Rant brought to you by disgustingly talented 15 year olds.

For the "Saying Goodbye" theme on www.getbetterordie.tumblr.com

This was originally a really expansive image, about funerals and lots of people, and small scenes happening in big scenes, and well it just didn't work so it just kept getting cropped cropped cropped. And the drawing of the girl is waaay too stiff. Blerp, don't like it, but that's okay. I've been told you have to make a lot of crap before you do anything right. Maybe I'll move away from photoshop for awhile.

Actually i was thinking about illustration, and whats fashionable right now. I really love german children books from the 50s- 70s, and even now really. They tend to be really loose drawing, or simplistic shapes, and instead of one focus there's a lot of joy in creating images that have many interlocking social interactions happening in a tiny space. For example if it's a fairy tale, you'll have the main scene with the prince and princess swooning in the grass, and then you'll notice some owls in the trees peeping at them, and then when you're about to turn the page you realize there's a lawn gnome sunbathing by a puddle of water and some lady bugs having a property dispute. 

Example of German Story book illustration. Also, This is a pretty accurate description of my home. 

I don't like how insecure I've become with my art, or at least how it reached this pinnacle of paranoia about not being good enough, tight enough, talented enough, egotistical enough. It's actually one of the reasons I left SVA, because for some reason folks disregarded what I held as important (character, complexity, scatter brained etc.) and instead were trying with all their might to create another one of their slick drones, clean edges, worthy of awards given out by stuffy old men running obsolete museums. Now I wish I could have stood up a little stronger, been a little more of a butt-head and told folks to shove off. Because now I have all these sicko art school rules bouncing around my head and they're making me bonkers, because they make no sense and at not point have they helped me create better art. 

The point of all this is that I just want to leave all that bitterness behind, put it in the past and make this last year in school really count. 

And that is why I don't like my illustration for GetBetterOrDie.

Gettin messy, takin names

Apparenly I like drawing people touching their faces. Now that I think about it I touch my face a lot. 

Notice tumblr avatar in upper left hand image, saame. Also the same as that one king print from awhile back. Fixated, only want to draw gnarly hands and squished faces.

Also I've decided to stop being such a neurotic pussy and just MAKE THE GODDANG ART. If that means I have to be a slob, then dang-nabbit I'll be the best slob you ever did see.

OH YOU FANCY HUH?

Oh, and I bought these pants and am a little over excited about them.

The American Apparel pose comes free with purchase.

Now that I have the fancy tumblr, It seems okay to share with you more trivial things. BUT DANG, look at how glorious these are! They are definately a work of art worth admiring.

Whoa.

Breakthrough! (And wow, low cut top lol)

HOLY MOTHER OF GOD MY BRAIN JUST EXPLODED! I know what I want to do after undergrad! I know what I want to study, I KNOW OMG I KNOW! So in practice I'm an illustrator and obsessed with images but have trouble sticking to the ideologies of print arts and more modern conceptualizing thats so in vogue and know that I'd be totally discontent just blindly following one art practice, because I'm on the fence about illustration as a boxed artform and the formlessness of contemperary art. Whenever someone tries to force an artistic truth It's hard not to see the holes in it, the self congratulatory tone of art critiqe and the necessary exclusion of people that's necessary to artifically produce an art economy. This art lecture course has really opened my eyes to how art now belongs to those who are able to argue their ideas the best and overpower the less articulate. Which means more talk, less art. Aka (derp!) politics? WHAA?!

Containing excitement.

It's basic powerplays. Idk, oh my god, I don't want to be stuck in that swamp, I want to study it. How do images change us, how has it been used historically to control people as a whole, how it's being used now, how it shapes racial/ sexual/ collective identity etc. etc.

This is hella rambly, and makes no sense, but for some reason I feel like I've hit something important, something that I've kept overlooking.

Visual Artist by day, Vigilante Art Historian by Night! Huzzah!! (Or maybe the other way around haha)

Done and back to work!

