Decadence and Distortion

This coming week I will be at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg Tennessee, teaching a one week workshop, "Large Drawings: Image and Text". 

It should be a fun and exciting time for all, and one of those teaching situations where I learn as much or more than the students. Because 1. I have never taught a class on this theme before in such a short time format, and 2. Gatlinburg apparently has a "moonshine bar"which I hope will provide libations to loosen everyone up and get some BIG gesture drawing going with non-traditional materials.

Stay tuned for images and impressions from the coming week's adventure...

In the meantime, here are some images of what was happening at the McColl Center studio this past week. Having finished a few new mixed media pieces, I rewarded myself with one of my favorite things in the world: starting a big, new ambitious drawing series. This is a dangerous reward system, in that I have a tendency to start projects well and finish them less faithfully. Hopefully posting projects to the blog, and holding myself responsible to the Internet audience thereby implied, will keep a fire under this series. It would be great to have everything I am working on in the studio now completed by, say, October... Ah well, it's good to have intentions.

So this new drawing series pairs various distorted and disfigured heads from my archive with collage material from a book on the history of dolls. It is something to ponder; as many heads and bodies as I've drawn and studied over the years, I don't think I have ever really looked closely at dolls or puppets as potential drawing reference material. Of course, the collage imagery I have chosen has something of a creepy factor about it, but this seems to be the norm when chopping up dolls into parts and putting them into a particular context.

There are five drawings started so far in the series, and each sheet measures about 2.5' X 3.5'.
I decided to keep this work within the realm of traditional "dry" drawing materials, meaning that there are no acrylic or gesso washes in the first layers, and the materials are limited to graphite, ink, collage and colored pencil. Here are three in progress (shown with detail shots) that have been sketched out to the point of having a stable composition and fixed subject matter:

And on an entirely different note, it occurred to me upon reviewing a few of the past month's blog entries that I may be giving a false impression of my McColl Center studio: that it is a squeaky clean, polished, gallery-like space. Such is not the case, at least not on a day-to-day basis. Here is a random shot of what my work table looks like in the middle of the average workday before a lunch break:

There's usually a lot of crap on the floor as well. It is important to remember that creative space is messy space, both physically and intellectually.