New Drawing

So I started working on another drawing.  So far it is ballpoint ink on vintage paper with some watercolor.  It is roughly 5" x 5".  The original pencil sketch still shows through.  I am testing a new crackle medium in the meantime.  Hopefully this will yield quicker and better results.  Anyway, this piece is called, "Into thy hands, I commend my spirit."  I offer this innocent black child as an offering.  I ask, into whose hands?  Into the hands of the same God worshiped by the men who kidnapped her?  Into the hands of the same God worshiped by the men who would rape her? Into the hands of the same God worshiped by the men that would continually enslave, both physically and mentally, the fruits of her womb for generations to come?  Or is it into her own hands, by her own power?  We speak of her spirit, what of her soul?  This is going to be an interesting piece to work on.  Forgive the camera phone pictures---I will post a scanned version later.

In other news, today was the first day of school for my munchkins!  The two older ones are veterans in the second and fourth grade.  The younger ones...it was hard.  My husband and I spent a lot of time teaching them at home.  Letting them go just isn't easy.  My kindergarten baby was super excited to be in school finally.  She was all decked out in her pretty pink.  I sent her off with her school supplies and list of allergens (she's my sensitive baby) and a hug.  This school thing is going to take some getting used to.  She's really shy and sweet with gentle and humble ways.  Her teacher is great so I don't feel as uptight as I was feeling.

My pre-K baby was upset.  She saw all her siblings off to class and as we were heading out, she looked at my husband and me tearfully and asked "What about me?"  Bout near broke my heart.  We consoled her and told her that she would be there later today.  Today she had to be tested for eligibility into the pre-K program at the school.  My husband called me and said that she came bounding out of the classroom exclaiming that she told the teacher what the earth was and that she did really good. My husband said they passed my kindergarten baby on the playground and she was having a blast.  I'm happy to hear it.

Completed Portrait

This is an interesting manner to experiment with.  I am creating artwork that while it is visually interesting has the potential to be an archival and photographical nightmare.  To get really good pictures I would have to employ the help of a great photographer.  I am experiencing glare issues with the glaze and reflective issues with the scanner. This is a scanner here and the buckling of the paper shows up light on the hair even though it is all dark in the original.  I love how it came out either way in real life.  The textures are really beautiful.  This was completed in ballpoint ink, watercolor, goauche and crackle glaze.  It will be finished in a matte varnish.  This fits well into my Awakening series. 

In the closeup the textures are more evident.  I would love to see the dynamics on a larger scale.  I will do a larger portrait in watercolor, ink and gouache in the coming weeks, probably a self portrait to really experiment with this.  I am going to work on another piece in the Exotic Symbolism series that I will probably post later today.

So what does this piece mean?  It holds a lot of meaning in regards to religion and spirituality for the people of African descent in America.  I tend to avoid themes of religion specifically in my work however this piece deals with it directly.  The text talks about how the Hebrews yearned for their distant home after being in bondage.  It speaks to how despite being far away from home they harbored a longing for their future generations to survive and wished for the future what they themselves could not obtain.  They sat by the rivers of Babylon, in the land of their captors and wept when they remembered Zion.  This text resonated with me in its correlation to the plight of the people throughout the African diaspora.  The image is for anyone's interpretation.  Is she a representative of the past or a foreshadowing of the future?  I touched down on a similar theme in my piece To Our Future, Black Children.


That being said, the furthering of the Awakening series will no doubt ruffle a few feathers.  A lot of my recent ongoing readings have been slave narratives dating back from the late 1700s through the US Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.  It's painful, jarring, sad, and angering.  It's hard to control the gamut of emotions that comes from reliving their experiences.  Awakening has to deal with primarily our ancestors taking on the religion of their captors. What am I interested in? The lies they were told, the beliefs they were forced to hold and eventually accepted out of survival's sake, being told that if they ran away they were doomed to hell...the psychological effects of that is evident through today.  It passes down through the generations; a curse of sorts.  It's disturbing to me, and my thoughts, sketches, and writings over the years has culminated to an exploration in a series of small personal drawings.  Children will remain a central theme in my work they were with the Lost Within Series.  As I stated in my artist statement for that series:

"I chose children as my primary subject mainly because they are the purest vessel through which we can hope to reclaim our future.  It is through them that we survive and it is through them that the answers to the unknown can become known."

Current pieces and ACEOs

I decided to work on a larger piece that's about 4" x 6" roughly.  I named it "Difficult Journey Home."  It is ballpoint ink on a torn vintage page. This is a present work in progress as it will become a watercolor piece and an experiment with the crackle texture.

