My Very First Oil Painting

How exciting right! I'm taking an oil painting class this semester because I thought it would be good to beef up my (non-existing) painting skills. I'm primarily a drawing person, and I have painted in watercolours and acrylic before, but never with formal skills etc. Also, I'm making it a point to take one therapeutic class every semester, so this is it! It would be a good skill set to obtain too, illustration-wise.

My composition skills are a bit shite (note: this was already cropped in photoshop), and I don't have so much the loose option to alter or add on to adjust things as I would when I draw, since I'm not too comfortable with it yet.

The close-up shows the brush strokes, and close tonal scheme that I seem to incline towards. I'm on my third painting so far, and its becoming very apparent that I'm into subtle tonal differences and a kind of blockish brush stroke. I actually took this class hoping to learn how to do the hyper-realistic style of oil painting but urgh, blending! Maybe I don't have the patience for it, or rather the fact that amateurish realism looks so lame that I would rather leapfrog across the whole thing and not learn it at all!



Also, Euan Uglow is a present favourite:


More sketch-doodles. I'm stuck in the sense that I haven't a clue how to process them to make them look more polished - I have tons of these.





*Who's Hans Bacher? He used to be a production designer for Disney, working on major things like Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, Roger Rabbit etc. He came to our school today to present a lecture and it was really entertaining - apart from hearing the inside (positive and negative) scoop of what happens behind the storyboards at Disney, he presented a really cool analysis on colour and composition principles based on some classical paintings. Very nice.

O, I SPY WITH MY FACEBOOK EYE -

Right, right, time to get a grip.

Hey how about some Egon Schiele? There's a delicacy behind the rawness and brutality that seems relevant my life-mood in general. Life-mood? You know, that constant nugget of ache or feeling or tone of pensiveness that accompanies you in your chest when you're doing nothing, something or anything in particular.



































































What about a poem?

The mint bed is in
bloom: lavender haze
day. The grass is
more than green and
throws up sharp and
cutting lights to
slice through the
plane tree leaves. And
on the cloudless blue
I scribble your name.
Sunday; James Schuyler

It (the poem, not the naked lady) reminds me a lot of gorgeous sunlit days in campus when I troop out from the computer labs and have a jaunt up the hill for food! and snacks! and sometimes, thoughts of you! Who? No, no one in particular.









Oh let's be honest now, how about this one?

I want you to feel
the unbearable lack of me.
I want your skin
to yearn for the soft lure of mine;
I want those hints of red
on your canvas
to deepen in passion for me:
carmine, burgundy.
I want you to keep stubbing your toe
on the memory of me;
I want your head to be dizzy
and your stomach in a spin;
I want you to hear my voice
in your ear, to trouch your face
imagining it is my hand.
I want your body to shiver and quiver
at the mere idea of mine.
I want you to feel as though
life after me is dull, and pointless,
and very, very aggravating;
that with me you were lifted
on a current you waited all your life to find,
as though you were wading
through a soggy swill of inanity and ugliness
every minute we are apart.
I want you to drive yourself crazy
with the fantasy of me,
and how we will meet again, against all odds,
and there will be tears and flowers,
and the vast relief of not I,
but us.
I am haunting your dreams,
conducting these fevers
from a distance,
a distance that leaves me weeping,
and storming,
and bereft.
Yearn On; Katie Donovan

Not all the lines apply, but enough do.

I'm feeling erratic, only because I came to a very wrong revelation on the first day of the year. Talk about taking several steps back, and not even a step back into 2008! At least last year, I didn't have this unfortunate edge of self-awareness. It all makes sense now, although it scarcely leaves me in a better situation. Fact is, I - 

Yes.

Bits from a graphic novella. Country singers write wailing love songs, I give boys their own graphic novella man. No, I don't know how to end it yet.