Possible program?

Workin Workin Workin

Here's a shot of my workspace and a painting thats been in the works for awhile. For the past few months I've been haunted by this icelandic boy (not actually haunted, but pursued by the idea of) and finally a few weeks ago decided he deserved a proper canvas. Again am reverting back to the frontal facing figure but at this point am convinced it's just one of those ingrained personal archetypes that should be developed. Don't worry, that's not all I'm going to be painting, but am no longer going to apologize for this repetition in my work. The small painting has really electrified me to start working larger and be uncarring of the fact that they arn't as seamless and perfect as the current trendy illustrations (which ironically I look up to haha).

On a funner note I have SO MUCH STUFF I want to make and show you guys. Theres an interview I have to write up with a local artist I interviewed, some self loathing autobiographical comics, musical obsessions, offensive character designs, MOAR SMUT etc. If only I had the time and not so many labor intensive finals coming up!

So am really enjoying getting your feedback to the blog questions so today I want to know, in one sentence, what you're currently obsessed with. Personally, I'm bonkers about peppermint flavored things and learning about the female migrant population in China.

Times are A' Changing

Bits from my sketchbook. Leonard Foujita and his dog.

I've been a little negligent and really should try harder to work and practice this way (sketchbook), away from larger pressure laden projects. But I really dislike sketching people out in the real world. They notice, and then they posture themselves and suddenly my hands don't work properly and I hurry and do an awful job and my back hurts, and my fingers get cold. Something about being in the public sphere as an artist feels very unsafe. Have been thinking of just taking a camera around at all times to steal moments quickly without anyone noticing and then reopening them at home for me to spend time with.

I've noticed though that there's a lot of negative feelings toward artists working primarily from photography or memory. It's probably just a matter of pride and identity, like a woman refusing to take drugs to dim the sharp pangs of childbirth. Obsession with being as strong as previous generations I guess.

So Question to you guys out there: What are your opinions/ thoughts on the growing relationship between photography and traditional art techniques such as painting, printmaking and mixed media?

Also, as you may have noticed the blog is no longer named Tragically Unpopular but instead Not Quite Science. This may change back, but somehow the old title seemed too pessimistic and self deprecating. Maybe a change of title will help cultivate my ego ;)

And then there was one

Materials: Graphite, Gouache, watercolor, photoshop, collage

Finally, something I'm truthfully proud to show you guys! This piece was my first attempt to reconcile my love of drawing and my lack of skill in real life medium. I have a lot of prejudice against computer art (giant art snob actually), and yet I keep being drawn back to it. Thus it's been decided that I should shrug my shoulders and give in to the fact that I'm a participant of a specific time in history and that it should be embraced.

This doesn't mean that I'm giving up on traditional art work, just that I should view digital methods as more than just a shameful crutch. In this image for example I started with a graphite drawing, keeping most of it simple except for the bird which I wanted to completely render so I could try out a different version of layering where I can concentrate on value and then introduce color ontop of it, a basic oil painting technique that I have yet to learn. For a moment it seemed I had ruined everything by haphazardly applying pigment but then found that sometimes in breaking down a mistake you find something new hidden underneath. Once a wall was hit, the image was scanned in and slowly refined in photoshop. Mostly playing with the color levels and contrast to bring out texture.

It's by no means perfect, but so much was learned in the process that it feels like a success.

(p.s Don't want to go too much into the concept, but the Santa Muerte has been on my mind a lot lately.)

Cris Brodahl at the Seattle Art Museum

Today I want to steer your attention to a very talented artist named Cris Brodahl hailing from Belgium, she was just brought to my attention this thursday. Unfortunately her internet presence is very small (not even a website!) so I was unable to locate any of her pieces from the show I saw but these will have to do.

