Audrizzle

Practiced with the Wacom. Went for a little longer than usual this time, this took about 2.5 hours. I did it just as practice which is why it's far from perfect, but I think it's pretty good for just practice.


This is my cousin Cahalen, who played here in Knoxville at Preservation Pub last month. He was fantastic! I'm so proud he's so talented. Check his tour dates, he's always playing everywhere, I recommend that everyone go see him!

Anyway.
Not a whole lot de nouveau is going on, I have been thinking really really hard about getting a job and have even applied to a couple. But mostly what I've been doing is thinking, as opposed to going out and doing.

This is partially because I am sick as a very sick person. I did not write "sick as a dog" because I don't know many sick dogs.
Also this: once I was at my mom's house and her dog Loopy threw up on the carpet, so I went to the kitchen to get a paper towel. When I got back, Loopy had just finished licking up & eating her vomit from the floor.
When I'm sick, I don't do that.

I guess what I thought I had was a sinus infection, because at the beginning of last week it was mainly my nasal area that was giving me trouble (in the form of... well, I'll not go into details) but since then my throat has started hurting a lot, and last Tuesday my chest was really bugging me too. Luckily that's mostly gone, so it's just the sinuses and my throat being itchy & sore.
Also mild fever, 100.2 degrees.

But I've had a mild fever pretty consistently for the last 2 or 3 months. Which isn't fun, but at least the weather's cooling down outside. And boy, is it beautiful!

Knitting is my usual fall sport, and this year is no different.

The other thing that's a whole lot of fun is Wii.

I think my favorite game right now is Groovin' Blocks.
It's like Tetris meets Dance Dance Revolution. That's pretty much the best way I can describe it.

Working on my art, still reading "The Magus", trying to organizize the apartment, taking cough syrup and mucinex. Oh, what a joyous life.

Hopefully I will be better by next week, because next Thursday is my BIRTHDAY! WOOHOO! Actually I don't really care. My mom is coming to town, though, which should be interesting.

Also, sad news: Timothy Brown passed away last week.

He was a really great guy, and very good friends with my mom. When she was queen, he was her King.



Rest In Peace, King Captain Timothy.

Labels: art, death, fall, mom, wacom, wii

We all know I have a tendency to become obsessed with things.

Here's a new one.



Dear god.

I have always been a fan of Kool Keith (or "Special Keith" as some confused baby boomers are prone to call him) but I watched the "Livin' Astro" video again yesterday for the first time in about 4 years and fell in love with it.

Sigh.



I guess I first saw it in fall of 2005 on GTV, which I will admit to watching. I will also admit to hosting a show on GTV, but that's as far as I will go.

So, technically I can say that I fit into the following categories:

* Award winning writer
* Published photographer
* Museum-featured artist
* Former TV show host

On top of many other things.

Or alongside of them.

Whatever.

all of A sudden is the proper way to write it. I have been wrong for YEARS, thinking it was "all of the sudden." I can't tell you what an idiot I feel like for this. I can't even begin to bring it up.

Also, the other day...
this is getting a bit personal, OH NO! ... Well, the other day, J apologized. I'm not going to say for what, but the fact of the matter is that I had been waiting for J to apologize for 7 weeks, and a couple of days ago he finally did.

Now, I had been waiting and waiting and expecting and HOPING that the moment J expressed his remorse would come along, but when it finally did, something interesting struck me.

Everything that he was going to say I already knew.

Seeing as we had not discussed the incident, I can't say how I knew it... people often assume things and most likely they are wrong. I guess I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it and came to my assumption which turned out to be right. And though I think the old me would have been ready to rub his face in it, would have preferred he lick my boots in addition to saying he was sorry, would have laughed as he groveled at my feet... well, the present me just felt sorry for him. I mean, getting to the root of the issue, I realized that his problem was his inability to react to things as a mature adult. He had felt uneasy the entire time about it whereas I was able to get over it after a very short time.

I felt horrible to think that two people could go through the same experience and come out of it so differently. I mean, I'm sure he wasn't agonizing over it, but the depth of his apology to me was so genuinely heartbreaking I fear that it was almost as bad.

