Art Thoughts

            A lot of stuff has been happening, and I've been ignoring my poor blog. It always makes me    feel really sad when blogs die, so I promise not to let that happen to this one. 

            I went to the Holiday Artist Market at the Brooks Museum, and I bought an Alexander Paulus! I really admire his work. I bought one of the less expensive ones (although I love the paintings the best).

 

It inspired me to draw a self portrait:

  

         Funny story, when I had bought this drawing and walked downstairs in the Brooks with it, a security guard for the museum was at her post there and asked me if I had bought it. I said that I had, and she started laughing. "How much did you pay for that?" I told her and she said, "You pay fifty dollar for that?!?" She could not stop laughing. Very strange behavior for a museum security guard, I think...          

         But I thought it was funny. She even got me laughing!

         I went to David Hall's art show last Sunday. I drew this section of one of his paintings: 

 

            It looks like thread to me, which is why I liked it so much and drew it. It was made with thread, in a way, a thread of rubber cement that was used to block out these lines.

           The moon when I rode home that night was full, and it was spectacular when the sky was just starting to go dark.

           I've been looking at amazing art online, a lot of it on this website. I've also been thinking about paint, and what it means to be truly masterful with paint. I think it's a combination of natural talent, years of experience with the medium and ridiculous fluency with it, and a joy the artist must draw from the act of painting (which joy, I'm convinced, does come across). I'm still thinking about this!

          I found a Memphis artist who did portrait commissions: Paul Penczner.

 

I painted a picture of David at his art show:

I love painting portraits, but I should really work more, I think, on my works on tulle. Especially after reading a little of this book my mother-in-law just gave me as an early Christmas present, I really want to concentrate more on the work that was directly inspired by her. These are much more difficult to make, but I love them intensely.

I'm reading Infinite Jest, which is good so far. It's 1,000 pages long. And people complain about Wuthering Heights! Reading Infinite Jest gave me this urge to write fiction, and I've been remembering a lot of wonderful moments from very long ago. These are two things that happen when I'm reading a really good book, so I suppose that's what Infinite Jest is. However, I really ought to finish it before reviewing it. David Foster Wallace has been compared to Thomas Pynchon, and I hated Gravity's Rainbow, so I'll have to see.