Love [ & Other Mythical Beasts ]: November 2011

Monday, November 28, 2011

Series of Drawings... Pogo was a Friend of Mine: I, II, III.

I made these drawings for my Advanced Drawing class earlier in the semester when asked to make 3 drawings representing our interest/style. As I'm used to making art about relationships the subject matter deals with a guy who I was starting to get attached to, and then, as things happen things ended.

Pogo was a Friend of Mine I. Pen, pencil, marker, colored pencil, pastel on paper. Uban. 2011.

Pogo was a Friend of Mine II. Pen, pencil, marker, colored pencil, pastel on paper. Uban. 2011.

Pogo was a Friend of Mine III. Pen, pencil, marker, colored pencil, pastel on paper. Uban. 2011.

These drawings I consider portraits of that time. One is a portrait of him as an inside joke of a serial killer clown, the other is of me as a shell of myself with a head filled with shrimp representing semen, and the last one is a portrait of half of his unborn baby as a symbolic shrimp/sperm falling out of a symbolic purple glove representing a condom. Some people might think this is a weird, and you know what, I think it's weird too.

Related Post. (Note, the fetus. There's another drawing of a pregnant woman I haven't uploaded, but this was before shit went down. Aha.)

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Circolo degli Artisti/In God's Garden

I finished this painting for the show at the Circolo degli Artisti, which my advanced painting class was participating in. I re-painted the face, as I had mentioned in an earlier post, and defied my painting professor who had been very critical of my inclusion of the glasses. After it was repainted, she took back all the pressure she had put on me to remove them. We had a good laugh at critique. It needs a bit of touching up to be completely finished but I'm not going to touch it again until I'm back home since I want it to be sufficiently dry for transportation.

In God's Garden. Oil on canvas. Uban. 2011.

Front of Invitation to the show.

Back of Invitation to the Show.

Me posing with my piece in the show. (Taken by Cheyenne Gil on Rosie Carlson's camera!)

I had prepared the Artist Statement for this show but it ended up not getting shown with our work... Check out the artturome blog for more pics from this show. My friend, Christina Lower, made a cute lil' video of the evening, "Take it away, Dave." All through the night, my single declaration was, "Art is hard." (After I consumed orange juice and gin, red and white wine, cosmopolitan, and long island iced tea, Christina got me on a night bus, let me fall asleep on her on the bus ride back, woke me up to watch me throw up, then walked me up my five flights of stairs to my apartment, tucked me into bed, and put a glass of water on my nightstand. She is a model friend... I, on the other hand, am a model idiot.) All in all, it was a good time although we had a bit of rain. We also got to meet the Cornell students participating in the show. I'd say it was a successful night.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Inverse Operation, Meatpacking, Stigmata

Inverse Operation. Collage. 7X9 inches. 2011. Uban.

Meatpacking. Collage. 7X9 inches. 2011. Uban.

Stigmata. Collage. 7X9 inches. 2011. Uban.

I really do enjoy making collages. I've loved making them ever since I was a kid. I made these for the postcard project for my advanced drawing class.

Here are some collages I made in a past post, "Collages. For my mother."

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Artist Statement/ List

My advanced painting professor, Susan Moore, was frank about the intimidating challenge of creating an artist statement. So as an alternative, Moore got the idea from the work of a current grad student, Jamie Felton, that each of us would write a List. This list would contain our goals, interests, influences, etc. I ended up using this as an artist statement for a show at the Circolo degli Artisti a few weeks ago. (This is the third or fourth version, since I kept writing them in random places and forgetting where they were.)

