Tuesday, September 29, 2015

1st entry for Sept. 20, 2015







On the Sunday I went over to the Jam Factory Collective's session. Lina was working as our model, and pianist Tom Richards provided musical accompaniment.
Lina's work was solid as usual. The music reminded me of Jason Kenemy's session (Sun, May 3,) with free ranging (and often fairly loud) piano improv. Richard's musicianship was impressive, but I found that he wouldn't seem to stay with any melodic direction or genre for more than about 40 seconds. It was like musical channel-hopping, morphing from boogie-woogie  to classical to jazz and more, with random bits of sampled sounds thrown in to the mix here and there.
It was a more engaging set than I would have chosen for drawing, and I found the breadth of styles and rhythms was making it hard to bring focus on doing some pure line drawings. The music kept inviting me along different paths then Lina's edges. I was also thinking "a little less forte and a little more piano would be better for me...," and was using some improvised earplugs to bring the volume down. A piano can throw a lot of sound into a mid-size room if it's getting banged on with gusto.
But this is my usual busy music whine. The top two studies here are 2-minute ones, and the next two are 3 minutes each, where I was wrestling with keeping my personal tempo, which was at odds to the music. The next two are 5-minute studies, where I gave up and started scrawling in time to what I was hearing, but in a less pen-destroying tantrum-y snit way than some other occasions.
After that I switched to a pencil gesture with ink lines on top. as that isn't jammed by the music, and that  was much more comfortable. it is a 10-minute study.
These are all Pitt pen on 18 x 24" sheets of Canson Recycled Sketch paper.
And for all that I like to point out the challenge some musics throw at me, I have a sense that the getting messy with marks is beneficial in the long run, even if I'm not enjoying it in the moment.

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