dancing with dirt on my feet

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Tax info finally in to the accountant, stack of new CDs by the player, all's well. It's a very DFA evening around here, as I got both the cheap label-centered mix they did for Muzik magazine and the too-expensive mix they did for the French series "Colette," which is all oddities by e.g. Minimal Compact and the Invisible Girls and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, plus new Rapture and Juan Maclean tracks. Mmm. Plus I just got back from seeing the Thermals at the Mercury Lounge, who gave me la rock (and reminded me of how much I'm looking forward to playing with the Sweater Girls this weekend); they opened with my two favorite songs from the album, and finished about 20 minutes later.

The class I'm getting the biggest buzz from this week is probably my drawing class, where the assignment we've been given is to look over a list of 40 contemporary artists (a very odd list, which it turns out was put together by the teaching assistant--it includes a lot of installation/object/photographic artists, as well as people who paint and draw), learn a little about them, pick two that we particularly respond to, find out as much as we can about their life and work, do quick sketches of 20 or 30 of their pieces, and then do two more fully realized original pieces that draw on their ideas (rather than on their images). Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter are VERY popular with my classmates, it appears--I think 1 in 4 picked each of them as one of their two. I picked the very odd couple of Paul Laffoley and Eric Fischl. Laffoley makes huge diagrammatic paintings of machines to change the ontology of the universe etc., with science-fictional themes and words all over the place--I really like the crazy intensity of his ideas. Fischl I have more of an attraction/repulsion reaction with: I love the energy & the presence of the artist's hand in his early drawings (esp. the glassine drawings) (I'm maybe a little too fond of the idea that if I make artwork it has to be clear that it came from my hand), and I admire his devotion to the emotional content of his images (which are mostly photo-based & involve moments of uncertainty and awkwardness, lots of naked people, and dogs), but he's repeating himself these days in a way that seems more pernicious with him than with Laffoley, and a lot of his content creeps me out.

Even so, I really like doing sketches of the Fischl pieces--in part because they're drawing people, which I haven't especially gotten to do before, and maybe in part because his line is like a million-times-better version of mine sometimes. I've got an idea for what I want to do for my original-but-inspired-by pieces, too, but it involves a number of drawings of actual humans, and I'm not sure I know how to draw them from scratch rather than from a Fischl drawing. We'll see, I suppose--it's due Monday.

1 Comments

joy said:

me, i finally -stopped- drawing so much. this is what happened:

http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/casualgeorge/lst?.dir=/sprouts&.src=ph&.order=&.view=t&.done=http%3a//photos.yahoo.com/

ok, some of them obviously involved a pencil at some point, but i'm making progress.

joy

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This page contains a single entry by Douglas published on April 2, 2003 1:37 AM.

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