Her first ever US Solo show, Relievo, is being presented at the Seattle Art Museum. Though I often do try to mainly look at the art and not the explanations, one particular sentance sticks in my head. It states that Cris Brodahl has been "quietly" painting for years. The emphasis is on "quietly". Suturing herself within her studio, where only one lone painting hangs, she's been dedicating her life to her images, not the outside world's expectations. This artistic monastary not only blocks out the world but her previous works as well. This purity rings when you see her works. They are clean, calculated and uncomfortably full of madness.

Brodahl pays her respects to classical art by taking her scalpel to it, cutting photos of women apart, cutting them open until their insides in the form of amorphous flowers and knots of finely woven hair tumble out to lay forgotten at your feet.

One could go on about her exquisite painting skills. Though her larger scale figure paintings/ sculptures seemed to be lacking depth, her portraitures of the picture mutants that seemed to be encased in a filmy mask of rock are so full of her obsession for detail, and are so heart wrenching that they make up for their larger counterparts.

Another point that should be noted is though she has been keeping out anything that could sully her work Brodahl is keenly aware of the current art climate. I say this because part of the gallery showcased a series of porcelain sculptures of diaphonous women being lost in a mass of cartilage and bone. This theme carries over to the paintings/ reliefs on an adjacent wall. Upon closer inspection the bony parts of the paintings and the the entirety of sculpture seemed to have been crafted by possibly machine? It was too perfectly cut to be anything hand-made. This use of computers is very ingenious and speaks to the constant pulling sensation in her pieces. Beauty vs. gruesome, artificial vs. traditional.

How convenient these new tools are, but are we selling a little of our souls in the aquisition of these new tools that promise leisure and reproducability? It speaks to something that the current generation is collectively experiencing, especially in the realm of visual culture. What we are seeing is a clash of moving forward and retaining the past, the fear and knowledge that no matter what is done all will not be saved. I was just talking to a friend about this but what we are seeing is an acceleration of technology that is erasing everything from books, movies, cartoons, painting, craftmanship, the real human vs. the idealized version of an avatar or carefully calculated internet persona. The loss of the initial seed is what is feared. I apologize for the sudden downward spiral of this last paragraph but it does illustrate the panic of the handful of people seeing the world move on without them.

Last Observation: What is up with current female artists and the hair obsession? I've done it, classmates have done it, Cris Brodahl is HELLA doin it. Why is hair so important to us? Feel free to comment!

We're not sure what kind of love this is.

Originally this piece was meant to be part of a series at least three pieces long about dominance, both sexual and social. After sketching out the images that were to follow I realized they were just cute pornagraphy haha which of course I really like but didn't fit in with this first image which loosely dealt with obediance and waiting. Maybe later I'll post some more naughty bits since as seedlings they looked pretty compellingly dirty and exploitative.

Special thanks to Morgan Conley, who last time we hung out showed me how to make it so you can color BEHIND your inked work. Have been asking around for literally ages on how to do this but nobody was ever able to give a straight answer! Was so excited, because it's really very important to be able to preserve the original drawing in all it's texture and minute mistakes and not just throw it all away in exchange for a clean yet fingerprintless line art thats only meant to hold robotically filled color.

Also, another friend Andrew Werner, reminded me that one of the perks of digital art work is how easily textures and colors can be spliced in. Collage used to seem very dishonest to me and I was closed to it's possibilities because egotistically I wanted to be able to take credit for every single aspect of what I created. As my computer slowly becomes a holding bank for stolen images it has become undeniable how important of a relationship my generation has with photography and video. That even if I wasn't directly using imagery in my pictures I was just as much of an image burgler as anyone else.

Quick fact: the background is blown up pixelated parts of colors found in photographs of the red light district in Amsterdam.

Ribbon around a bomb.

Hello everyone, as you can see I couldn't stay away. I JUST REALLY LIKE BLOGGING YOU GUYS! Plus I really like making pictures so there you go, crisis averted. And do you know what got me so quickly out of my slump? A movie about Frida Kahlo... Whaaa??