I completed this ACEO over the course of Monday.  Since I actually have to work, the original pencil and ballpoint ink portions above were done on breaks and taken as best as they could be with my camera phone.  I love the crisp lines of the ballpoint ink and believe it or not they blend really well when other mediums are added.  I start all of my drawings in pencil with basic shapes to make sort of a skeleton and approximation of where the features would fall.  In my larger work I let them stay as they only add to the final piece.  I built up a foundation with colored pencil on the face and watercolor on the veil.  I then layered on more applications, alternating between colored pencil and watercolor.  Then I overlayed portions of it with crackle glaze.  Below is the completed piece and a close up of the texture.  The challenge with the scan is that it whites out some areas due to the reflective nature of the glaze so the darks aren't as dark as they are in real life.  I am going to experiment taking photographs with my 10 mp camera to see if I can get a better rendition.  This is the first in an exploratory series I have tentatively named Exotic Symbolism.  It will feature close ups of ethnic women throughout the world and feature a sort of visual commentary on their different struggles.  This obviously is a Muslim woman.  Notice how her lower face is veiled but her hair is not.  I came across this article Joan Smith:  The veil is a feminist issue and was inspired to do a portrait based on this quote from the article:

"Women don't wear the burqa in Afghanistan because they like it; they wear it because they are afraid of being killed if they don't. Women haven't suddenly gone back to wearing the veil in Iraq because they're pious; they do it because women who refuse have been murdered. I loathe the niqab and the burqa when I see them there. And I can't pretend I don't find them equally offensive on my local high street." 

The eyes were once confrontational.  The glaze took the edge off of them and yet they are still confident.  I named this piece "Without a Voice (But Still a Choice)."

I came across a sketch in an old sketchbook from 2003, the start of my natural journey.  I had drawn a shattered glass with my image in it and had titled it "Missing pieces of my identity."  Seems I still haven't gotten away from identity issues or depicting fragmentation in regards to women's issues.  I have an old print I did of a woman from India wearing a burqa back from high school and another piece of a woman wearing one in college.  That image of being covered and having no voice sticks with me and creeps into my work every couple of years or so.

This is presently up for auction on ebay!  See the auction HERE!

I'm Baaaccckkkkk....

After a rather long hiatus from this blog, I have returned to the world of ACEOs.  The past year has been a rather eventful one.  I have immersed myself into the craft of crochet which I explore in my blog HERE and I have been pursuing my venture with my store, Moya Arts.  I have moved into more local avenues of selling.  I haven't been selling on ebay in a good little bit but with the new promotion of free auction style listings through 9/3, I have a reason to get back into the swing of things.  I have a bunch of prints I will place for sale sometime this week.

Also I had been neglecting the great art of ACEOs and miniature drawing.  I participated in an art exhibition back in April in which most of my pieces were 17 x 21 -24 x 30 inches and in charcoal.  I love that body of work and I hope to continue to exhibit in the future.  See my larger format work HERE. 

What brings me back to ACEOs?  The exploration of the same ideas of my larger format work.  I love cats and all; however, the messages I want to convey with my art cry out to me much stronger than my niche commercial market.  My more recent work evokes contemplation and thoughtful meditation beyond what's on the paper.  I've had all sorts of reactions from discomfort (most common), to shock (more to come on that), to marvel.  The different interpretations I have been given by others has surprised me.  My work does convey a lot of pain and it is interpreted in many different ways.  On one of the pieces (Among Our Dreams), a viewer likened it to a domestic abuse victim because of the anonymity of the image (that was intentional on my part) and the unknown.  The eyes aren't shown so the depth of the pain cannot be measured.  Out of everyone I've ever spoken to only one person actually understood the meaning of my work as a whole.  It goes beyond my artist statement...there's only so much I could say there.  I am content with people developing their own interpretations.  The subjectivity of art is what makes it a worthwhile venture.

The works are large and unavoidable.  I am now going to play with that same concept on a smaller format which is more intimate.  I am going to explore the dynamics between having the viewer's space invaded to the viewer becoming the invader. 

I look forward to this new turn in my work.  Now there will still be cats and anything else I get the fancy to draw.  My primary focus will be on my new series.

This is the piece that has sparked my curiosity once again.  

I have this old book that's pretty much falling apart.  It has been read eons ago and had lost a few pages already.  The pages are slightly yellowed and a great backdrop to draw on.  The drawing is done in ballpoint ink, watercolor and goauche.  I do not know the archival quality of the ballpoint ink but it is much cleaner than pencil and shows really well through the letters without completely obliterating them.

It is roughly ACEO sized (2.5" x 3.5") but it goes over some because of the torn edges.  Working title: "...had invaded the inner citadels of her completely. There were no secrets the...barrier to throw up to protect herself...always naked, always open to pain." The wording wasn't intentional.  I noticed it after the drawing was done.  The child's withdrawn expression gives a lot of weight to the words.  This is very similar to the larger format work I have done that deals a lot with psychological effects of events, mostly past and ancestral events on a modern subject.   I went back in and made some areas darker like around the lips and the lower left.  That white area was competing too heavily with the details of her face and took away from the effect her eyes were intended to make.  I'll probably post the update later as an edit to this post. This was only a preliminary study.