Angel/Devil, OR Learn Polish with Dualities!

I have been working on and off on a visual dictionary in Polish– actually, let’s be real and call it a very limited glossary — since December. This is deeply silly on a few levels, the most prominent one being that it feels like the extension of a wonderful but incredibly long project I was involved with at work. It would be even sillier if I thought this project was a good way for me to actually work at learning a language — doing that usually requires you to focus more on the quantity of the words you know rather than the quality of the pictures you create to represent them. Silly or not, though, it has been a way to tie together a few things I spend a lot of time thinking about. I’ve always liked the feeling of working a few puzzles at once, and thinking about art while I study language and language while I create art has deepened my engagement with both.

I showed you one of my early favorites a few months back; here are two I’ve done recently. Fortunately, I don’t think you’ll need to hit up Google Translate — though you might find these pronunciations useful.

This pairing is such a cliché, but even if you take out religion, history, and Big Questions about the nature of good and evil, it’s easy to see why we return to it so often.  In order for two things to be “opposites,” they have to be very much the same. After all, each thing only has one opposite, and it’s never something that’s absolutely different (Dog and cruise ship! Tennis and slime! Nebula and scarf!). Rather, opposites are quite alike, except for the one thing that’s most essential to understanding them: Over and under, cat and dog, man and woman.

For angel and devil,  the most interesting thing commonality is just how absolute a concept each represents. Of course you end up with a preternaturally serene angel and a gleefully bad devil. The thing that differentiates angel and devil lends itself to extremes better than, say, man and woman. Think about the angels and devils in movies and advertisements and even art — the main thing they have in common is just how over-the-top they are. I don’t think I need to explain how fun illustrating this type of contrast can be.

The big challenge of depicting these two is making the angel even a third as likable as the devil. I think I met that standard, at least — as I worked on the angel, I found his beatific little smile infectious enough that I smiled the whole time. Still: that devil! He is perfectly wicked, and a lot more charming than anyone so bad should be. Poor angel! At least he has justice on his side.

Sleepy Monkey

Right now, I’m at the start of an interactive project of sorts. It’s going to involve a collection of responsive, subtly animated portraits. I have a modest-but-not-insignificant amount of the artwork done, but I realized that I still have to mess around with animation quite a bit in order to be able to achieve the effect I’d like to go for. My main question is this: how simple can an animation be and still convey a character’s personality?

To focus on that question, I’m taking a break from the artwork I’ll actually be using for this project. Instead, I’ve been doing some tiny experiments with animated GIFs.

 

I like this little guy a lot, not in small part because at this moment I feel exactly the way I think he does — pretty sleepy and not even half-heartedly trying to stay alert. This is kind of an obvious one, but I’m really excited about figuring out what I can do with just a few frames.

On that note, it’s time for bed for both of us, I think.

PS. I realize this guy is pretty abstracted from the idea of “monkey,” but I actually drew him from a photo of a Tamarin Golden Lion I saw at the National Zoo! That said, the monkey I saw was totally bright-eyed and not sleepy at all– I did take some liberties there, I’ll admit.

 

Matching Set

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what people mean when they talk about two people being “a match” or “pair.” The whole concept of a perfect match seems off, somehow — you can have a matched pair or socks, but people seem a little more complicated. For two objects to be matched, they should be as identical as possible; for two people who are romantically involved, that idea seems a lot less sound.

This pair is pretty well matched; for that reason, I find them a little eerie. There’s something almost twinnish about them, and I think this set could just as easily depict two aspects of one person as it could a couple.

Obviously, a visual resemblance isn’t what people usually mean when they’re talking about a “perfect match.” That said, I’m pretty dubious of that type of match, too.  If you’re searching for a perfect match, on some level, you have to assume that you can accurately assess yourself — and that other people are truly knowable. I think I’ll stick to matching pictures for now.

Girl and Pet

I think everyone finds their pets pretty special, whether those pets are cats, dogs, or amorphous happy blobs. This is the first non-work related piece I’ve finished in a while. It really makes me happy.

Old(er) Art

This is one of the only photos I still have that I developed myself, and I don’t have the print, just this scan. I took it on my first “real” camera, a Canon AE-1 with some sort of prime lens — I don’t even remember anymore. It’s of a building at Bard College in upstate New York. Frank Gehry is the architect.

I took the photo during a weekend trip to visit my then-boyfriend in 2005, and developed it shortly after returning to North Carolina. I made at least one print that was fairly large, and I remember how exciting it was to see it develop. At the moment, I was so heartsick and lonely in the place where I was, and there was something really transporting about seeing a memory I already missed become something that I could hold in my hand and hang on my wall. I would change some things about this photo if I took it today — I don’t think I really understood what an f-stop was — but I still love looking at this view that I had during a really important and tumultuous period in my life.

2013 II

I’ve started 2013 twice now: once at the proper time, on January first, and then again later that month when I decided that I didn’t really want to continue a year that started with a pretty major disappointment.

This fresh new 2013 (2Q13?) is a few weeks old now. It’s been strange and disorienting, but also pretty beautiful. One of the hard things about falling (or being jerked abruptly) out of love is that suddenly a thing that imbued your life with a lot of loveliness is completely, irretrievably gone. At first, it’s easy to confuse the loss of a very important source of joy with the loss of all joy — the world, for a moment, is ugly, small, and empty.

But then, of course, it isn’t. The really wonderful, impossible thing about heartbreak kicks in: being alive starts to become lovely again in very unexpected ways. At that point, you almost become thankful for the terrible rupture:  it lets you be reborn, and whatever happiness you can find is new and wholly yours. I felt really enlivened and illuminated by being in love; it’s painful but exciting to find a way back to that feeling on my own.

I don’t think of myself as a particularly serene person: I get angry too often and too intensely for that. Being angry feels awful, though: even when someone has hurt me pretty deeply, thinking about how furious I am makes me feel diminished, not righteous or strong. So instead, I’m really focusing on everything and everyone I’m thankful for. It’s a pretty long list.

I think this year is really going to be something good.

Kot!

It is the end of a really wonderful year, unfortunately, and while I’ve done a lot of little art, I’ve been pretty bad about sharing it here. I won’t make any resolutions about posting every week, but I will say this: I have some really fun art projects on the horizon. Some of them are for work, and some just for me. I’ll be posting bits and pieces as they come in (and maybe some big things, too).

For now, I’ll leave you with a little teaser from a new project I’m working on for myself. It’s all mixed up with another personal project — (re)learning Polish in time to visit my aunt in Gdansk this summer.

Now you know two things:

1. How to say “cat” in Polish
2. How much I (still) love (and try to emulate) Charley Harper

Both are pretty obvious.

In any case, that’s it for 2012. Goodbye, old year! I hope the new one is good for us all.

Art Class Distractions

I would apparently rather doodle on table-protecting newspaper than work on real color studies. Oops.

More People I Love

My friend Becky is a lovely girl with a slightly dysfunctional scaredy-cat named Ginsberg. Yesterday was Becky’s birthday.  Since Becky is big on walking everywhere her feet can take her, I decided to make a picture of her taking a nighttime walk. Of course, Ginsberg came along too.

Happy birthday, Becky!

Happy birthday, Julianna! Happy giraffe, everyone else!

Today is the 25th birthday of the incredibly talented Julianna Thomas, who has appeared before on this blog. I’m so lucky and grateful to have her as a best friend. She has a sharp mind, an adventurous spirit, and a bright future.

For her gift, I made this print. It’s a paltry exchange for all the wonderful things her friendship has given me this year and every year, but it was fun to make and give. Now you guys can see it, too!