Lee's Artlog

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2005-  I became more callous during this year at some point.  I stopped saying “Why me?” and attempted to distance myself from my recent successful past.  Doing what I had done, being in the financial industry was great, but all in all, it was taxing and I had no time to sit on my laurels.  I had used my loss as a crutch, so that I had no reason to move on and let go of the memories.  I guess it was a passive aggressive grief in a sense.  School had taken a back seat to a disparaging job and this was the time to reorganize and prioritize myself first.

The Seated Man was a gestural drawing that my instuctor in Life Drawing told us to ‘flesh out’ after about 5 minutes. I spent about 30 minutes total on this piece and really tried to accentuate the stress that I felt that the model was or should feel on his body through the ebony pencil. There’s almost a jaundiced, pensive look to the model… The lines run down his face and the eyes stretched and stressed to a point you feel he’s giving up, waiting for a handout.

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2006- Financial troubles remained abound and it bothered me immensely. (Living from loan to loan while you go to school fulltime can be quite taxing and restricting to your lifestyle.) I was also dealt a blow when a relationship ended strangely and suddenly, (although fully expected,) and an instructor at college gave me an 89 in his art class. (I hadn’t received below an A in an art class in 15 years.) These factors combined to send me into a spiral of introverted frustration. I don’t like feeling attached to a cell phone, email, or blogs but this resentment intensified to a level where I completely avoided them for about 6 months in a form of self-imposed form of luddite-ism. Luckily during this time I completed some artwork both in class and also in my spare time to channel my despair elsewhere.

Frank Miller’s movie Sin City, is an audacious, artistic masterpiece if you can overlook the visceral violence of the film. Inspired by that and stuck in the mire that I was in, I created this self portrait of myself in Photoshop. I took a pre-existing photograph of myself, and then ran a variety of custom built filters over it. The rain was done by adding noise, adjusting the motion blur and duplicating layers. Desaturation and levels were applied liberally to get the black and white feel down. I was overall pleased with the way this piece turned out, as I created the custom filter and macro/action myself from scratch.

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2003- The Skull was rendered in charcoal and chalk in under 30 minutes while I was trapped in my apartment because of an ice storm. I was working with a studio piece, so technically this is a still life.

I felt a lot of pressure eventhough I was collecting unemployment. I really wanted to work and apply myself at doing anything to feel valuable to a company. Some days were very boring, while others were stress-filled with angst of the future. At some point though, I woke up, and I think I had a stroke because I just stopped worrying anymore. If I couldn’t do anything about it, and it was out of my control, I felt it was meant to be that way, so I just started trying to enjoy the ride. You lose perspective when your life is spiraling dizzily, but when you barf up life’s little minutes and revelations the merry-go-round usually stops for a few minutes to let you catch your breath.