MoCCA but she came by my table and we ended up trading. a 24-page color-xeroxed (but most art are in b/w) mini-comic, Strawberry Ghost initially attracted my attention with its imaginative and stylized, eerie but lovely drawings (w/ some photos mixed in them). i didn’t expect that it would lead to such an intimate reading experience, the narratives are simple but poignant, the dialogs are mostly short, unexpected, strange, yet the emotions feels very…real and raw.
all in all, a very engaging debut. can’t wait to read her new work!

Brain Songs (Five Comic-Short-Stories) by Uli Oesterle
the belgian comic publisher Bries showcased an impressive array of works by some really excellent european comic artists. it was a great table to learn about artists/works that are not well known/ hard to find in the States. a lot of great artworks, inventive formats, and just about everything there looked tempting. i wandered there several times and finally went back to my table with a german comic magazine with a hole in it (too bad i can’t read it), a slim book by Rabate in french (some day i will figure it out with the help of an online translator), a series of accordian fold comics in a palm-size box (no words, but the comics don’t make much sense to me), …and Brain Songs by Uli Oesterle. good that it was translated to english. i read it twice before i could fully comprehend it. but it’s worth it. it is dense and dark, especially the first story “The Sweet Memories of Otto Mallorca”. i felt like i was really getting into the head of the schizophrenic Otto. kinda scary.

…i just realized that that if i were to go on talking about my comic discoveries, i won’t get any of my own work done….

But here are some other interesting works i want to mention:

Stories from the Ward #3 by Lark Pien (she was at MoCCa with Global Hobo, a distributor based in san francisco. they had some really intriguing mini-comics with beautiful silkscreen covers.) the cover itself is a great piece of art. i especially like page 8, where you can’t tell who’s in the aquarium, the people or the fish.

Habitual Entertainment #2-Fool’s Gold by Will Dinski.

the MOCCA Art Fest is finally over. i was there showing my hot-off-the-press book for the first time, and it was an awwwwesome experience. (after a whole week of drowning in self-doubt and anxiety, the day before the show, i finally came to terms with myself. I decided that i would just go in without any expectation, and just have fun meeting people etc….and what great fun it was!)

first of all, thank you thank you thank you
…to all of you who stopped by and looked at my book
…to the wonderful MOCCA people and esp. the volunteers
…to all the artists who participated and those who stopped by and shared your work with me.

and a big thank you to all of you who actually bought my book! it really warmed my heart. i heard other cartoonists getting upset about the people who read through their book from front to back then decided not to buy them. of course I feel disappointed sometimes too, but there are so many good work at the show, even i myself couldn’t buy all the books that interested me (and it is just hard to absorb everything since i was just really overwhelmed). so i am happy enough that people spent more than a few seconds reading my book; and it made it all the more special to me when a total stranger liked my book enough to decide to take it home with them.

after all these long hours of working on the stories alone, it is easy to feel disconnected with the rest of the world…

(may 2005)

…so it is always wonderful to know that someone can relate to my art. isn’t that the great thing about art? this sudden click between strangers; this sharing of an “other space” created by the artist and the viewer. (or by the writer and the reader…)

So, thank you all of you. Hope to see you again next year.

(sketched in may 2004.)

so here is my book, still waiting to see the printed copies.

am i happy with the book? in general, yes.

it is exciting when you have an idea in mind, but not sure how it would come out, and to see it finally realized on paper. but the most valuable thing about doing this little book project is the artistic process itself. (i know, the end result looks so simple, yet it took so much out of me.)

…towards the end of it, i was improvising a lot, making a lot of decisions based on intuition alone, which often lead to results that surprised me.

…of course, it was always fun to pull off an idea that I initially gave up ‘cos i thought i would never make it work.

…and i was working much looser towards the end, which makes the process less tedious.

of course there are many things i would’ve liked to have done better–especially the stories i drew 1.5 years ago. in some ways i feel embarrassed to show them. but i drew them because they really meant something to me, and if i didn’t like the final execution, there is still something about them that i like enough to want to put them in the book.

now, every time i am tempted to make changes in my old work, i think of what aldous huxley said in the 1967 bantam edition of the Brave New World:

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as, or at least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics. Remorse, for example, is as undesirable in relation to our bad art as it is in relation to our bad behavior. The badness should be hunted out, acknowledged and, if possible, avoided in the future. To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed at its first execution, to spend one’s middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth-all this is surely vain and futile. And that is why this new Brave New World is the same as the old one. Its defects as a work of art are considerable; but in order to correct them I should have to rewrite the book-and in the process of rewriting, as an older, other person, I should probably get rid not only of some of the faults of the story, but also of such merits as it originally possessed. And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else.

