The idea:
Throughout my drawings, one particular image kept standing out to me. The floating animal heads - I’ve actually accidentally doodled this concept one day a few years back and I loved it so much, it had only one eye (reminds of of Odilon Redon’s work) and it’s been scorched at the back of my mind. There’s something so... disturbing, not in an aggressive way but in a... there’s a bad energy living off your negative feelings kind of way. They’re not un-friendly but… they’re not there to make friends either. To be honest, any body part floating, and on top of that, a child-like figure holding the end of the string that it’s tied to - can be counted as unsettling, I hope. Anyway, I had the strong urge to make a larger painting from this idea. I’m not sure exactly why - the drawing with the floating cat toy with candles on it was strange but doesn’t have that essence of the DISTURBED YOUTH that I wanted. Like a child grown up too fast. Like its age doesn’t match up with how it feels. Like everyday living feels like barely surviving in murky, dangerous waters. But it doesn’t have to be that negative, the viewer can read it in more positive ways. It could just be an innocent bunny holding one innocent looking head with an innocent looking companion tied around its neck. All in all, I felt that this imagery fit what I felt about aging and youth perfectly, from the initial trigger of thinking about the concept of birthdays.
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| odilon redon |
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| (I like the contrast between 'old' and 'childhood') |
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| sort of like a teru teru bōzu (rain doll) |
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| still figuring out how to draw the bunny.. to the left this version looks more grown up.. to the right was just me feeling swamped and frustrated with the rate i'm working at |
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| does growing up guarantee loneliness? |
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| I originally wanted to blurred two faces. |
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| the middle one is a sort of cute cartoon-like doodle, I can imagine him saying, oops! |
The process:
After making very quick and small sketches in the sketchbook, I started sketching the forms with a turquoise colored soft pastel. It was quite a strong colour than what I would usually start off with on a blank panel - and as I progressed I noticed how prominent it made the figure from its neon luminosity. I was quite lost in which mediums I would use on this painting. I went about the usual - the ink wash..(and in the past, I would only use the ink and watercolor to complete my paintings. I would also use resin to top it off in a glossy coat) (but currently, I felt that I needed some development… like more vibrant colors with gouache and acrylic perhaps.) and that’s exactly what I did. Before the color though, I actually loved what the painting looked like with only white and the turquoise outline - it felt ghostly and a presence that’s barely there. I always have a fear that my paintings look better in the beginning when I barely worked on it. I painted on white acrylic on top of the primer where the bunny was. At this point the turquoise was threatening to come off easily with a brush of the hand. As I added more color with ink I realized how much I liked the feathery outline though, how it gave an eerie surreal feel to the figures, so I decided to keep it. I didn’t really know how to keep it on (fixative?) but I continued to color with watercolor etc. on the inside of the figures. I also added a surface on which she stands on, like she’s in this polluted, mossy, almost squirming its half alive, ground.
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| liked the ghostly presence |
*The problem I always faced was colour - I didn’t know how to choose colors in order to convey the atmosphere I want to express. It’s definitely something I’ll be struggling with for a long time. I don’t know how to mix colors, fit colors together, etc. (also, I’ve been using ink and watercolor a lot, which acts differently in color to acrylic/oil etc) People painting around me (almost all oil painting) seem to know color very well, and I wonder if I could ever develop a sensitivity for color and space. Right now I’m at a place where I KNOW I don’t have a sense of space/perspective/color or any kind of skill-based knowledge in painting but that’s what makes my paintings look like they’re surreal and floating. From the Crit with Alex, he pointed out that I was using Local Color which is what they use in cartoons - where red is red and blue is blue. So that’s why my paintings look sort of dream-like, since we usually dream in local color. But in real life colors don’t work like that - I should stop painting things like the color I know them to be and really look, apparently. But all of my subjects are from my imagination… so where should I look? I suppose I could look at objects in my paintings like clothing and try and develop from real life. It would be quite interesting I think, a sort of amateur looking at a real thing and trying to mimic it. I’m not sure what I want to do. I’ll definitely experiment in the near future. On top of this I have my hesitation in drawing, although its getting a lot better, just letting go and just doing it, I think I’m too bound by what reality seems to be by other people. I think I should just let go of everything BUT it doesn’t mean I want my paintings to look like what I want to depict. For example in pop surrealism / surrealism the artist knows exactly what they want to depict, like an object or human-like figure, and they usually do it with confidence. I want to achieve that sort of confidence one day and have that certainty of imagery I’m depicting. Not that I don’t like what my uncertain style is depicting. It feels very ambiguous. Perhaps I can meet in the middle. I don’t know. I’m a very uncertain person always on the border, not knowing what I want or need to the point where I annoy myself. I’ll just have to try everything.
