Arts and Crafts and Fire

A house burned down in my neighborhood yesterday, sometime after 3am. A few months ago, the building next to my sister's apartment also went up in flames. In both cases, no one was hurt. In both cases, I've had to take my usual walk right next door. Since I didn't have to dwell too much on my own bittersweet mortality, my mind wandered to where it usually does: art.

Fire, violent and impetuous, is part of our artist hive mind of symbolism. Both destroyer and creator, it's the glue that holds together the mobius strip of life itself. Western culture's example of this is seen best with the phoenix, reborn from it's own ashes. Southeast Asia has its own distinctive motif to represent the concept:

This curling, almost feather-like design is central to most traditional Buddhist Thai art and used on houses, temples, and decorative work. It can symbolize two things depending on form and context: Kranok - the cleansing flame of Buddhism, or Kanok - humanity's flame of impulsiveness and passion, which can be quelled by Buddhist teachings to reach enlightenment.

Like what happens to many religious motifs, its mythological intent slips further away as it usage becomes more decorative. Here is the same motif, but highly stylized:


This is the top of a small craft box I bought from a tourist shop in Chiang Mai. The motif is simplified to the point of lines and dots, made to sell to silly travelers like me. Furthermore, it was a cheaper, hand-painted alternative to the gold leaf lacquer boxes of nagas and elephants. Whether or not the painter knew the history of the iconography wasn't what he was hired for. He was hired to paint as many as he could as fast as he could.

And yet I love it dearly.

The thin, precise lines of acrylic paint bring me great joy, combined with the S-curves I use so much in my own work. Lovely stops, starts, and flourishes. I'd like to think that the painter could make lovely original work with lines like these. For what it is and its possibilities, it's terribly charming, this art-inspired handicraft.

Am I contributing to the dilution of art into craft? Maybe. But maybe art and academia need to be set alight once in awhile so it can be reborn as well. And then later on, when the position has come full circle, we can have this discussion again from the other side.

Spring Cleaning

I've been going through a lot of boxes shoved into one corner or another in the house, and have been coming across more and more old sketches. Some of them in proper sketchbooks, others on the margins of history notes. This one in particular was hanging out in anthropology, next to some bits about language and stratification. By how sparse the actual notes are, I can tell my focus at the time was mainly on this.

It's funny though, all of this cleaning is like opening up a time capsule. There are some terrible, naive drawings that embarrass me to the point of wanting to burn them. But then there are charming, oddly out-of-place ones that make me want to pick up a pencil again.

All of them seem to be snapshots of my mindset at the time. Flighty or focused. What was important to me. What bothered me. How far was I willing to go for it. I could see potential in a just a few pencil marks, if I had just pushed it a little more. There's at least a decade's worth of these moments that I've been carefully pouring over this past week. Seeing what I missed or overlooked.

But now that we're reunited, it's never too late to breathe life into them again. When the room is clean, it'll be time to start anew with what I apparently had all along.

Artist Spotlight - Felice Varini

If you ever needed an artist to mess with your sense of perspective, it's Felice Varini. He's a Swiss artist who works in painting large-scale environments to be seen from a single point. The above photo is in no way digitally manipulated. Here's the same work from a different angle:

As usual, the whole "But is it art?" debate crops up among critics and scholars. I'll keep my thoughts on that long-running issue to another post, but in Varini's particular case, I'd say the he's putting a twist or even reversal of the traditional trompe-l'œil. Instead of 3D illusion on a 2D plane, it's a 2D illusion on a 3D environment. Especially in this time of computers and digital art, when his work is viewed on the internet, the initial reaction is usually a disbelieving "Why is that photoshopped on there?"

For more his website is here (in French.) After you select a work, click on "hors point de vue" for other points of view.

