Dialogue
I made these a year ago but I wasn’t ready to let anyone see them. I worked on these everyday for a while then. They’re a dialogue I was trying to open up to. Between me and me…or the universe and the universe. They are both, and they are silly. They’re little drawings, because as it turns out the universe is ridiculous sometimes.
That’s Helmut Lemke. He was my teacher for a while.
That’s my husband, Rod. We don’t always see eye to eye.
I Release
“The offering up or cleaning up ego stuff is called purification. Purification is the act of letting go. This is done out of discriminative awareness. That is, you understand that you are an entity passing through a life in which the entire drama is an offering for your awakening. You see that the life experience is a vehicle for coming to God, or becoming conscious, for becoming liberated. And you understand ultimately that’s what you are doing here.” Excerpt from Ram Dass’ book “Polishing the Mirror”
(Returned on January 2015 by it’s previous owner.)
You and me and us and me and you
About a year back I decided I wanted to make work that I could just make on my own, spontaneously and anywhere. I was reacting against the Takahashi pre-performance preparation that had to happen. At the time, they required other people, stretching canvas, setting up electronics equipment, a projector, and then having all the things communicate with each other. It was hard to do spontaneously. So I decided to just draw. White paper. Black pen. And me.
In tandem with those drawings I started becoming curious about color. There was shift in the Takahashi performances from paint to [colored] light, and this set up no longer required me to stretch a canvas or use a projector–another move towards pre-performance simplicity (though pursuing this colored light stand wasn’t done for that purpose specifically). I could just plug in and go. Though it’s still very technology heavy, spontaneity and technology are not in opposition. So now, working in the muck of the Takahashi lights and the ink drawings, it felt to me like I was exploring two things: precise line work (absent of the consideration for color), and expansive pure color.
Yesterday, during a Takahashi rehearsal with Linda Jankowska and Rodrigo Constanzo it occurred to me the water color works are actually perfect for use in the Takahashi light set-up. It’s like one part of my brain has just let another part of my brain in on what it’s been working on. I think these works are somehow perfect populators of the Color Picker sample space (the color granular synthesis max patch), which before only had a “place-holder” image. I really want everything to be personal, and resonate with me. The body of line drawing work I’ve been doing, now with the addition of water colors, are hugely significant to me and this period of my life–creative and personal. So here we are.
I just want to make beautiful things…and it feels like an explosion.
(above work owned by Rocio Bolaños)
Photos by Linda Jankowska.
A Mundane Transcendental Object
Click on the image to zoom in. I go in deep with this one.
Owned by Linda Jankowska
New Pens!
Testing out some new pens!
The skull is owned by Lina Martinez…and no man or woman may yet possess Man Dantana!
Sense/Sense Object Dissection
While drawing this one of the things I was thinking about was the relationship that sense and sense objects have–as it’s articulated in the Upanishads and specifically the Katha Upanishad……Good-bye horrrrrr-ses, I’m flying over youuuuuuuu….. Also I allowed the two-dimensional figures to not be fully visible, and allowed objects on the surface (foreground) to sneak behind other figures. In other drawings (like this one) this was a limitation I set on myself: that every figure live on the surface, and not curl back into that fake implied space. So that’s why this one has more a three-dimensional quality to it. I allowed myself to push in and pull out. I believe that’s why it feels like a dissection. Going forward I don’t want to be too permissive with myself though, since I’m not trying to make a thing that mimics existing in the space we exist in. We’ll see how it goes on though. I don’t want to over-think this stuff and snuff out the novelty of spontaneous characters/characteristics.