i heart wabi sabi!

i learned about "wabi sabi" while studying ceramics in art school from a japanese student. he told me that the concept behind the two words this is very difficult to translate, and it took a lot of explaining and reading to get a grasp of what it stands for. this is my favorite interpretation of the japanese phrase. thanks wikipedia!

"wabi" may be interpreted as the imperfect quality of any object, due to inevitable limitations... especially with respect to unpredictable or changing usage conditions; "sabi" could be interpreted as the aspect of imperfect reliability, or limited mortality of any object, hence the etymological connection with the japanese word sabi, to rust.

imperfect quality, let go to inevitable limitations. reliably imperfect. but there is beauty in letting go.

i love this concept, but something in me routinely disagrees and fights against it.

my drawing process

i think it's time for me to write about my drawing process. i've been experimenting with this process since the end of 2003, which is when i started tracing instead of freehand drawing for paintings. it all started with pancho and lefty. something about tracing the cover just felt right; even if i was such a snob about it when i was a kid. i've been changing and adapting this process ever since. currently this is what it is:

first i find an image that i am interested in painting. today it's the slinky siamese from kittens usa 2010 annual magazine. it's from the editors of cat fancy magazine so you know it's quality :) i find images from all over the place; magazines, catalogs, vintage books, the internet. recently i've started taking my own photos to use as images.

next i'll make a xerox copy of the image.

once i have a xerox, i'll start tracing the outline of the image with a soft graphite pencil. i like 6B pencils for this. but i need to check out mechanical and drafting pencils because i want my lines to be more precise. the lines from regular pencils gets thicker as you keep drawing.

after i finish tracing the outline, i transfer the image onto a sheet of paper. i do this by flipping the xerox over onto whatever paper i'm using and rubbing the back of the xerox with a bone folder. my transfer process is similar to making a print.

the soft graphite lines transfer to the paper without needing carbon paper.

From here, i'll either make a painting or make a master tracing; depending on whether or not i want to make multiple paintings of the same image or if i decide to manipulate and refine the image.

for this image, i'm going to make a master tracing. i want to refine a couple lines a tad and get rid of a bit of clutter.

once i get the image right, i make a xerox copy of it.

then the process begins again...

trace outline and rub one out :)

for this painting, i'm using translucent yupo. it took the pencil really well, but the pencil lines will disappear once i start to watercolor.

peeling wire

one of the things my dad would do to occupy his time was to sit up watching tv late at the night while "peeling wire". i should probably explain what this means.

my dad worked with his brother, my uncle johnny, who was a carpenter. my dad would wander around at work and pick up any left over wire that was laying around and bring it home. he would get particularly excited after the electricians came to install electrical wiring (ooh ooh ooh!!!) and he would go off searching for hours; finding all kinds of stuff and all kinds of different wire. sometimes the wire would be electrical cord wire (two small chambers of plastic with thin wire inside). sometimes it would be wire so thick it wouldn't bend when you held it up. but they were almost always covered in plastic to insulate and prevent electrocuting someone when used for the intended purpose.

for whatever reason, he would cut this casing off, and reveal the wire itself. first he would peel the outer plastic wrapping from a piece by slitting a long line down the side of a 4 to 6 inch piece of wire he had cut and just peel off the casing. and there were so many varieties of metals, brass, silver... but copper was usually the most common and was always my favorite.

when people asked him what he was doing he would say " i peeling my wire" or "don't touch my copper!"

then my mom would say "oh, you and your damn wire!" whenever he would decide to take off to go look for some.

he had a long piece of copper pipe with a bunch of thick tape wrapped around the bottom. after he had peeled a bunch of wire, he would wrap the wire round and round the pipe to form spiral rings. i have no clue how he came up with the method, but it was perfect for making rings. he would use pliers to make sure the rings were perfectly straight. and each thickness of wire had a different method.

he did this obsessively for years while watching tv late into the night. i'm going to reckon he could get 5 done in an hour (conservatively speaking) and estimate he worked on this around 4 hours a day. I think he must have done this for at least 10 years and with 52 weeks in a year, he must have made over 10,500 little wire rings in his lifetime. wow.

but what did we do with all these rings? we sold them to scrap metal places for extra money. my dad always called the money he made off the rings his "coast money" (to go fishing in corpus or rockport, he loved it there) but more often then not, we had to use the money for something else. i don't know if i have any of the rings he made.

i think eventually the electricians caught wind of what my dad was doing, and started saving their scraps more and more. so eventually he moved on to collecting cans and pull tabs.

i miss my dad

tuesday was my dad's birthday, which is probably why i have been thinking about him so much lately. one of the biggest regrets i have in my life is that i didn't call my dad for father's day the week before he died. i've never been any good at keeping in touch with people and yes, that is still the case. i don't always learn from my mistakes.

pancho and lefty

first draft of a picture of my dad and me from 2003. it's based on the cover of merle haggard and willie nelson's pancho and lefty.

i traced the cover and the freehanded the faces.

