Last night, I had a Zoom call with an artist from New York, a super nice, super kind woman named Leslie Volle. She creates these fantastic works in encaustic which I admire very much, but it’s her graphite drawings of twigs that I love the most. I’m so grateful to have been able to meet her when I was taking my Praxis classes back in 2020; even more so now that she still remembers me and keeps in touch. I had ‘planned’ to write about something else for the jillablog this month but last night’s Zoom made such an impression on me I felt the thingy I was thinking about writing about could wait. In any case, I figure writing about this now might help me to process x make more sense out of it ^^
0 Comments
I spent this year trying to clean up the various messes I made last year, and also in trying to ‘catch my breath’ so to speak, and to regroup in terms of my art practice. I’ve gotten in whole worlds of trouble, and by the grace of God I think I’m finally starting to pull myself out. I’ve taken a deliberate break from ‘painting factorying’ (indeed, to be honest, I’m not sure I want to go back). And all this time, I reckon what’s kept me grounded x from completely losing it was to do my best to make sure I at least drew one thing a day. I first met Rainbow Mosho while I was taking my Praxis classes back in 2020. I think I even remember the first thing she asked ~ how she could get her work exhibited in a museum. But it was on Instagram when I really got to know her or become familiar with her work. Praxis encouraged us in the use of Instagram and to follow each other (you know, our ‘classmates’). And after a while, I was drawn to not just her art but the artist behind it. My mom coulda given Mario Andretti a run for his moolers ~ that's her driving the old L300 van we used to have at breakneck speed across Quezon Ave when I was about, oh, 15 or so ~ and that's me in the back without a seatbelt on. I legit felt the van jump, just like in the movies. A friend once asked me how come I was always so stressed whenever I was prepping for a show. (Come to think of it, I used to get that question a lot, lol.) I told her it was because of the deadline and she said something to the effect of, ‘Oh, I kinda thought you just made things and you had a show whenever you were done.’ My dear Kathy (wherever you are now), if all artists did it like that ain’t none of us would finish jack spit or ever even have shows, LOL. I write this now at a time when I want to sort of break away from what I used to *fondly* refer to as ‘painting factory mode’ ~ I want to just, take my time and, come to think of it, do it just like that friend of mine thought how things went with folks like me. I sort of have this idea now, that if I wasn’t so fixated on getting things done as quickly as I could, maybe the work would turn out better, I don’t know. A starving artist's desk I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that being a ‘starving artist’ is no longer a thing ~ unfortunately, it is, still for me LOL. And that’s something that’s been brought home to me this year more vividly than it ever has been in my long and uneventful life.
Honestly, if it hadn’t been for God, my dad, and my brother, I wouldn’t be writing this jillablog post now (or even have a website to post it on) at my desk in the lavish (for me) comfort of the jillahouse. God willing, things will work out somehow, steadily, and soon ~ until I get all four feet back under me again. But for now, I couldn’t help taking a quick and humorous look at what being a penniless painter has led me to do ~ even during the times I could actually afford to throw insane (for me) amounts of moolers away on paint and things. I guess I don’t have an Ilocano dad for nothing. To be clear, I am grateful for having such a father because his prudence not only made it possible for me and my six siblings (and then some) to go to good schools, go on holidays overseas, take up music and martial arts and basically never have to work a day in our lives until we graduated. It also gave us (or well most of us, anyway) the insane work ethic that made it possible for me to do what I’m doing now ~ which is basically work my hindquarters off so I can continue to create. Anyway so you’ll understand (I hope) why I end up doing these weird things because where I come from, pesos (and paint) don’t grow on trees. (Doesn’t make these any less weird, though ^^) I sometimes wonder how painters from way back felt when photography was invented. They probably thought they’d be out of a job! Kind of like how a lot of us *creative* folks feel about AI, lol. Or wheelwrights when they invented cars or film camera humans when they made camera phones. It’s just how it is, I guess. I mean if things like that didn’t happen we’d all still be digging holes whenever we needed to go to the jon or hitting the jungle for lunch (or something to wear). That said, I’d like to say a few things about painting for memory. This does involve painting from memory, but I wanted to go into painting or drawing something to save it for a time when maybe our memory cells don’t work so well anymore. Or to save it for when things change so drastically that