Still tangled

This is why I haven't been blogging lately...among other things:

Where is your light source?

I had the privilege of meeting the inspiring, insightful, "illuminating", and hilarious cartoonist Lynda Barry this week in a roundtable discussion at SAIC. I even mustered the courage to show her some of my own drawings from my very prolific period called: 1st through 3rd grade. She inspired me to go back to my own childhood drawings and remember what I was thinking then.

This pencil drawing is from the pad of paper that was always kept by the phone to take messages. I was 6 years old and my mom had the wisdom to hold onto it. I'm guessing I was thinking about the sewer system underneath the streets. I'm not sure if the lady's careful disposal of trash despite her unruly elbow was an early comment on environmental action. Lynda Barry did mention that I had a keen sense of light sources in my drawings. Sure enough, the drawing above includes the car's headlights in the background. Lynda included a light source above my name when she signed my copy of her book, One!Hundred!Demons!. She just plain rocks and has become my newest light source.

Exploiting the Nude Female

I'm going to exploit one of my thesis readings here- a reading chosen for an entirely different topic- to blog about something else. (Notice my complete disregard for proper citation here. Screw it.) But what I will tell you is that this is a picture of a life drawing class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905. A hundred years later, the nude female wouldn't be the model; she'd be the performance artist. Art school now and then. Wow.

You've come a long way, baby.