5 Images 

I’m currently taking an online drawing class with Sarah Grass and this past week we were asked to share five images that we like. I pulled some together, trying not to think about it too much. In the class we discussed the similarities of the photos and any common themes. I was really surprised to see how my images were related to my other artwork.

The first image is a picture of a wall in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. I took it during a trip last year. It’s the city where some of my great grandparents were born. I like the image because it shows layers and textures — symbolic of the generations of people from and in the city and of the complexities of their histories. 

The second image is one I took while walking around my friends’ neighborhood in San Francisco, on March 2nd, 2020. I was reminiscing about my time living in the city, missing who I was and how I felt then. When I took the photo I was interested in the architecture and windows of the gorgeous homes. There’s such a diversity of style in the architecture in San Francisco and the various window styles made me happy. The day I took the photo was the first day my friends started working from home. We’ve all been working from home ever since, if we are still working. 

The third image is a watercolor I did recently. I made it through a meditative process of letting my hand move across the page without thinking too much. I like having an art practice that allows me to be free to move and mark as I feel, especially now that I’m cooped up inside.

I like to use a variety of mediums—this one has watercolor, ink, oil pastel, and posca marker. I like the posca marker because it is very matte and opaque. It gives me a good solid color. The colors I happen to have at home are desaturated pop colors, which I like, and I think they ground the whole color scheme of the piece. This piece is about the struggle of trying to stay away from others while walking outside. I have been having a hard time running or even walking outside because there are so many people. 

This fourth image is a photograph of an artwork by Whitney Oldenburg, a New York based artist. She was showing work at the Spring/Break art show this year. I love her use of texture and line in this piece. It is very simple while still being very complex. I also like how the line is very casual — to me it depicts a knot but it doesn’t look very planned out. I want my work to look similarly effortless yet specific. I love how the foundation of the work is so messy and tactile and yet an unblemished white.

“I see glimpses into overlooked and unheroic objects, the “mess-ups,” as potential proper nouns, as sites or heterogeneous co-presences, and as possible exchanges of control, imbalance, repression, and hopelessness.” — Whitney Oldenburg, in New American Paintings

This fifth image is a photograph of ‘Will’ by Manuel Mathieu, a Haiti-born, Montreal-based artist who was showing at the Kavi Gupta Gallery booth at The Armory Show this year. It’s so strange to think how now the Javits Center, the location of The Armory Show, is now a hospital. 

I love the streaky smeared paint and the colors in this piece. It shows an obstructed figure that reminds me has a Jesus on the cross. 

In the class we discussed what our image selections had in common. I was really happy to hear the similarities my classmates found in my images and pretty amazed that they are also what it seems people see in my textile work. 
Space and line

Motion

Contrast

Color blocks

Showing the labor

Paying attention to texture

Free and casual

Wabi-sabi

Unfussy

Layers

Controlled chaos

Texture

Per recommendations of my teacher, I looked into the work of Kaveri Raina and Christina Graham. I found some images of theirs that I also like that are inspiring me for the drawing series that I am working on. 

Drawing Series in Progress

I’ve been at home now for four weeks. The first drawing I did about two or three weeks into working from home and the second drawing I did this past week when I started feeling sick of being stuck inside.

Maybe because I have been feeling cooped up, I started listening to Ear Hustle, a podcast about life in prison and recorded in San Quentin prison. (Want to sign a petition for a more humane treatment of incarcerated people? Check out Color of Change’s campaign).  

I was interested in televisions in prison and then found that translucent televisions are sometimes used inside prisons so prisoners cannot hide things in the televisions. I also found out that an early electronic television receiver, the RCA TRK-12 Television Console, displayed at the 1939 NY World's Fair was made of lucite and translucent to show what was inside the TV.

I also watched A Room with a View, the 1985 film directed by James Ivory based on the novel by E.M. Forster and set in the Edwardian Era in England. I loved seeing a young Helena Bonham Carter, but the final twists of the movie made me cringe. I don’t want to give it away, but let’s just say I’m glad that women have fewer constraints now, and that we aren’t forced to accept advances just because they are the only passionate experiences were are allowed to have. The film is worth a watch for the acting, bizarreness, and historical cultural experience. 

Uncanny Life

This week I tried taking a hip hop class online, from my favorite teacher at my favorite studio. I was one of two students and the administrator person made me feel guilty for not having my video on — not the zoom etiquette I am used too — and so there I was trying to let go while being surveilled. I hated it. On top of that, the connection was spotty and the instructor kept freezing on me. 

I realized how abnormal this all is. We are trying to live through screens and translate in person experiences with inconsistent digital experiences. It is completely inequitable since many people don’t have internet or a good internet connection or even the most up-to-date devices to be able to use up-to-date technology. I can’t even use the Zoom background image replacement feature because I don’t have a more up-to-date laptop, which is crazy because I’m using Jeremy’s relatively new laptop. I come out as a ghost on a screen when my fellow zoom participants are crystal clear against their desired background image. 

We are also having to expose our private spaces — bedrooms, kitchens, attics — to strangers. My sister put a sheet up over a closet so she has a cleaner background for her college classes, which are all online and all with tons of actual strangers. I am fine with my fellow crit club members and art class students seeing my bare bedroom walls, but it’s still awkward. Since I am home during these calls now, I also want to eat a snack or have a cocktail (most of my classes are during dinner time), but I don’t want to be eating or drinking on screen and I feel weird turning my screen off. 

Then there’s the texts were getting from the NYC COVID-19 alert line. It’s just dystopian — stay inside and look at our parks online?

And Michaels is boarded up.

I saw this post on Next-door. Some one thought this guerrilla art work was dystopian while others found it thought provoking.

I have found some solace in the following:

• Octavia Butler’s Blood Child: And Other Stories. This edition includes short stories and essays by Butler, each with her notes about the piece afterward which are both delightful and inspiring. I will be rereading many of these often. 

• Drawing and painting and weaving. Which I feel very lucky to be able to continue doing right now.

• This essay about how we use our bodies in a pandemic by Gia Kourlas

  • “The pandemic has created something fascinating: a new way of moving, a new way of dancing in the streets. It can feel like a game of chicken. Who will be the first to make space? What is the latest swerve or hop to become a step of survival?” — Gia Kourlas in How We Use Our Bodies to Navigate a Pandemic, The New York Times

• This essay about the body and how we talk—or shouldn’t talk— about it by Gordon Hall. 

  • “What’s more ubiquitously human than feeling bad in relation to our bodies? Or what bodily experience is more common than voluntary and involuntary bodily transformation, from puberty, pregnancy, aging, and illness to make-up, electrolysis, fitness routines, and the acquisition of gender-appropriate speech patterns, facial expressions, and gestures?” — Gordon Hall in Why I Don’t Talk About ‘The Body’: A Polemic, volume 4, Monday Journal

  • “Our institutions still have an incredibly long way to go to meaningfully change which artists they collect, invest in, and offer career support to over the long term, and these types of spectacles-of-difference arguably have very little to do with these fundamental changes.“ — Gordon Hall

  • “This is very serious, because it means that artists still don’t feel welcome to make whatever work is in them to make, no matter how inscrutable their own body might be, for fear of risking being passed over by a museum looking to visibly diversify their program.” — Gordon Hall

  • “This is not a way of being valued that we should accept for ourselves or promote for the benefit of institutions and their publics. Our job is to make specific artworks with our many different bodies, whether we ask to be read or refuse to be visible at all.”— Gordon Hall

I had a dream that the final scene of A Room with a View was Lucy Honeychurch jumping out of a plane, sky diving. I think that is more what love feels like. 

Take care, 

Stephanie