sketches

Hello blog.  I've actually had stuff to do since starting my Master of Education. Hoorah. Now inventing a classroom activity involving ASL... On another note, here are some recent-ish sketches by moi:

moonstory

Story and drawings by moi

marker drawing

a line drawing (by me) using this pic as reference

Turkish circle art

Eric Emin brought me back this concentric circle art from his trip to Turkey, from an artist drawing/selling on the street. It looks like it was done with different coloured pens. I don't know much about Turkish art, but maybe we can think of this as an update of more traditional Turkish designs.

I < 3 you, Photoshop

Comfort, by me

I've always wanted to be a Photoshop pro. Mike told me to colour in Photoshop using the Multiply function in layering, so I tried that with an old drawing. Then I played around with the selective colour. It brings me back to the good old days when I used to make 50 copies of the same photo, just slightly altered each time. ...And just by making it blue, we suddenly have Avatar fan art. Look, they're even glowing! I just need to add some plants and stuff.

no turning back

It's tempting to look back once you've reached your destination, but sometimes it doesn't matter - there's no turning back.

Follow the fishies

I think the girl at the bottom was supposed to be climbing up from a cliff into an ocean above but I just realized that I didn't actually draw that. Probably because it's an impossible perspective. Oh well, use your imagination.

fish tree

Drawing by me, words by Bryan

same old sadness

Drawing by me, words by Bryan

heart manipulation

I drew this to illustrate a to-be-published short story about a morgue worker who becomes enamoured with a dead girl. I felt his "love" was at least partly based on her incapacity for speech (as her lips were sewn up). Being dead, she couldn't have an inherent personality. This is different from his obnoxious wife. Personally, I prefer my love loud and alive, so it's a good thing I have Bryan. Speaking of which, here is Bryan's awesome manipulation.

Sealed by Hooray for the Future (print available)

the most profound...

Bryan thought it would be interesting to see someone else's artistic representation of his poetry. He gave me this quote illustrate:  "The most profound achievement of the twentieth century is that you can now live your entire life without ever touching another person." First I thought about a man alone in his apartment connected to the world only via technology. He's sitting on a couch looking at the viewer wide-eyed, hunched over with his hands together in his lap. But such an image would lack context, so I thought of millions of such people each in his or her own little box, like animals stacked in cages. One guy would drive the delivery truck around town, delivering the necessary tangibles to the people in their boxes.  

I thought about people on the subway hunching their shoulders inwards so as not to touch the people sitting next to them. I thought about a boy and girl passing each other on the street and their iPod wires happen to get tangled up; they're frustrated with the inconvenience of human connection. 

I thought about a series of computers connected by tangled wires, but touch is personal even when its virtual, and depersonalized through technology. So I drew the above sketch. It's not that people aren't connecting, it's that we allow something to mediate that connection. It's often technology that we come physically into contact with in order to connect with other people.

documenting 7 years of visual obsession

It's obvious that as a society we are trying to understand love, a phenomenon deemed central to the meaning of "human." Some people write novels about love; some philosophize about it; some study it scientifically. I do all of those things but primarily I collect, interpret, and create images. First I sought to represent the connectivity of minds through the intertwining, merging, or melding of bodies. Like this:

Entwined by Shy-Too-Shy

Just try to untangle them in your mind. There's power in the solidness of the formation they've created. The following was my FIRST attempt at such a representation:

By creating images, I wanted to create a kind of love. I wanted my love to be genderless and universal, but the darker figure turned out to be more feminine and the lighter figure masculine. I wanted my love to be equal. But with the two figures indistinguishable from one another, the image didn't look good; it looked confusing. I kept wanting to define each body separately (by shading one differently).

Love seemed doomed to be two separate people, rather than one joined entity. And the shading created an element of race that was entirely unintentional. This was my first sketch I considered successful, even though it didn't solve my artistic or philosophical problems.

I had an artistic epiphany when I realized that my lovers didn't have to be touching. They are two separate entities drawn together by something else.

I later satirized my own representation of love. I thought love might be a farce. What is this mysterious force that draws us together but the language (words or otherwise) that comes out of one person and consequently makes the other feel something.

 

As entirely separate entities with faulty mechanisms of communication, aren't we doomed to misunderstanding?

The Lovers by Rene Magritte, 1928

As beautiful and simple as real love might be, the complexities of interaction still make relationships difficult if not impossible to maintain. Without a proper use for love, why bother having it?

Complejidades by pijijes

Especially with the pain of separation that must ultimately occur.

Giving up on representing love for awhile, I tried drawing related human interactions. Desire for inclusion:

We cannot help the fact that we need each other to survive and even more, to propagate. We create social structures to bind us.

 

But in the end, we have to decide which hand we would most like to hold, and maybe it doesn't matter which one.

  

By David Shrigley  

Most of us, if we are human, come back to that basic human desire to love and be loved. We try and try.

And as with most human endeavors, perhaps occasionally we succeed. Happy Valentine's Day.

Fire on Toronto by Bryan Jay Ibeas

self

My friend Eric drew this picture of me from a self-portrait I took in 2007. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied. I look a little manly but with muscles like that, who cares? I could kick all their butts. Thanks, buddy.

processing the data

This picture is for my new friend Sam and all his robot talk.

a typical zine meeting

Good idea: 
Carrying your soju in a water bottle when you go to noraebang

Bad idea: 
Carrying your soju in a water bottle when you go to work

...

I was editor to a short-lived but controversial foreigners' publication. Meetings tended to end with conversations like these and me lovingly accompanying my drunken publisher to his taxi.

Cartoons of my life

In Korea, I started drawing myself as a character in cartoons of my life. I think of these as a more personal perspective on the PNU bar scene. I must have been hyper self aware, or social occurrences were more ridiculous there, or memorable things just happen in bars. Either way, these represent excerpts of conversations I actually had, most likely word for word. I drew these in Korea, except for the last two which I started in Korea and filled in in more detail today.  

This first picture is not exact from memory. It's a drawing of a guy I met at Tai Hyun's going away party at Moe's. We connected over our mutual disillusionment. I let him walk out without getting his number because I figured I'd find him on Facebook or that my friends would know of him. When I got home at 7am, I wrote down all the information I remembered about him but couldn't find him again. I deeply regretted it and thought of him often. Many months later, I saw him again at Moe's during a concert, but he was with a hot girl and didn't seem to notice I was there. I hadn't been thinking of him anymore but I wished he remembered me. Now I can't even remember his name.

 

I met a lot of people at bars. I would even see them again, but that didn't mean we were friends or that I knew their names. "Eric, eh? I had a boyfriend called Eric. You're much cuter though." I should just refrain from speaking while drunk.

Who sends a text message asking "What are you up to tomorrow?" and then doesn't reply to "I don't know yet"? I was furious.

This is me trying to make an intelligent statement while drunk at a Canada Day party. That's the famous Canadian, Collwyn entertaining us on guitar.

Alternately, this one could have read: "You're different from all these people, Emily. You're an intellectual." Me: "You're just saying that because I have glasses."