I couldn't get my face to look right, but i got dad's :)

"did you trace that?"

we had a drawing in my house that my dad made of two deers. it wasn't until years later that i was told that my uncle doug had originally drawn it, and my dad like it so much that he either traced it or drew a copy of it for himself. i remember being all pissed off about it when i found out since i really thought it was something my dad had created (typical teenage shit). and i remember one time i drew this elaborate picture of a dragon from a temporary tattoo (lol, super typical teenage shit!) in marker for my art class and my dad's comment was "did you trace that?" we got into an argument because i wouldn't listen when he tried to explain that it was so good that the only way i could have done it was to have traced it. yeah, i was pretty offended that he didn't think i had the skill necessary to much such a masterpiece. it seems really silly now and i'm really starting to realize you shouldn't take everything you do so seriously, but at the time it really hurt my feelings. i realized later that the intention behind that comment were genuine and he was just impressed, but it was the way he delivered that intention that was pretty shitty. but if you think about it, it's a good art and life lesson: think shit out so your intentions aren't misunderstood.

kids are stupid :)

this is the birth announcement my mom embroidered for me when i was born.

i hated it as a kid, but i was a stupid kid :)

don't run with the good scissors

you know, i should probably give a shout out to my mom, since she used to always talk up the fact that i was the first female in my family that is artistic. she would always tell people "well, nikki gets it from her father but she also gets it from my side of the family. her uncle doug is artistic too". at the time it annoyed the shit out of me but i think it ended up instilling a sense of pride in me about being female.

but i'm not so sure that fact about me being the first artistic female is true. i guess it just depends on your definition of the word. my mom is really into doing crafts, and is still always working on a project of some sort. she doesn't do it very much anymore but my mom is amazing at embroidery! she used to do these commemorative birth announcements for people when they were born. my grandmother started doing the birth announcements and taught my mom. my mom taught me some basic stitches, but i never picked it up. should probably revisit that...

i remember that my mom had this sliding door end table filled with her craft stuff in the dining room. i used to sneak in there because she had a stockpile of images she used as patterns for different embroidery projects. cartoon characters, flowers, animals of all sorts; it was right up my alley. she would collect images from coloring books and god know from where else (this is before computers, internet and instant image gratification) and she would trace the image onto tracing paper and then transfer the tracing on cloth or whatever using carbon paper. i loved that folder and adored the ghostly tracing paper images. i would sit around just looking through it whenever i got a chance. even the carbon paper was cool. my mom would use a single sheet over and over and it would build up multiple outlines over time.

but i wasn't really supposed to touch her craft stuff. i was never allowed to touch the sewing machine (granted, my brother and i decided to play race car with the foot pedal once) nor was i allowed to touch the typewriter. and it took forever for her to let me use the good scissors. i should go out and get a pair of good scissors just because. but i probably wouldn't let a kid near my scissors either...

i heart graffiti

omg i remembered this awesome silly thing i did when i was a kid. i think i had watched something on tv about graffiti. i don't remember what it was exactly, but it was probably a story on the news about those damn kids that spray paint on buildings and shit. i don't even know if i even knew the word graffiti back then; i must have been like 6 or something!

anyways, i was playing in my room by myself and i decided to put on my own tv show about the difference between good graffiti (i had decided good graffiti is graffiti that is pretty and pleasing to the eye) and bad graffiti (shitty looking half ass shit. yes, those probably were my exact words at the age of 6!) so to demonstrate to my audience, i drew a picture of a lady as well as i could on one side of my closet door. it was pretty, dammit! after i finished that, i drew something ugly on the other side of the closet. i think i just made up random shit. or did i use stickers? or maybe stamps? i'm not sure what i had decided bad looked liked or how i did decided to depict it but whatever i did ended up rubbing off the brown varnish off the door as a result.

needless to say, my mom was pissed! and it was much, much harder to explain the difference to a real audience. but i still feel the same way and will always have a soft spot for graffiti and street art.

there's no such thing as a straight line

when i was really young, i showed my dad a drawing i had done using a ruler. he said, "nikki, there is no such thing as a straight line. you put a bunch of small lines together to make a line look straight." later a teacher in college told me there are nothing but straight lines and you put them together to make a curved line. both statement mean the exact same thing to me about a basic line drawing technique but i prefer the way my dad said it.