What really struck me about the situation was this: J caused me to suffer, so in the past I would have wanted to see him suffer. BUT when faced with the actual front of his suffering, I realized that he had already suffered much more than I had as a result of his actions, and whatever petty need for revenge I'd had was long gone. I just wanted him to be my friend again.

So, I accepted his apology, I halted his pathetic pleas for forgiveness, and I told him it was alright, to stop fretting.

Anyway.

I guess my ultimate point is this.

There is something that I know the old me would have done. The bad me. The hateful, mean me. And I couldn't do it.

So many times when confronted with a situation, I have thought to myself...

A) This thing is bad but it's the only thing I can do.
B) This thing is bad, and I know I should do the good thing, but I'll do the bad thing anyway.
C) I want do to the bad thing, but I know I should do the good thing, so I'll pretend to be good even though I really don't want to.

This occasion brought me face-to-face with a new course of action.

D) In the past I may have wanted to do the bad thing, but now I can't bear the thought of it, so I must, i WANT to do the good thing. It's the only thing.

Result:

I am "getting better, becoming human".

Becoming a decent human at least. There are plenty of humans out there who are juvenile and oblivious and all the more unhappy because of it.

And I guess I'm not unhappy.
Saying so is really a giant leap for me.

In other news, some friends and I were going to go see The Goonies at Market Square in Knoxville this evening, but it ended up storming like crazy, so I stayed in and did artwork.

Soo, that brings us to the Friday Night Art Roundup!

If I wasn't super lazy, I would make a cool graphic for that. Who knows, maybe I will later!
(ha yeah right)

Anyway, here's what we've got:


First was the top left, then the bottom left, then the top right, and finally the bottom right.

The bottom right is very different from the other three, obviously, though you can still see some light dripage in the middle.

Anyway, I am pleased with the one on the top right less than I am with the other three, but oh well.

I think the one on the bottom right is interesting because it's obviously very intricate and took me longer to complete than all the other three (plus cleanup & setup time) put together.
Anyway, what's interesting is that I didn't notice while I was painting it, but am noticing now, 4 feet away, the lines through the bumps on the "enclosures" around the shape. If you look where the encircling lines go down (especially around the middle part of the right side) you notice some non-lines are formed in the pattern just by the shape of the painted lines. It's hard to explain, and if you can't see it already, it's probably not worth it to you or me to continue explaining.

Anyway, it is interesting, was unexpected, and like I said, I didn't even see it until after I was finished.

Another "discovery" that I will try to put to more use at a later date.

Sigh.

Wish I could sleep. Apparently I don't have any desire to stop writing.

It's been a long day, filled with terrible dreams about monsters and conspiracy.

And then some painting and some music and I'm feeling better now. But not tired, not tired at all.

Oy.

Well, I guess that's it for now. I'm out. PEACE!

Labels: art, knoxville, life, mental illness, music, obsession, people, rambling, relationships, self-improvement

I'm not a big person for posting links, but right now I am just fascinated.

I mean there is so much art done with corpses these days that it's not really all that shocking anymore.

see: Ferrarri Forever - "Marco Evaristti is searching for a person on the verge of death, who wants to donate his body..." to be placed in an awesome Ferrari as 'art'!

It's funny, though, because I have always said that I would like to donate my body to art after I die. Art, then cannibalism, then science, in that order. But only art in a public sense - in a gallery at least for a while and if it does end up in someone's private collection, i would like there to be high resolution prints of it available online, no matter what.

At first my thought is "I'm not sure if I would want my name associated with it, though, what if it made me look bad?" Then I realize "Wait, I'd be dead, why would I care if I looked bad?" I don't know. I guess most bodies that are donated are donated anonymously.

Speaking of donating bodies... I was very shocked to hear about this almost 6 months after moving here. Just because I am weird and interested in this kind of thing but didn't know about it at all...

The original "Body Farm" (started by William Bass) is the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility located a few miles from downtown off of Alcoa Highway in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I drive Alcoa highway pretty much any time I go out. I know exactly where that is. Unfortunately, Google's satellite image isn't very revealing, but still, crazy, right?

