weekly reckoning

As of this first post, I'm 90% done with a wire and paper sculpture, and I haven't done any printmaking in months. But, after a long dry spell, I have been sketching pretty much every day for the last several weeks and have recently struck a fine lode. I like the mining metaphor for sketching even though images of flight and gravity-defiance have been showing up more than anything else lately. I'll cheat and show sketches from the last few weeks in this initial post.

I had just seen the Humouroborous, a merry-go-round sized zoetrope, and was thinking about animation when I started this sketch. I was surprised when he lifted off the ground, and kept rising. He seems surprised too.

I started this one with the man's face, not knowing anything that would follow. I didn't like how the man and woman are facing away from each other, but the birds as a final addition solved that problem. The title might be "Looking for a good place to land." I like the smudges from my crappy eraser on the cheap paper, and all the ghosts of other pages showing through.

Here is the flip side, the necessity and pleasure of giving in to gravity sometimes.

But then sometimes gravity is not my friend.

Thinking about gravity and flight makes me think about Italo Calvino's great Six Memos for the Next Millenium, a series of essays on different literary virtues, such as Lightness and Quickness. He sees Lightness as being in opposition to the heaviness and stone-like opacity of mundane life. He says,

"I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."

That is why I am doing this blog, to help me float above the heaviness of everyday life that sometimes seems designed to keep paper blank and sculpture unfinished.

See you next monday,

Daniel