PROOF OF GOD! …and other tragedies.

I used color today. I’ve been working with a limited palette for years – often because I can only find one or two pencils and I can’t stand to waste paint. I think I might plan to add color, but the blanched character of a lot of my drawings appeals to me. I think sometimes that the world is visually over stimulating. My initial impulse is to focus on detail – not the inclusion of many small things in one big picture, but a study of one or two small things in one small picture. Maybe one day I’ll muster a landscape, a skyline, a cafe’ scene. Or not. If I were to do a cafe scene – the only living things at the cafe’ would be potted palms and cats. Have you noticed yet the certain felinic (new word = the quality of being feline) theme that creeps up.

I may be a cat lady. Then again I may simply be mildly misanthropic and cats make suitable default characters. Perhaps all the cats that I draw are actually people that I’m too nervous to draw for fear that they will all be too beautiful. And not beautiful in a humanity-captured way, either. Beautiful in a smooth and plastic, well-proportioned way. Ugly beautiful. Beauty with no truth. So, cats it is – at least for now. I guess cityscapes and humble humans are on my list of things to explore. But, to be honest – I don’t really want to. Artful liberation from the hard-fast and true cannot be gained if one’s art is focused on replicating our conscientious interaction with the world. Wait a second – how can I intimate that beauty is ugly if it lacks truth and then go on to suggest that in the pursuit of artful liberation we eschew the true. Well, it all depends on what you consider to be true. Common conception is that what is real and liminal is true. However, I feel that perhaps the sense of the world that we get when we skew the lens a little may be more true. By skewing the lens I mean looking too closely or crossing your eyes or remembering the strange dreams that surface at the moment of sleep. I guess that, really, both realms are true – but, different.