Falling in love for the first time, apprehension, analyzing intentions and behavior, hyper-intellectualism VS hipster, one day marrying a man who will build us a house and all the furniture in it, living by the sea or a cabin in the woods or in a condo, stream of consciousness as a narrative model, a white dress of soft cotton fabric, watching DIY home improvement videos on Youtube about installing baseboard molding, (but don’t ask me how because I don’t remember, however luckily for you, there is a Youtube video for that), background, fields and fields of green, working on a watermelon farm, dirt, the smell of fresh dirt, worms in the mud after a rainstorm, the smell of tomato plants, holding hands, germs, leminiscate as a symbol of infinity, the lady in the bible who got turned into a pillar of salt, genital piercing, body modification/mutilation, linear regression, coloring books, puzzles, cooking better/eating better, the occult, the supernatural, knowing the future, intuition, Fate, going to medical school, becoming more external, making art that is more straightforward, making graphic novels, making prosthetic limbs, pop-up books, greeting cards that sing, illustrations of animals, fairy tales, romantic garbage, amoeba, parasites, the way asphalt expands in the summertime, modernism, antiques and objects with gilded edges, John Wayne Gacy Jr., the scientific names of plants, Ipomoea alba, chiaroscuro, middleground, cross-hatching to create volume, shadows, tension, mark making, line quality, y=a +bX, time travel, mixing the color of skin tones, how fluffy and pink skin looks sometimes in Impressionist paintings, cannibalism, rose tea, what is it like for a blind person to dream?, obsessive unhealthy debilitating crushes, wallpaper design, once I Googled "how to be less awkward," alchemy, philosophy on a layman level, cysts, skin, blisters, scabs, pores, amputees, war veterans, the smell of nursing homes and Jell-o, the human brain, pineal gland, the human heart, visceral forms, forgetting song lyrics, ultramarine from lapis lazuli, mummy brown paint, charlene brown paint, falling in love for the second time, arbitrarily assigning percentages to my preferences, I like liverwurst on my sandwiches 42% of the time, when my glasses fog up from kissing, when my glasses fog up from the steam of hot soup, innuendos, how we're different, how we're the same, potential, possibility, white wine, I wish my family knew how much I love them, foreground, dogma in religion, shame, all the agnostics who come out of catholic school, martyred saints, holy angels, being first generation Filipino-American, the humiliation of assimilation, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," my childhood home was a townhouse with a red roof, drapery, Mandelbrot Set, e.g. of a fractal is broccoli, falling in love for the third time, thunderstorms, entropy, the logic of language, the etymology of words, falling in love for the (...) time, dying young/dying old

8 Meters of Rome

Official Poster for the 2011 Show "8 Meters of Rome."

My advanced drawing class had the opportunity to work with Italian artist, animator and cartoonist, Marco Raparelli, (unfortunately his official site seems to be under construction). I enjoyed working with him, there was a bit of a language barrier, but that didn't deter me from prying into his art life. His work and my work share similar themes, something like a cute but sinister darkly humorous personal reconstruction of how we see humanity but not trying to change the way people are at the same time. Marco doesn't particularly like to call his work "romantic," but it was evident that love has important place in his range of subjects.

The artists, Marco, and Professore Roberto.

The showed opened and was called "8 Meters of Rome." I honestly felt good about the work I presented, but I had a distinctly similar style to Raparelli's that I was able to invoke for this project. The space presented 2 4 meter works by students (8 meters per student). It was very nicely present. However, I was a bit underwhelmed by the lack of conformity between work in the technical aspect. In the diversity of styles, I enjoyed seeing how each of our experiences studying in Rome overlapped. Perhaps, I am being too critical of a student show, but I was a bit embarrassed when one of the faculty members who was in charge of curating the show, commented that another show, "Works in Paper", (my work was also in this show), hung in the upstairs gallery had much stronger work. I guess I find it difficult not to judge harshly in a field as competitive as the art world.

Mingling at the opening.

Though the turnout was very modest, a lot of our friends came out to the show opening to show their support. It was nice to schmooze with the grad students and faculty. And who doesn't love a little wine and party mix?!

In progress, one of two drawings.

Most of the pictures in this post were taken from artturome.blogspot.com. Check it out if you're interested in seeing more of the artsy goings-on at Temple Roma without my borderline a-hole commentary!