BIG BODY TRACINGS AND GARGANTUAN GIGGLES

Monday evening, August 25.

I am currently standing in the midst of 20 GIANT body tracings and 20 giggling college students. Their first class is tonight and they are working in pairs, tracing one another and cutting out the tracings. In a minute I will tell them to pose the figures. We are going big here, and thinking about movement and composition and fore, middle and background, but they don't know any of that. You see, these are not art students, but medical students. They are studying to become nurses, or lab technicians or physician assistants. This class, Introduction to Art Media is a stretch for them.

During the semester I will introduce these students to different kinds of art media. Tonight we have started with the basics: drawing tools. Here are two of the cutouts made by one pair of students.

Rethinking ideas

I have been working and reworking this idea for Half the Sky. I am still not satisfied with my designs. The idea is to create an iconic, recognizable design that speaks "half the sky" but is still a design that I can vary. I posted several sketches recently on this blog and on my Facebook page Pippengerart and asked for comments. Most were positive but one of my artist friends, MB, noted that I should keep exploring. I agree. Presented here - for the second time - are the colored pencil sketches I posted:


             

Yesterday I started working on a new design that could be the answer. It is still in the sketching stages. This is part of the task of new work, trying out different ideas and sketching and reworking till it feels right. Let me know what you think. Comments help!

YOUR THOUGHTS NEEDED!

In a previous post I talked about a new series called "Half the Sky" and my attempts to give visual voice to the proverb that "women hold up half the sky". At the time I noted that my first sketches were not yet ready for prime time viewing. Well, today I am posting four colored pencil sketches for you to check out. AND, I would like you to weigh in with your thoughts, about the sketches and the proverb. What does "Half the Sky" suggest to you?

     

     

I am SO looking forward to your comments. 

Keeping up....

Updating the calendar, checking deadlines, choosing show entries, negotiating exhibits, tracking expenses, promoting work....whew! When do I actually get to make art? That is the true struggle of the artist. All we really want to do is make things - always more ideas than time - but we also need to attend to the business end of our creative lives. The care and feeding of the art career is multi-faceted and it is really easy to ignore the part where we don't get to draw, paint, cut, paste or sculpt.

In a sense, creating is the reward for tending to the business side. And tending to the business hopefully allows us to show our work, sell our work, buy supplies, pay some bills, and actually feel like a grown-up in the art biz. It's definitely a circular world: one task feeds the other!

Business is my to-do list today, and the reward for those jobs well done is studio time. Hurray!