It's true, modern Hollywood has created something kind of great. The Format of the film is narrative and then a tie in to one of Frida's paintings. She really was something else and quite inspiring really. The impression that the director of the film gave was that Instead of defining herself by her artwork Frida merely lived her life and then painted as a way to sort of funnel and describe the numerous wordless pains and joys that would spring up. She was quietly brilliant. A first look at her paintings suggest an obsession with the self that borderlines on the narcissistic. A closer look at the circumstances of her paintings suggest a different interpretation.

Frida worked I daresay mostly from her bed? Earlier in her life, before art had taken precidence, she was caught in a harrowing car accident where along with having almost all her bones broken, a pipe traveled through her right side and exited OUT OF HER UTERUS. Throughout Frida's life she would go through multiple surgeries and suffer from chronic pain that would pull her focus from the outside back to her own broken sorry excuse for a body. As an artist honesty seems to be the best policy, and what is more honest then unashamedly saying "All I think about is how my nerves are screaming and how my heart is hearting, All I think about is me!". Because really we all love thinking about ourselves. Frida is just able to paint the nasty bits that we can relate to and make them beautiful. Gaahhh so good!

Blah Blah Blah so much ranting! The point is I look up to Frida, and it was really inspiring to hear about this person who was so uncompromising when it came to her art and life. The End. Now look at this Bangin picture they took of her for Vogue! So fashionable!

I SWEAR IT WILL GET BETTER, any second now.

Yaaaaayy, haha, here's Marie Antoinette in a confusing composition devoid of proper contrast or watercolor technique OR ANATOMY!

Man, Does anyone else ever just get really frusterated at their current predicament. I feel really wierd right now, maybe because illustration as a focal point of my art just seems to fit a little less every day. Or maybe its just because I've been listening to conceptual artists too much. Either way, my disinterest in my assignments, school and traditional art school education in general has left everything a little rickity, so i've been analyzing what being successful in art means to me, and how I can fit that into the real world and somehow survive financially all at the same time!

But yes, realize that these little introspectual rantings are really not that fun to read, so I'll try uploading little interesting tidbits that are seperate from my art, because I have so much more that i want to share with you guys! SO MANY BEAUTIFUL MONSTERS AND TOYS AND MUSIC AND LOVE and hate lol.

Am making a gooey lovey dance mix, so stay tuned!

A "Polished" rant.

Hello there folks! Kicked things off with a running start today with the first critique of the shiny new semester. It was a pretty interesting one since we had a substitute who actually systematically went through everyone's pieces and picked out all the inconsistencies. And DANG there were a lot! Most were sort of practical sharp observations about the technical aspects, but the biggest issue she had with mine she had was the mixing of the "Tragedy and Poetic/romantic" elements which through me a bit of a whammy because Tragedy is made romantic all of the time, and clearly my picture is fantasy. It sounded like she wanted there to be less substance? This teacher saw two seperate stories while I saw one? Her family perished in a tornado?

The focus was meant to be on the two tornado's having their moment and the houses were supposed to be just structural, like playmobil houses. And I know theres a cow! Because its bloody funny! I don't know, when I told her that I was offended that she thought me to be making fun of the dead (after coupling her own initial indifference toward the Crash in the twin towers with my painting mind you) she said she wouldn't mind me making fun of folks dieing. DEATH IS TRAGEDY. I say Watson this logic is circular!

But I didn't really disagree with any of her points she made. People do need to be aware of how their art comes across to other people, and clearly this picture is not as clear as it should be if the above was talked about. The whole bottom part of the picture is muddy. Haha and I respect her appreciation of stylization...and looked up her art and really liked it though it wasn't what I expected at all, yet still fit her to a T. Balls Ladies and Gentlemen, this lady has balls!

