Janey and me

Sketching at animal parks is a lot of fun, not only because you can really observe the animals, but also because the animals are likely to observe you. They are used to people mimicking them and taking flash photography, but they are not so used to see a human scribbling on a piece of paper and watching them without direct eye contact. Meerkat sentries take a keen interest in your sketching and so do parrots, but obviously apes and monkeys even more so.
I had the opportunity to visit San Diego Zoo recently and I was sketching away while one of the orangutans came to the glass pane to show off to the audience. I thought it was very funny. She was showing her teeth to the ohhh and ahhh of an amused audience. So I started sketching her and she seemed to observe me with such an intensity, that I turned the sketch around to show her. She came closer to take a look and then seemed to ask me for my pen. I felt very sad that I could not hand her my pen through the glass and she looked sad too, but perhaps it's just the way orangutans look. I kept on showing her my pen moving on the paper making marks, and she kept on watching me and the drawing forming on the paper. Then she came up really close, two inches from my face and stared me right in the eye. It was not a threatening stare, and in fact it looked like she was entering my soul, exploring what was past my eyes, into my very being. I did the same to her, wondering what kind of magical bonding moment was happening between us. I was deeply touched.
Later I found out that her name is Janey and that she is an artist in her own right. She paints, draws and wears makeup. What a bizarre fantastic experience.

The Mighty Blendy Pens

Sometimes I go shopping for art supplies with my friend and fellow artist Diana. I have tons of art supplies already, but I NEED to have more. To impress Diana, I decided to show some kind of restraint last time we went to Cass Art and did not buy a big box of Blendy Pens. I had some old ones at home already, and, really, I didn't need them. Or did I? Actually the Blendy Pens were that one elusive tool that would have magically guided my hand into creating the most amazing art EVER. I had to have them. As simple as that. So I bought them online for £2 more than they cost at Cass. When they finally arrived in the post I discovered that they were bigger than the ones I had already, and I much preferred the smaller ones. I started to wonder as to whether the Cass ones were big or small. Should I go back to Cass and get them? Two boxes of Blendy Pens - isn't that a bit too much? Do I "deserve" them? Of course, if I showed myself worthy of them. But how? The idea of a Blendy Pen pilgrimage started taking shape in my head: I am going to walk to Cass! 5.5 miles!!! The next day I set off at 9am with a small rucksack and a bottle of water and walked, walked, walked. The funny thing about this pilgrimage was that I walked by two places where I used to live ages ago, and so it also became a memory lane kind of walk. I walked by shops, gardens, dogs, cats and lots of joggers (were they all running to Cass?). An altogether fantastic and dreamy experience. 2 hours later I arrived in Cass, ran downstairs and grabbed the Blendy Pens box, only to discover that it was identical to the one I had bought online. So I bought something else (well, I had to, after all that!) and took the bus home.
As a present for Diana's birthday I made this sketch of a vintage car from a photo I took in Julian, AZ, and coloured it with... the mighty Blendy Pens!

Not Hockney again?

I have just finished David Hockney's Secret Knowledge, a book that makes you feel good about tracing, and bad just about everyhting else. Hockney claims that many more artists and much earlier on than we would expect, knew and used optical tools to aid their drawings and paintings. This, he says, doesn't at all detract from the ability of the artist, because these tools don't make marks and making marks with them is VERY awkward. I would like to add that what we do know for sure is that Renaissance artists did not use the iphone app called camera lucida. Neither did Hockney, funnily enough. I have used it here for this self portrait with Castello Bruzzo. It is as awkward as the real camera lucida: the phone moves, the paper moves and I did all this perched on the arm of a chair because I was charging the bloody thing. Nevertheless you can clearly see the resemblance with the drawings by Ingres (no? Really?). I like the three Bruzzos overlapping each other and across my face. What depressed me about the book, though, is that it kind of claims that the optical/photographic representation of the world is not truer or more real. Hockney, in fact, goes to the extent of saying that the camera obscura is the reason why we notice and reproduce shadows in our paintings, unlike other cultures who do not. When as a child I discovered that wherever I went, my shadow came with me, I was utterly distressed. Would I have had a happier childhood had I grown up in prephotography China?