Tree Lady

For awhile now, I've had a few recurring characters that pop up on the margins of homework or other pieces, but the one I like the most is the one I so cleverly call Tree Lady. When I first drew her she looked like this:


Back-breaking posture with stylized swirls. Also, lack of arms. I was actually amazed that I still had this in an old notebook of art history notes. She's also the only recurring character I draw that doesn't have a story of some sort attached to her. Tree Lady is purely for drawing exercise and she changes a bit each time. At one point she had wings, which were then replaced with branching arms and spindly fingers, seen here:

Tree Lady's general posture stays the same, though a little less painful-looking each time. Never seems to open her eyes though. I think this was a plan for a clock I was going to make. I have a secret love for mechanical bits and pieces, so there was going to be moving gears and whatnot behind her. But then I just started rolling with her design and started making it into a drawing instead. Here's a more recent incarnation:

She's very unfinished here (note the classy lined paper) but I like the direction it's going in. I think I stopped short because of the realization that I wanted to put her in a more formal media like ink or watercolor. Or would that defeat the purpose of changing her a bit every time I depict her? Setting her in ink might make that particular design canon and that seems silly to do to her. The use of pencil is so casual to me that I don't have to worry about presentation or what is canon for her design. For instance, here she started sprouting another pair of arms. And her usual straight hair has picked up wind somewhere. Will she have legs next perhaps?

Ah well, despite my best efforts, I'm sure she'll work her way into something eventually. She always does.

Mini Masterpieces

When I'm feeling particularly off some days and want to do art but not think too much (especially recently with my week-long sickness), I usually end up doing miniature copies of famous paintings. I'm pretty sure this isn't how most people would think to use an art history degree, but it's fun and doesn't use a lot of paint. May also make me blind in the process. I primarily use my smallest brushes and a couple of pins for these.

This one, Thomas Eakins' Gross Clinic, is still in development, but it's been a fun challenge just because of the number of figures in it. I particularly like that Dr. Gross' forehead is a big shiny white spot in a somber and dark surgery room. I'm not usually a big fan of American art, but Thomas Eakins won me over when the professor talked about how he would write letters to colleagues about the ridiculously hard time he had making the jump from drawing to oil painting.

I can't help but be charmed by famous artists who shared the same problems even a hundred years before. Art changes and evolves, but now just as always, the art student must go through the same motions and frustrations.

A room with a view - part II

This is Wat Arun in Bangkok, Thailand. There are better and more photogenic views of it, but this picture stayed in my memory because of where it was taken: a squatters' home.

One of the professors, being in very good standing with the local community for his historic conservation work of the area, had a friend who took all of us on an unofficial tour through the back alleyways and shops. We passed a butcher's, a fish market, an ice maker, an impromptu garden, and a few other non-tourist places, eventually coming to the squatters.

Their home was a makeshift of aluminum sheets, boxes, and old advertisement banners, divided to give each their own privacy. The common area opened up to a small dock into the humble view of Wat Arun above. It was funny because we didn't actually see many of the squatters. They didn't care that we, a bunch of westerners, had just barged in and looked around. But they were there, definitely. I could hear them just casually chatting, occasionally a chicken would also pipe up. There were even a couple of beautifully cut beer can windchimes spinning happily in the breeze.

I thought it would be rude to take a picture of the inside of their actual home, so instead I directed the camera to the view to keep the memory. These people were not "sad" or "poor" in the very least. They had their home, their health, and the view. That was enough.

Midnight Soup

I've been sick lately so you get a foot:

This is when I'd usually wax philosophical, but due to a mixture of cold remedies and general laziness, the only thought that pops up is,

"Why the hell didn't I sharpen my pencils?"

It looks like someone stepped in some spaghetti. How this situation might've occurred, I don't know. I try not to question it.

Lesson learned: sharpen your pencils or you'll end up with drawings that confuse the hell out of you years later.

Kinnaree - Work in Progress

A kinnari/kinnaree/kinnara is mythical creature with the top half of a human, usually a woman, and lower half of a bird (often cited as "swan" in English-translated literature but pictorial evidence suggests otherwise) They describe themselves as thus:

We are everlasting lover and beloved. We never separate. We are eternally husband and wife; never do we become mother and father. No offspring is seen in our lap. We are lover and beloved ever-embracing. In between us we do not permit any third creature demanding affection. Our life is a life of perpetual pleasure.

In Thai mythology, they are akin to angels or muses, flying between the human and mystical world and being the very ideal of song and beauty.

Traditionally, they look like this:



Just getting to the base idea and pose here was more exhausting than I'd like to admit. I wanted to definitely keep the kinnaree's lower half as a bird even though contemporary trend has her sporting human legs more and more often. I could go on and on about the anatomy problems that comes with a woman with wings on her hips and bird legs, but let's just say there's a reason you don't see ostriches sit in chairs...