Which brings me to my next point, the fact that women artists have to have bigger balls than most other men folk, or atleast feel they need to feign them when dealing with others. A friend was telling me about her storytelling teacher and that she is absolutely terrifying and is constantly going on about how hard she's had to work just because she's a lady. Maybe I'm just really thick headed or just live in a really open artistic environment but do people look at my art differently because I'm a girl? Is it really that much harder to be an artist with a vagina? Thats so wierd since art school is a pretty estrogen infested place, but how many of those women actually use their skills after, or just give up when babies arrive? Not that commercial success is artistic success, so thats a little nebulous. OH MY GOD there might be a whole secret population of matronly van goghs trolling about our population and we wouldn't even know it because they're too busy suckling their male offspring!

Cool :)

Hurry and count to 30! *EDIT* with color

Here's the value sketch for one of my assignments that required us to have an artificial light source. The entire process of developing this idea has been such a good learning experience. Just the vast amount of work I have to put in to stay a float in my classes has gotten me a little down trodden and frustrated with my limitations, but the product seems really worth it you know?  The final colored version is due next week, and here I increased the contrast and darkened it to get the effect I want in the final. Am so scared of redoing it again though, me and coloring do not get along :)

Oh and here's one of the reference photos of my roomate, its almost if not more beautiful than the sketch! Just look at those shapes refracting off the wall.

I love monsters so much. I know they're not supposed to be real, but I swear to god they existed at some point, if only when we were all little kids stranded atop our beds, in fear that if we ventured out for a glass of water, the moment our bare feet touched the ground something would grab us. That something was so tangible and real back then! And yet even though it was the darkest part of our psyche we could somehow protect ourselves by either not opening our eyes or taking refuge under our unpenetrable blankets.

To bad the monsters arn't as easy to find now.

Am so tired.

*EDIT*

Oop the final color! Ugh, so just between you and me I really don't understand the purpose of gausche (guasche, gauche?). My roommate said that it may help to get the same dreamy and smooth quality as the sketch, but I, like always, just ended up using it as watercolor! Gaah, what a fool. But really, the only upside to using it seems to be that the colors move around a bit when touched by water, but it ends up becoming just as transparent as watercolor. 

Feedback was minimal, nothing I didn't expect. Composition was wack, said my colors were washed out etc. etc. I seem to lack that whole sense about how to use composition. The major complaint from the teacher was that it was so busy, and yet seeing that I left just some open space that I guess I thought made it all right. Plus idk, detail just seems so attractive. I want people to roam about my picture with their eyes, not sit like a lump on a log.

and, AND (!!!) all right guys, I didn't want the focal point to be the child, the monster is the character I care about because the child is ITS monster! Maybe becoming penpal's with ones teacher is advised, because I didn't realize how frustrated I was until I started editing this entry and writing about the critique.

Why won't it grow?

I'm a bit distressed by the rut I've fallen into in respects to my art. It just seems to be the same colors and types of characters I've always done.

here it goes with that box again, you know the one I can never quite get out of! Baaahhh humbug what a lame-o I am, especially this summer.

You know I had the full intention of creating these beautiful oil paintings, "serious art" but I always end up liking my drawings better or shamefully don't have the initiative or attention span to follow through.

AND I HAVN'T TOUCHED MY SKETCHBOOK IN AGES! Its so bad! So Maybe I'll stop doing these mini projects for awhile and just start working in my silly black book again. Observe the world a bit more and actually start writing again. Well, maybe after I do this mini-comic I was thinking of...

Oi, this journal was never meant to be a pity party, so I'm going to stop, take a haitus and come back with something actually worth sharing that will enrich your lives. Stay tunes ladies and gentlemen!

P.S. Photoshop can suck it.

Its the small things that matter!

Ugh, so I started in a new, slightly larger black book and I'm freaking out. Either I'm in a drawers block, the pressure of a new book too much or the pages are just to damn big! And what the bloody hell its not like i can secretly whip it out! Why did I buy this, its to large, to cumbersome and definitely not as sexy and secret!

God, its like I adopted an overweight dog or something baaahhh.