Category: Art making

Which word

Katharine Asals11 Comments

Sweet? Wistful? Kind? Tender?

These are the words I find myself drawn to these days.

There is such boorish brutality in the world at the moment, that a gentle, kind corner of life feels absolutely compulsory, wholly necessary.

I’m at the beginning of a 100 day challenge of Art Making / Art Sharing, and that simple commitment has felt like a flag in the rock, an essential act of self declaration and preservation.

What could we call it… a respite, a sanctuary… solace, reprieve…?

Out for coffee with a sweet, thoughtful friend over the weekend, she allowed as how she was being cautious with her words, censoring herself as she knew I was American, and didn’t want to offend me, didn’t want to inadvertently insult me… (while here in Canada our entire economy and our very sovereignty is being threatened…)

*cough*

I mean, as much as my early memories are Cape Cod and Philadelphia fireflies, I’ve been here in Canada for the forever of my little life, I speak French better than most anglo-Canadians, and am missing only the far north in my travel stamps. At this point, I’m pretty much, kinda totally Canadian…

This, I think, is a common experience – this cross border, hybrid, fused identity.

Perhaps that is why each day, I find myself drawing bears…

Bears are a symbol of effortless strength, of the medicine of the forest, of the deep uninterrupted sleep of hibernation, of the shocking speed and power of the grizzly, the polar bear, and yet the tender, goofy, friendly Yogi Bear.

Canada much? What better way to draw out / wait out this season…

Lens Artists Challenge – Pick a Word

Bold & reckless

Katharine Asals8 Comments

I’d signed up for a Sketchbook Challenge – something to carry me through the holidays, when I had a feeling things might be a bit challenging, a bit daunting – there was the personal level of things shaping up to be tough, but of course there had also been that election in the States, and as much as we would all like to pretend it’s just politics, in another country, not here… Yah. Whatever. It’s been a lot.

Anyways, a little creative challenge that would engage me on a daily rhythm but had no ambitious trappings to it felt just right.

At the beginning of course you are instructed to Find Your Why. And the main Why I found was an intention to push to be bold and reckless and experimental, to be messy and try things. To try things and fail at them. After all, it’s just a sketchbook.

So I went with that, and for days and days I did free and loose and messy and anything goes…

Bit by bit, the looser things got, the more I longed for structure, and I found myself drawing some objects, specific things over and over again –

How much the same thing can be so different every time…

Somewhere along the way, without really thinking about it, I felt like I needed to be doing something bigger – big drawings. Just being in the groove, rolling with the constant practice, it felt like putting a bit sheet of paper on the wall and drawing with charcoal would satisfy some kind of longing, so I did it.

The paper is somewhere around 4 ft x 4 ft.

Looking back now I kind of love that early phase where it’s not quite clear what is where and what’s going on, but I kept on going.

And ended up with this.

But maybe especially as it was an evolution from the daily scribbly sketchbook drawings, it feels like this is maybe just the first one of many…

Lens Artists Challenge – Bold

On the bus

Katharine Asals2 Comments

Some weeks ago I went to New York City with my son.

We landed early on the Wednesday, dropped our things at the hotel, and then made straight for the museum around the corner that was having a show of Wangechi Mutu’s work – a woman whose collages I’d long admired online.

But OMG, the show was so much more than what I knew, and so much more than I expected… the early collages, but later paint-collages, sculptures and short films and installations – several floors of a lush, dynamite, gorgeous and frequently creepy body of work – a highly coherent and full retrospective of an artist in mid-career.

On the Thursday we had a lunch date with V, who I had never met in person, but knew from some online art classes and group critiques, from 2 years of regular zoom meetings hosted by our mutual teacher, Lisa Call.

And at some point there over lunch with V, talking about art and bodies of work, both she and I tried to explain the Helsinki bus theory to my son – a theory Lisa introduced to us early on in her classes, as a way to focus on one’s own path for long enough to get to a point of deep creative exploration and originality. We stumbled through our explanations, looking for how to say that if you stay on your one single bus long enough instead of trying each and every new thing, it will start to evolve into something that is original.

And once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire—that’s why you chose that platform after all—it’s time to look for your breakthrough. Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it. Your vision takes off.”

Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Lisa had us consider this way of thinking early on in our work with her, along with a process of what she called “closing doors” – closing the doors to all the things you are NOT going to do, so that you can focus on what you ARE going to do. And in a way, the narrower, the better – challenging, but also a clearing of the dross.

So looking at the work of Wangechi Mutu, it was so clear she had stayed on her bus – but the interesting thing was, that her materials were able to change quite radically through the years, and it was her thematics that stayed true and focused like a north star throughout.