…to the bottom of the well again. that’s what I need. i need to send my comic out to the printer by the second week of may and of course i am panicking. so besides going to work, (and yoga/ swimming) working on my book will be the only thing i do. the only “hang out” will be the django fest. i am even taking some of my precious vacation days to work on my comics. this reminds me of my final semester at sva, trying to finish my thesis project at the eleventh hour. except that i didn’t have a full-time job then. looking back, i am always amazed at what i could get done in a short amount of time. yes, it’s the deadline thing again.
so, until may 10th, take care.

my first plant in this apartment is now dead, after more than 2 months of staying here. okay it sounds silly to get sentimental over a plant, but this jade was given to me by a friend for this new year, new life, and it really livened up the kitchen the minute i put it on the table. it was growing well all through this winter, i just don’t understand why it would wilt when spring was just around the corner (i don’t even know what i did wrong in watering).

i meant to draw it when it was alive and well. but never got around to. so here it is, the last goodbye…

it’s some herbal medicine soup mix my friend takes everyday for her allergy.

i wonder why they didn’t at least chop up the bugs first…

from wind-up bird chronicle, may kasahara to toru okada:

“If people lived forever–if they never got any older–if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy–do you think they’d bother to think hard about things, the way we’re doing now? I mean, we think about just about everything, more or less–philosophy, pschology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world…”
…”Who would think about what it means to be alive if they were just going to go on living forever? Why would they have to bother? Or even if they should bother, they’d probably just figure, ‘Oh, well, I’ve got plenty of time for that. I’ll think about it later.’ But we can’t wait till later….Nobody knows what’s going to happen. So we need death to make us evolve.”

i have always been the last-minute deadline driven type. i just can’t seem to get things unless there is a deadline. well, i guess Death is the ultimate deadline, isn’t it?

(nyc–8/04/03)

from The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Mr. Honda to Toru:

“It’s not a question of better or worse. The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you are supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up.”

a little more than a year ago, like toru okada, i was down in a deep well. now i feel like i just climbed back up to the ground; and i am ready to find the highest tower.

then again, i think the best state of mind when creating artwork is to go deep and go high at the same time. but with a full-time day job, it is not easy to climb too far down or up.

anywway…
right now, i am focusing on getting my first comic collection published. it really doesn’t sound like much, a mere 32-page zine. but it is a lot more work than i thought. it seems like i always end up spending 15-20 hours or so on one page*, and of course they would be read in 5 seconds. is it worth the time and effort? yes, i would say so. i will be proud of it, for actually doing it, if not for the results.

(6-13-05: well, some of the pages in the book are done a lot quicker. still, the thought process can take a long time before i even started sketching it out.)

finally went to see The Gates on saturday. i rode through The Gates on my bike in the quiet early morning, just the way i had wanted to experience it. (i don’t think bike riding is allowed on pathways, but i rode very slowly and no one said anything.)

i was slightly disappointed by the size of the gates. for some reason, i thought they would be wider, closer together, so one would feel like they were lost in saffron waves.

but it was still an amazing experience.

a friend told me that he went to see the gates, but didn’t go very far before he left. “once you see them in one spot, you pretty much have seen it all,” he said.

how wrong.

when you go miles and miles and still see the saffron fabric moving rhymically all around you, the park becomes a very surreal maze. the effect is so theatrical that i kept thinking that people in strange costumes will jump out from the bush anytime.

actually, there are people in costumes–everywhere in the park, you see The Gates crew in gray vests holding 6 ft. (or is it 7 ft.?) poles with a tennis ball on one end, ready to answer people’s questions. i asked one of them what is the most frequently asked question. she said,”what is the tennis ball for?–that’s what i hear most.”

oh well.

i hope to go back before the gates get taken down. i always think new york is too much grey and brown. now, with the saffron color burned into my mind, the city is gonna feel even more colorless after next weekend.

at least we still have the yellow cabs, right?

* * *
here are more gates:
cracker gates
torii gates (i wonder if these had inspired christo and jeanne claude)
somerville gates

if it’s so easy to steal a locked bike,
…you may as well leave yours unlocked.

(nyc–2/09/05)