the thingy you’re saving isn’t likely to ever for never no matter what forever happen again. So that when you look at the painting, you remember ~ and maybe even relive it. So I saw this basketball movie while I was sick in bed a week ago, and in it I saw this coach tell the baller he was training that he had to learn to deal with trash talk. More specifically, he had to learn how to not let trash talk get to him and still be able to play the game. It wasn’t easy, to say the least ~ you wouldn’t believe what the poor guy had to listen to. Of course he gave it to the trash talker, and of course everyone shook their heads and said tsk, tsk, couldn’t handle it. Poor guy got ejected from the game and of course the trash talker had a huge stupid grin. You might think this was weird, but I’ve always been able to draw some sort of parallel between art and sports ~ but never more than about a week ago when I found myself watching this film. Because there is a lot of trash talk aimed at artists ~ or well at least, I’ve heard my share. And the sad thing is, sometimes it’s from your fellow artists ~ just like how the basketball players in the movie were trash talking their colleagues. But see, like that baller in the movie, we really just need to learn to ignore those j**k ****s and focus on our practice. Buuut I guess we’re only mortal (if not human), so I guess we (or okay fine, I) can’t help but vent sometimes. And I guess I’m sharing this to let you know that if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of trash along the lines of the following, you’re not alone and ~ here’s my nail-studded baseball bat. (Just. Kidding.) You know how you have bad hair days sometimes? Me, sometimes I have “bad drawing days” ~ I can’t draw a bloody thing x nothing I draw looks right x everything I draw looks like a bad tattoo or one of those “delusional artist” pieces. What do you do when you’re in a slump? I’m writing about this now because well, I’m kind of in the middle of one, so I guess I couldn’t help noticing a couple of other artists I know who’ve been in a slump recently, too. So in this post I thought I’d go into what a slump is, exactly, for artists ~ what happens during a slump, what causes it to happen, and more importantly, what to do if and when you’re in one. Last year I was in a group show called Breaking Barriers, to which I submitted the painting above (rather unimaginatively titled Breaking Tikbalang). I remember I arrived rather early at the opening, feeling very awkward because I didn’t really know anybody else there. So there I was, floating around like a lemon, looking at all the other works when one of the other artists came up to me and asked me which piece was mine. Jillamonsters have zero social skills, so, *stutter-stutter*~ so the kindly gentleman looked around, saw a Georgia O’Keefe-esque painting of a flower, and asked me if that was it. He seemed kind of surprised when I pointed at the horsey above. ‘Whoa!’ he said, or something like. I didn’t know what that meant, but I gathered he didn’t figure me for the type who would paint something like that. Must’ve been the stutter or the skirt. Anyhow. In preparing for this month’s post I did a little looking around (i.e. Googling) and saw there didn’t seem to be a whole lot about inferring the personality of artists from their work. Can’t say I researched very thoroughly, or anything, of course, but all I seemed to see was about the personality of collectors based on the paintings in their, well, collection 😅 (Here’s a quiz if you like.) So everything else you read here is based on, well, how I read into a painting~for what it’s worth. I’m not a psychologist or an art historian or a detective 😊 or anything like that. I’m just someone who likes to get to know people (in a detached, third-party, outside-looking in kind of way 😅 ) who just happens to have an art degree and paints, too. And someone who’s obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, lol. Just thought I’d share in case it helps people look at art or, enhance their experience or appreciation of it. I’m talking here, of course, about visual art, but it miiight be applicable in sooome way to other art forms, too. In doing my homework for a client I was working on not too long ago, I came across this article (which actually had nothing to do with the client or what I was doing for them lol). It was called 10 Reasons Why You Should Not Become an Architect by Michael Riscica, and though I am not an architect (although I’ve known my fair share both within and outside of my family), I could so totally relate. Many of the items (if not all) on the list are so completely applicable to artists. After all, architecture is an art in its own right~and I could really feel that the author really dug deep when it was written. So much so that 1. I felt like giving the author a hug after I read it, and 2. I felt like coming up with my own list. It had crossed my mind recently to write a sort of ‘open letter to aspiring artists’ in the same vein, but this is probably *neater*. Some of these reasons are adapted from the article, while some of them are so totally mine. |
Categories
All
Archives
January 2025
|