Yes, so I was struggling picking colors for this painting, I went along with the turquoise outline to match the ground and the first floating head, and I decided to drip red / pink ink on her dress and also the ‘companion’ to the right of her. It looked way too similar, the colors, so I change that later (into a purplish hue) I began to develop more certain characteristics on the bunny, like the eyes on her ears (many ways of interpreting this, really, the fact that she has no pupils in her actual eyes, which we don’t even know if they are her eyes, could just be slits, but the ear-eyes are always in caution and sort of trying to look out for her, and looking at the floating heads from time to time) (I just like the idea of eyes being in the WRONG places in the body, it’s so disturbing) I also like the big kangaroo-like feet I gave her, part of this almost cute form comes from when I read moomin adventures recently, I was inspired by how simple but distinctive her characters are with features such as this.
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| surprisingly some similarities between sniff and I...('timidity means that he won’t do anything dangerous' 'Sniff is terrified of water' 'oves to investigate new things with others, but he soon gets tired and is always the first in the group to quit.' 'Sniff is selfish, lazy and easily bored' |
The scarier multi-eye appearance of the floating heads came about as I saw them in the ink, I merely emphasized them with gouache and watercolor. The ‘butterfly’ in her dress was also something I spotted in the ink, with its head looking surprisingly like moomin’s head. The accidental ink drips down from her dress gave a sense of gravity I really liked. As I painted out the butterfly however, they sort of turned into its legs. So, the butterfly was completely unplanned and spontaneous but also indirectly feeding off what Olive, who sits next to me was telling me about (her family had a cocoon at their window for 9 months and he finally came out only to have crumpled wings. they kept him in a box and cared for him till the end of his life. His name was Chris for chrysalis. I’m certain he had the best and most loved time of his life being cared for by olive and her family.) And it was a very sad but powerful metaphor for being pushed out into the world and growing, surviving… and the idea that the chrysalis is where they grow before they come out into the real world… all of it seems to match up with my idea of aging and youth… which was why I painted a hopefully subtle enough ‘CHRYSALIS’ on its body to suggest this metaphor of growth and act as a sort of commemoration for the life and unfortunate death of Chris the family butterfly.
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| always wary... |
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| always watching... |
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| chrysalis.. is he holding her up or is she holding him down? |
About the background… recently I’ve been quite drawn to the bright yellow and orange. My roommate trinh is loving yellow at the moment, and I’ve been swayed by the vibrancy of it all. My hair has faded from pink into a weird orangey-gingery-blonde and I am beginning to embrace it as well. I never liked the two colors, so I never really used it much in my work. But thinking about broadening my colour palette and all, I thought why not, it would be quite a contrast with the turquoise outline. I didn’t want to paint in vivid thick paint (ironically, since I’m always feeling like I want to do exactly that but maybe I don’t really??? I end up not doing it anyway) and so I started to make some vertical yellow marks with the pastel. I liked how the gravity weighs down when things are floating and the background has vertical strokes. So I continue to do so until almost all the white is covered. It looked a bit pale on the whole as I stepped back and looked at it (paintings really look different from afar) so I decided to emphasize the areas around the heads and bunny. The thicker areas are actually just yellow pastel smudged into the panel with my fingers dipped in white acrylic. I felt very amateur but very HUMAN. I like using my fingers for paintings because I think it gives it the raw, human touch… and through it you get a sense of desperation even. it blends the colours unevenly and in a strange fashion, unlike what brushes could ever achieve.
some other inspirations that indirectly fed into this painting...
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| gary baseman |
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hikari shimoda
(most of her practice surrounds the exact subject I was investigating,
the innocence lost in youth in young children) |
Originally, I wanted to write some text beside her… something to do with aging so its clear what I want to say in this work… in my sketchbook I’ve written ‘AGE LIMITS YOU TH’ which I, at that time thought it was quite interesting thinking about ‘age limits’ and what that actually means and also what ‘youth’ entails. but after having ‘CHRYSALIS’ written on there I feel that what I want to say is already there. and if I really wanted to make it clear I could name it something to do with aging. Overall, I feel quite happy how it turned out - the floating heads could have more detail and certainty but I kind of like how ambiguous they are now. I also liked how I incorporated the spraypaint-over-ink method I accidentally adopted in my practice in the past on her dress. Thinking about it, this is the first painting where I directly transferred a doodle of a figure of some sort onto a large panel and letting go, which is what I’ve always imagined my paintings to be. So I am quite happy. I feel like I’ve aged during the 3-4 days I worked on this painting but also younger. Doing this kind of painting brings me back to more youthful days not necessarily from my life in the past but where I am now. I feel like a child even though I just turned twenty. I feel like it’s important but deadly to hold on to your youth like this. Should I hold on, should I let go? Is there an in between? I hope I find out before I fall.
