2012: A Return

It has been nearly a year and a half since posting to this blog. I won't make excuses, but I can say, that the pens and pencils were still busy in that time. Maybe I will share some of that, maybe I won't. What's important is that I'm back. I won't be making any unrealistic promises of posting something every day, but I expect the content to flow more frequently than not.

2011 saw a few big changes (License! House!) and so far 2012 is proving to be another eventful year (Dog! Banjo!). My personal challenge continues to be the effort of fitting everything that I am interested in and care about into my days, nights and weekends and still remain coherent and sane - but perhaps a little incoherence and insanity is good for us all.

Sooner or later, the structure of my blogs will be updated to meet the needs of the content that I am planning, but for the moment, I want to just get right back into the thick of it. First up is a formal drawing extrapolated from a gestural scribble. This style of sketch continues to evolve through my personal sketchbooks and is a refinement of graphic expressions that I have been toying with for a long time.

Retro Week 2009 - Day 2

Another piece from the old SCI-Arc Years. This model study was made in Spring of Aught-Two. It was made out of plaster and was about 14" long, 9" wide and over 3" deep, if memory serves. This shape was derived from an extrusion of a disassembled-reassembled Franz Klein painting, and was a study in gesture.

Recent Ideas, Doodles, Scribbles and Gestures

A few collage ideas, idea for extruded collage, some scribbles and general doodles from the last couple days.

Getting Sculptural

As promised, I started looking at the gesture form as a sculptural object. Here was my first attempt at the idea of two intertwining gestures, three-dimensionally. I used some thin aluminum tubing as the frames, and black masking tape to form the undulating plane betwixt them. There are two things that I learned while doing this piece:

1. By forming a gesture out of a malleable piece of tubing, without guide or preliminary spontaneity, it ceases to be gestural. Sure, its curvy and sort of suggests a swooping gesture, but it is not pure in its nature. I am not exactly sure how I can make something volumetric that reads as a gesture. This is something that I have also had to deal with architecturally. How does one keep the gesture pure and keep it grounded in reality, that is to say the physical existence as opposed to a theoretical one. Which brings me to...

2. It is very easy, even starting with two relatively uncomplicated "gestures" and intertwining them, for the shape to become a physical impossibility. My original intention was to divide up the segments into equal segments and then connect those points with its equivalent on the opposing segment, thus generating form. Again, this was not easily done, and I think that I eventually had to cheat and break that rule to get the form to work. This was acceptable as it gave me a physical way of dealing with a partially non-physical problem...

Failed Sketches

I sketched these on the plane today, exploring an idea that i had jotted down a while ago. The idea was that i would take two individual gestures and graphically "loft" them to make an image a sort-of swirling knot. The idea was to take the gesture to the next level... the next dimension. Unfortunately, trying to render a knotted ribbon out of two haphazard lines doesn't quite work so well on paper. In fact, they are downright awful. In the shapes' two-dimensionality, the intended knot was not the actual result, but a muddled mash that merely suggests knottiness emerged! I determined that this is definitely something that can only be explored three dimensionally, at least for now.

They aren't particularly worthy, but sometimes even failures are worth noting.