tied to the threads

colored pencils in moleskin sketchbook

the funny thing about last week was that it felt like i didn't do much art...

i spent a good part of the week catching up in this workshop, which i started a couple of days late. it was worth it though... patricia ariel is a gifted artist, a wise woman, and a knowledgeable astrologer.

colored pencils, oil pastels, watercolor and acrylic paint on muslin, 12" x 12"

this is the mandala that i made for the workshop (creative astrology)... our instructions were to meditate first and ask to be shown the image in the center of the mandala. what i saw was this animal, and since i have no idea how to draw animals accurately, i just forged ahead with my left hand... i don't think i'll leave it hanging in my art room - it's too intense. but i do relate to it deeply in a way that i can't access on a conscious level.

the main thing that i learned in the workshop is that i can be my own astrologer...

when i finished it midweek, i started on other things...


i did a few lotuses in oil pastels and china marker...



image transfer, colored pencils, acrylic paint, and alcohol inks in moleskin sketchbook

and i worked a whole bunch in my new moleskin sketchbook! i am so in love with that book!

this is an image transfer of the 8" x 10" piece that i did...( i forgot to reverse the image so it's backwards) i was impressed with how well the sketchbook paper held up to the image transfer process.


the rest of the pages are done with colored pencils and oil pastels. i got some new oil pastels and colored pencils and have only just begun to check them out. i got some faber-castell colored pencils and i think i like them more than prismacolor pencils. they sharpen perfectly (with no broken leads) and the colors are beautiful.


one of my favorite colors (of the faber-castell pencils) is terra cotta. it's on just about all of these eyelids! it's a great color for shading faces... and paynes gray! i got a paynes gray colored pencil and oil pastel stick! woo! her eyebrows are paynes gray...


her cheeks have some caran d'ache neo-pastel (oil pastel) 'salmon' in them. one of the great things about caran d'ache is that they have many colors available in all of their product lines . if you have colors that you like in the neo-color II crayons, there's a good chance they're available as a colored pencil and oil pastel.


some of these faces are on only a small part of the page - i've written on the rest of it and cropped it out of these pics... the words are conversations between my dominant and non-dominant hands - the 'child me' and the 'adult me'. this is proving very insightful. in the pic at the top of the post you can see that 'child me' is telling me that i worry too much. shocking!


inspired by the words of outsider artist michel nedjar - 'i am tied to the threads of the world'...

. . .

Many of the objects in this exhibition are the works of patients. The mechanisms of artistic creativity are exactly the same in their hands as they are for all other reputedly normal people. Besides, this distinction between normal and abnormal seems quite untenable; who after all, is normal? Where is he, your normal man? Show him to us! Can the artistic act, with the extreme tension that it implies and the high fever that accompanies it, ever be deemed normal? From our point of view, the artistic function is identical in all cases, and there is no more an art of the insane than there is an art of the dyspeptics or of those with knee problems.

Jean Dubuffet in the Catalogue of the first large public exhibition of Art Brut, Rene Drouin Gallery, Paris, 1949


XO