{"id":6009,"date":"2013-01-02T23:36:14","date_gmt":"2013-01-03T06:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alannarisse.com\/blog\/?p=6009"},"modified":"2013-01-02T23:59:29","modified_gmt":"2013-01-03T06:59:29","slug":"breakthroughs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alannarisse.com\/blog\/breakthroughs\/","title":{"rendered":"Breakthroughs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I was sick. I have laryngitis, so I don’t feel that bad, but I felt like I had to take it easy. I wanted to work on graphite drawings but didn’t want to inhale graphite. I wanted to try and push the oil paintings further but didn’t want to inhale fumes, so I got out my gouache and some large sheets Lenox paper. I cut them in half and went to print out some source material but the printer was out of ink. So I decided, hey I wanted to start making up my own maps so today must be the day. I used my usual methods for painting a background in the gouache. It’s my favorite part about working in gouache. I love spraying down the paper with water and dropping watery blobs of paint onto the surface to watch it to it’s magic. It’s so satisfying. Usually I just use this as sort of a background for a more representational drawing, but today I’m using it to make a terrain. Tomorrow I’ll start adding the mapping part.<\/p>\n

That was a boring paragraph but whatever, The gyst of it is, sometimes you need a wrench thrown in the works to get you going on something else, and that in turn helps your other pieces.<\/p>\n

Here’s the start of the new maps (on the floor) and dig how disastrously messy my studio is.<\/p>\n

\"gouache_maps_studio\"<\/p>\n

That got me thinking about Charles Burchfield and all my bee paintings and all my map paintings from before and how I keep using squiggly lines. In the bee paintings it was a way to make a painting of a photograph feel more like a distant source. The images I used for the beekeepers<\/a> at least for that first part of the series were all images I gleaned from the internet. To me the squiggles can sometimes reference digital noise. So I thought, shit, I should try that with this one painting that I don’t like. And lo and behold, it worked. It’s really shiny right now so the photo is a bit wacky, but anyway, here’s what I worked on today.<\/p>\n

\"tree_squigs1\"<\/p>\n

And then I thought, Oh yeah, I’d talked about this, adding some element to the foggy tree paintings to reference the computer, like a mouse pointer or something. And I thought, well, I dig me some squiggles so let’s try it. It’s helping me make progress on another tough painting I was about to give up on. So we’ll see.<\/p>\n

And then I tried to start another couple of small paintings with foggy tree imagery but I didn’t like how the trees were looking so I wiped down the canvas, and I liked that so I painted some more and wiped some more and pretty soon I had these sexy surfaces that reference the other foggy paintings without having any trees at all in them. Again, tough photos.
\n\"lostptg_dyptic1\"<\/p>\n

So, Today I touched 4 gouache drawings and four paintings. Unbelievable! I thought I was going to be out of practice from the big break. I felt like I had a real studio day. Yippee!<\/p>\n

I keep coming back to maps in my work. I always think about the interview I read with Squeak Carnwath and how she used to hide hand drawn treasure maps for strangers to find<\/a>. That article has inspired me so many times. I made maps about old towns<\/a> the first time I went to the France Painting workshop with Glen Moriwaki and make believe treasure maps<\/a> the second time too. I made maps of motherboards and electronics schematics<\/a>. I made abstract imaginary maps<\/a> at CCA. I keep going back to the music maps<\/a>. I’ve been looking at and tracing maps of the Pacific Crest Trail for this series. So, there’s a thread I definitely need to follow. And I feel like these squiggles on the photo based work are sort of maps in some way too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I was sick. I have laryngitis, so I don’t feel that bad, but I felt like I had to take it easy. I wanted to work on graphite drawings but didn’t want to inhale graphite. I wanted to try and push the oil paintings further but didn’t want to inhale fumes, so I got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alannarisse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alannarisse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alannarisse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alannarisse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alannarisse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6009"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.alannarisse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6016,"href":"https:\/\/www.alannarisse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6009\/revisions\/6016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alannarisse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alannarisse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alannarisse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}