View Larger Map

Anyway, I would love to go visit there but it's closed to the public. Maybe it's time to start studying anthropology?

I guess this is a photo of the body farm in winter, when you can at least kind of make out some of the structure of the place.

Also, here is a set of much closer-up photos, but all you can see is the fence.

Hmm, where was I?

Well, I was talking about dead bodies & art. Unfortunately I don't think many of the bodies at the "body farm" are taking part in any artwork of any kind.

So. Anyway, one thing I stumbled across (when reading about the Ferrari thing above) was Honoré Fragonard, who was an anatomist in the late 1700s. (See? I didn't even wikipedia link it, because the wikipedia article isn't actually very good)
I guess some of his écorchés or "flayed figures" (though I think the literal translation of écorché is "scorched" - ok, i looked it up and the answer is "skinned" but I can see how "scorched" is similar. A neat trick with French words is if they start with "é" that "é" can sometimes be changed for an "s" to create a cognate. "étudier" for example, is the verb for "to study", "épine" is the word for "needle" -like spine, get it?-, "école" means "school" ... so if you are ever confused in French and can't look it up, try that trick. It doesn't always yield the answer, but it does sometimes and it can help. Another useful trick is that the circumflex (^) often goes over a vowel where the S afterward has been removed. "pâtes" is "pasta", "hôpital" is "hospital", "île" is "isle", "fête" is "festival" etc.)

Ahem.

Anyway. It makes sense that the word for "skinned" would be similar to "scorched", I don't know though, I often try to make connections when there really are none.

What's cool about this Fragonard guy is his stuff really did leave the realm of educational or scientific and has crossed far over into art. Amazingly, the museum that has his stuff doesn't have very many good photos of it on their website, but I found a photographer's website which has some very nice photos.

Warning: You may find the image below offensive.


Click here to see the full series.

My favorite piece by far is "Man with a Mandible," which I will link to after the description.
Just because the description is so... I don't know, exciting.

This tall écorché was inspired by Samson knocking the Philistines down, using a donkey jaw. The work carries extreme violence : his arm brandishes the threatening mandible, his lips are tense, his look is deviated, his injected penis is obscenely taut. Fragonard went as far as twisting his ears and lips, and deep-setting his nose to give him an aggressive grin.

Click here to see "Man with a Mandible".

I guess it's just part of that whole incredulity I have with death, because these bodies are so ... energetic, it's just almost impossible to believe that there's no life within.

And to think about the guy that put that together, an anatomist being inspired by the bible, it's just awesome. And I don't mean awesome as in "bill-and-ted" awesome, but as in awe-inspiring. I don't know.
I just think of this guy and maybe the life he was living and how it came to be that he chose to do that pose. He had to put bodies together somehow and maybe he was complaining to his mom or something, "I just don't know how to pose them," and then she says "Well, why don't you look in the bible for inspiration?" And he did, it's perfect. Just perfect! This nerdy guy and his mom gives him the idea for it!
OK, well I don't know if that really happened, but this is the kind of thing my imagination takes and runs wild with.

Also, see the movie "Anatomy" with Franka Potente (trailer here). I am linking to the German trailer because the English language trailer sucks a lot. Walmart used to sell this movie for $5.50 and it's definitely one of their better deals. Most of the DVDs in those huge bins suck, but this one is great - however, I don't think they still sell it there, I think I bought it about 5 years ago. Anyway, it's all the "plastination" stuff where all the water is sucked out of the body and replaced with plastic so it doesn't decay... like that "Bodies" exhibit that everyone in the world has seen but me. And I lived in New York while it was there, what is wrong with me?

I guess it's in Atlanta until January, that would be a reason to go see it.

Hmm.

Anyway, I don't really have much to say right now. Just saw some stuff that I thought was interesting. Am moving soon, which is going to be exciting. I just can't wait to get out of Maryville. It's a cute town and all, but all I ever do is drive to and from Knoxville all the time. Oy.

So that's it for now.

See you all later.

Labels: art, bodies, corpses, death, knoxville