Playtime-Second Half

My spaghetti squash with calligraphy has been drying under a slight weight to prevent the shell from curling up too much.  It is time to commence the second half of the game.

I intend to etch out the calligraphy by following the brushstrokes with a cutting tool.  My plan is to have the writings appear to be hollowed out fonts.  My Dremel is summoned for the job.  I am going to use an Rotozip bit, assuming that is the correct tool for my fun game.

I am getting a quick lesson in humility.  My assumption is not quite correct.  The Rotozip bit is too harsh for the brittle thin skin of the dried squash and takes out a whole chunk of the shell before I can cuss.  I believe my bit was designed for drywalls. 

The alternative is a burring bit.  I should have used that in the first place.  The project takes longer since the burring bit does not remove as much material as readily as the cut out bit.  The hollowed out lines are much better defined though.  I suppose there's always a trade off.  So am I a dentist now?

I have a piece of red craft paper handy so I used that as an underlayment to the hollowed out writings.

I like what I am seeing.  I am going ahead with more pieces of the squash.

I am also curious to see what the cut outs look like when light passes through the openings,

I think the light show is much more captivating than the carving itself.

This is fun.

Someone asks me why I do this.  Is there a purpose in all this?

"I do it just because I can"

Still goofing off

I am going to try to paint my horses again.  I haven't given up yet.

My last attempt at painting 4 horses was ok.  One of the horses looked deformed, afflicted with osteomalacia.  I promised myself to do better.  Time to redeem myself.

I shall concentrate more on form and gesture this time around.  A silhouette comes to mind.

The equine on the right seems a bit off. Its shoulder looks strange, and its head is placed too far to the right. Or maybe its front legs are too far to the left?

Too late to cry over spilled milk, I am forging on.

 

The front left leg of the last horse still looks unnatural, I still need to study how to place the bend.

Then an idea comes to me, I should insert a horse behind the first two horses, to diffuse the bad shoulder of the second horse.

In this composition, the head of one horse protrudes from behind the left horse, utilizing its tail and rear quarter to modify the shoulder line of its adjacent counterpart. The three horses appear to have merged into a cohesive entity. Composition wise we have a multitude of three contrasting with two separate ones, fitting in with the idea of variation and harmony  

While the initial appearance may be somewhat chaotic or jumbled, the composition is functionally effective. It presents three horses grouped together, followed by two additional horses. This arrangement imbues the work with energy and dynamic motion.

I will use this formula for my future attempts. 

Horsing around, h(g)oofing off

I painted a lone horse last time.  Time to paint a few of them together.

I started out with a horse leaning in on a turn,

Added a companion trying to follow,

Somewhere during the process I lost control of the wetness of my brush.

The third horse presented more of a side profile,

and to bring up the rear,

I must had gotten tired since this was close to mid-night.  I inadvertently gave my last horse osteomalacia or rickets!  Let's hope it doesn't get euthanized. 

I'll do better, I promise. 

Time for bed. 

Playtime

Painting is playtime for me.  I try not to take it too seriously since my livelihood is not dependent on it. It has always been an exercise of exploration and fun with occasional frustration mixed in.

Recently I harvested a spaghetti squash, which is known as Shark-fin-squash where I grew up.  Instead of turning to mush like pumpkin when cooked, this squash has flesh with distinct filaments.  The strands look like spaghetti, hence the name; or like strands of shark fin used in shark fin soup.  The squash itself has a delicate sweet taste to it and is quite refreshing, unlike the over-the-top, decadent shark fin soup.  I halved the squash, scraped off the seeds and boiled the squash to soften the flesh.  After the softened flesh was scooped out and set aside for cooking, I was left with the tough skin of the squash.

Normally I would have put the skin, or the shell of the squash in the compost to feed a new generation of plants but I felt a sudden urge to play with them this time.

I wanted to do some calligraphy on them.

I did not anticipate the difficulties that were presented.  First off I just picked a brush that was laying around, which was not particularly suitable for calligraphy.  The most challenging part was the fact that the surface was not flat, it was dome shaped.  Unlike writing on a piece of flat paper, it was difficult to maintain a proper angle between the brush and the squash.  The result were a lot of glancing blows where a proper brush tip was impossible to maintain and I wasn't able to control the nudging and pressing of the brush.  I subsequently changed to a brush that I use for calligraphy (small piece on the left),

I gained new respect and appreciation for artisans who paint or write on vases, bowls etc.

I am not sure about what to do with this episode of my playtime but I had fun doing something out of the ordinary.  For me anyways.

For now I'll let the shells dry and see what I can cook up later on.

Sorry, I just don't get it

I was stunned, shocked, embroiled in total disbelief at a recent art show.

The piece of "art" that claimed First Place was a portable beach chair with a canopy, wrapped in aluminum foil and some colored fabric along with a seat cushion.

It was vague to me what won the honor of a first place finish; the contraption itself or the photo that was displayed behind it.  

This piece of "art" was a comment on global warming and rising sea levels, as the artist sat on this man-made piece of junk, mostly wrapped in non-biodegradable fabric and plastic and perhaps adding to the microplastic dilemma   Which brings to mind a famous outbound motor company tried to merchandise their motor with a filter that captures microplastic particles as cooling water circulates the engine. The sell was that while boaters are running their motors they are helping to remove microplastic contaminants from waterways.  The question that begs to be answered is what the consumer does with the used filters. The flimsy lawn chair is so trivial that begs the question: why even buy it in the first place.  To help the GDP of some poor country I assume.  Who knows, the artist might have picked it up at some recycling facility or might have re-purposed a piece of garbage that was found.  I was too quick to judge. Sorry!

