From sketch to colour.
And a new thing.
(Etsy)
I’ve bought a tiny tiny block of watercolor papers that I’m filling up with tiny paintings. I want to make something big soon, but this is easier, for now.
Tag Archives: art
August but it Feels like Autumn
The weather is getting cooler and I was walking this evening. I’ve started to walk when I want to listen to new music, so I can hear an album through from beginning to end. On my way back, right as I was walking the last few metres before houses and trees start to close around you, the sun came out from under the clouds. Resting just above the top of the trees while the rest of the sky was still a dark grey. It made stripes of field glow in yellow as the rain kept falling. Weather makes me feel things.
Here’s a completely unrelated picture of a sketch I’m working on right now.
Joy Essential
(Another yesterday’s incorrect thoughts.)
Goodnight.
The Mona Lisa
Isn’t it messed up that Leonardo Da Vinci never knew he painted the Mona Lisa? Like he knew he painted a portrait of Mona Lisa, but he didn’t know he painted The Mona Lisa. It’s funny because it used to motivate me to think that every step of his career led up to that painting. That the first stick figure he made was the first draft of all those things he would later create. It helps me to create casually. Even if your creation sucks, it’s practice for the next one. (That is practice for the next one.) And so on.
But then, you never quite reach it. In my head there will come a day when it’s no longer practice for the next one, because I’ve actually reached that point. I’ve made it. But the truth is, we never arrive there, we never know our Mona Lisa. Because it’s not like Da Vinci just painted it and then hung it in the Louvre. He probably just started preparing the next canvas. As far as he knew it might have been just another painting in a long line of paintings, and he never reached “it”, or got “there”, wherever there is.
Creative Endeavors
Today I was reading in an interview about how writing a novel is like giving birth to a baby, which I guess I’ve heard before and don’t we always describe creative endeavors as our children in some very lovingly pretentious creepy way.
But what’s interesting is that whoever was interviewed mentioned that if you don’t want a child, don’t get one. Like if you don’t actually want a kid, just don’t get one. Don’t get one because you should or it seems like something that would look or sound nice; Get a kid because you actually want one. You can write your story, paint whatever thing, but like, you really don’t have to. Like, that pressure is made up.
Now, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it just because it’s hard. If you want to, you’ll have to know that you’re getting into something that’s a pretty big deal. And you’ll have to know that “want” does not mean a sudden flow of emotion that makes everything suddenly easy, but rather that you know that this is something you want to do, regardless. But it’s also a joy. And yeah, you should do it if you want to.
(The interview I was reading was from The Creative Independent, which completely unsponsored is like the best website ever, and they send me these cute emails with articles and – you know – general life advice. Below is todays.)
More from my A4
(Photos of random doodle papers:)
My Etsy Shop!!
So I have started an Etsy shop to sell my art. I’ve wanted to do this for the longest time, I even had a shop one many years ago, when me and a friend learnt to make jewelry. It’s a nerve wracking kind of thing, where you don’t know how things will turn out or if you’ll get any sales. But frankly I don’t even have space for the things I paint anymore and life is better when you try to do the things you want to do. Check it out here!!
The Surprise of Creativity
(Excerpt from a notebook) On the topic of writing, Bukowski says: If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. There’s no other way, and there never was. I think what he means is that your writing has to be a surprise, even to yourself. Too many people see writing as a form of thinking, when in reality it’s the complete opposite, a mirrored version or maybe a distant relative to it. When you write, when you really write, you do not need to fear the blank page, because it’s not you who are going to fill it, but your words. Sometimes I’m all up in my head, and I only write such things I’ve already thought about. But what then is the point of writing at all? Is it only documentation? I believe, and believe strongly, that the power lies in not knowing how your sentence will end. I believe, and believe strongly, that we have labyrinths in us just waiting to be discovered, but if you always know and see everything, you just walk along a winding path. You miss all the ways you could have gone. True writing is about something like that.
The Tokyo Project
In a relatively new corner of the world wide web there’s a website called kofi. You could say that it belongs to a group of new websites, some of them not even that new, about crowdfunding and being – through the internet – supported by the very same people who enjoy your work.
Kofi works in the way that you buy someone a coffee, or, technically, you just click a button and 3 bucks are transferred to that person, they can use it however.
I want to use kofi to give away free coffee to people in Shibuya, Tokyo.
In the midst of, or rather right next to, the busiest intersection in the world, there’s a starbucks with a second floor seating area where tourists and locals can enjoy their coffee while looking at the endless stream of people passing by below. I went to Japan last year, and took some time to interview people there, because it’s one of my favourite places I’ve ever been. But this time I wanted to do something different.
I want to connect this virtual reality where everything is buttons and icons, and we sometimes forget that there’s even a person on the other side of the profiles, with the very tangible, physical reality. Don’t get me wrong, there’s beauty in the virtual just as there is in the physical, but it is – above all else – interesting when they meet.
I want someone to be able to sit in front of their computer in America and click a button, and for it to cause me to buy and actual cup of coffee that I’ll give to an actual person out on the street. There’s nothing abstract about that, real cardboard cups and caffeine and money.
This project is a study in two areas I find endlessly fascinating. First of all, different realities versus each other. In this case, the collision and connection of physical and virtual reality. The transformation of something virtual into something “real”. And also the connection and collision between the physical and spiritual. I think acts of generosity change the atmosphere of an area and around a person. And the second area: The great exhange. The way in which we all link up and the constant exhange that is happening, always, whether it comes to money and business or services or compliments. If you’re stingy, no one seems to have enough, but the more generous you are and the more you step into the great exhange, the more you’ll notice it. We’re starting something.
So for now this is just an idea, but when it happens, or well, when I do it, I’ll invite you to virtually give a random person in the Shibuya crossing a fresh cup of coffee.
Little art
Black ink and watercolour, I make them really fast so I don’t have time to second guess myself.
eirians 