Too big a picture?

The whole of London seems to be flocking to the new David Hockney exhibition called "A Bigger Picture". And yesterday we went too. Being a keen fingerpainter, I wanted to see his ipad work. To say that this exhibition was OVERWHELMING, is an understatement. See here to the left, my version of Hockney's ipad tunnel, with a tiny overwhelmed me at the bottom. There were hundreds of paintings of the Yorkshire landscapes, admired by a sea of wowing old ladies and extremely tall young ladies with sketchbooks. The colours were so bright they jumped out at you and wrestled you to the ground. I hadn't been quite as scared since I went to see Disney's Alice in Wonderland as a child (I was a teenager, actually). I was ANGRY and needed to be calmed down with tea and sandwiches and soothing husband conversation. We talked for hours before my heart rate went back to normal. I like Hockney very much (no, seriously), he does what he wants, whatever grabs his attention he explores without worrying about pleasing others. At least this is what comes across and what is so free and wonderful about him. He also works, I mean WORKS. And that is very inspiring. He does thousands of sketches, paintings, huge canvases, films, photos. I don't want to be Frida Kahlo anymore. I want to be David Hockney.

Striving for fridom

I have been a believer in the law of attraction for a long time. It is so far the best explanation I've found for how life works. The difficult part for me is to follow my emotional guiding system. My thoughts change from feeling good to feeling bad to feeling good again in a nanosecond, and sometimes I really need to sit down and ask myself: "What happened there? I was happy a minute ago, and now I'm angry/upset/sad (delete accordingly)." And other times to feel sad actually feels incredibly good. One such amusing occasion happened just before Christmas. I was watching a documentary about Frida Kahlo with my husband, and I was enjoying every minute of it, until I became suddenly very sad, angry and, basically, a venom spitting cobra. It took me a few hours to understand what happened. I had become upset because I developed a sudden desire to BECOME FRIDA KAHLO and move to Mexico, straight away, that night. Maybe Source is already in Mexico, but I'm still here. There are other minor impossibilities in this project, anyway. On the other hand, understanding all this, amused me no end. The mind is a beautiful thing. Or, the mind has a mind of its own.

Things

I have learnt and I'm learning a lot about things lately, how we surround ourselves with things to feel secure and how things actually fail to do that function -  they instead often stunt our creativity, fill precious space, and keep us where we were, stopping us from moving forward. One of the reasons why I like travelling is that I leave all my things behind. I now pack a tiny bag and rely on the masses of things accumulated by others. Adapting to what I find, in terms of books to read, accessories, paper, pens, toothpastes and hand creams, is a fantastic exploration of the world and of my relationship to the world. Travelling only with hand luggage makes me feel that I am at home everywhere and nowhere. Even my sketchbooks are becoming smaller. I love this super tiny Moleskine. I brought no art supplies with me to Genoa, thinking that I would find something there. I bought only this fun pen called tratto pen that turns blue if you wet it. Back home the tratto pen is now sitting together with all my other hundreds of pens, and has lost some of the charm it had when it was the only one. Possessing things or being possessed by them is a funny, delicate balance. Travelling is a great way to test what is and what isn't important.

What to do and how to do it

While I was barricated in the bedroom waiting for the floor to be finished in the sitting room, I read two books, the conversations with David Hockney and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Superficially these two books have nothing in common, but somehow each helped me to understand the other. It's something to do with who you are, who you want to be, who you think you want to be or do, who and what other people want you to be or do. Indecision on what to portray and how to portray it are often the main reason for inertia in creative people. Most often this insecurity is a struggle between who we are and who we think we should be in order to be succesfull, understood, appreciated, loved. This is why at the beginning of my artistic expression I became fascinated by outsider artists, people who follow their muse, be it a god or a need, without worrying about technique, without worrying about pleasing anybody. Just following their call. Outsider artists are incredibly prolific, because they do more and worry less. They also often have the time, but this is another excuse. The moral of these two books, as I interpret it, is: return to your soul, it knows better than anybody else what your destiny is, and your real destiny is always good.