I get it that a lot of galleries and artists alike are answering to the clarion call of social and environmental issues to stay relevant.  I don’t have a problem with that.  But when the open call was not based on such themes and somehow such pieces popped up as winners then the verdicts were less than cogent.  In fact it trivialized a good cause.

The point was that I felt absolutely resoundingly stupid.  I failed to see the "art" aspect of the whole thing.  It was a political statement perhaps, under the guise of environmental art that examines climate change in the context of human activities and global responsibilities.

This sort of reminded me of another First Prize winner at a local art show.  It was a tent show and the adjudicator was the city mayor.  A cropped photo of a raised fist captured that honor.  It was a photograph with intrinsically bad quality.  This was the time during a lot of social unrest and racial inequality issues. Again a feel good piece.  A political statement.  But "art", hell no !

A quick search on the web with words like "weird art", "absurd art" brings up hoards of examples of how dysfunctional some of these "art" insiders or authorities can become.

Artist's Feces is a piece by Piero Manzoni and was purported to be a satirical comment of the convoluted obsession with celebrities. Imagine paying good money to buy someone's gaga.  Not for medicinal purpose as in fecal microbiota transplantation. That is done to help restore the microbiome.  

Spatial Concept is a piece of red canvas with a knife slit in it.  The artist Lucio Fontana claimed that his work abolished the traditional framework where the canvas was supposed to be painted on.  By putting a knife through it, he freed himself from the shackles of art.

Who can forget about the banana duct-taped to a wall.  The piece Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan insisted that the artist broke status quo in meaningful, irrelevant and controversial ways.  Some fool paid 6 million dollars to help him destroy that status quo.  I suppose I would have deemed those 6,000,000 bucks very meaningful if I was Mr. Cattelan.

So what is my beef!  I’ve certainly stepped on a lot of toes.

Sour grapes?  Perhaps!

But sorry, I just don't get it.  Really.  

To sketch or not to sketch

Convinced that sketching was what made Xu Beihong's horses look so distinctive and exact,  muscles bulging and tendons tensing I decided to follow suite.

How crass!

I picked out a photo of a horse and I sketched it out in charcoal.  Paying attention to the nostrils, mouth, chest muscles and  joints and tendons.  Cute!

The rest was easy.  Using my brush and ink I finished my horse in no time.

It was only the following day that I observed the pin-up on the wall and was overcome by a profound sense of disgust.

The painting I had completed the night before was excessively precise, resulting in an appearance that closely resembled a drawing, almost as if it were a graphic illustration for a book. The brushstrokes were absent and the entire painting lacked any semblance of soul..

I mean when someone shows up with a perfect body, perfect lips and nose etc. we suspect cosmetic surgery........  We all know that god is not perfect!

So I tried again.  Without first sketching it out this time around.

Right away I could see the expressive brushstrokes.  I was no longer bound by the charcoal sketch.

A few days later I gave it a third try.

Upon analyzing the latest iteration of my painting, I must acknowledge that none of the individual components achieved the same level of visual appeal as the initial attempt. However, the brush now is narrating a story, and the brushstrokes have become spontaneous. The horse’s galloping motion is now palpable, whereas the sketched version appeared static.

It is evident that with each subsequent attempt at painting the same horse, my familiarity with the subject matter increased. Despite the three attempts spanning several days, there was sufficient muscle memory to enhance each execution, rendering the “sketching” process on paper obsolete, as the image was now firmly etched in my mind.

On a whim

It was almost midnight. 

I should be climbing into my bed.  Not because I was afraid to turn into a pumpkin, but I just wanted to have a good showing on my Apple Health app to say that I had healthy sleep habits.

But I'm a night owl.  Somehow I was reluctant to let the day go.  So I continued to scroll through songs on my music streaming device.  Any excuse to clutch the waning day. 

Then an album cover turned up, a lady's headshot.

For some reason I was so enamored with her image, I had to paint her; immediately.

Perhaps I had been studying Xu Beihong and his studies with sketching and what not, I instinctively grabbed my charcoal and started to sketch on Xuan paper.  I filled in the grayscale values with my brush wash which I didn’t empty from the day before, which was basically very diluted ink.  Her hair reminded me of the tail and mane on a horse, brushstroke-wise.  I had no training per se in painting portraits but that didn't stop me.  I was on a whim.

By the time the painting was done, it was already a new day.   I just left the painting as it was and went to bed satisfied, like a child having received a new toy.

I decided to take a closer look at what I had done the night before.  I examined it in the daylight.

 

That's when I realized that her nose was too flat and one of her nostril seemed to have collapsed.  Her eyebrows were not symmetrical.  Her mouth was off center or I should say that she had more lips on one side than the other.

I tried to rescue or hide my mistakes by draping her hair closer t the face to conceal the brow and lip, and re-shaping one of her nostrils.

Since my iPad came with certain artistic brushstrokes, I thought I gave it a try.

Combed her hair a bit, less wild, and a backlit highlight effect, 

That was actually fun.  I was on a wimp.