Countdown: 9 posts to go!
To celebrate continuing artistic life and the colour red, and
to thank you for helping me reach 100 comments as this blog comes to a close,
Win a sketchbook!
Comment between 17 September – 15 October 2010
Each time you comment, your name goes in the hat to win this beautiful Italian leather sketchbook.
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Found Drawing in an underpass - Brisbane
Close up
BRISBANE, Australia – 91/100
9 Ways to reinvigorate your art: Sunday Series to revisit some of art’s basic building blocks
- Line
- Form and structure
- Design
- Emphasis
- Gesture
- Augmentation
- Contrast
Obstacle – Between two worlds
Nothing like traveling to confront an artist with contrast. How about some of these ideas to spur your art to embrace the extremes, the opposites, the whole gorgeous range of possibility…
1. dawn and dusk
A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day’s unity. – Charles Ives
2. male and female
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning. – Maya Angelou
3. constrictive and expansive
The dance is a poem of which each movement is a world. – Mata Hari
4. familiar and strange
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. – C.S. Lewis
5. complex and simple
A grownup is a child with layers on. - Woody Harrelson
6. intimate and distant
In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time. – Leonardo da Vinci
7. single point of view and multiple perspectives
What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all. – Barbara Kingsolver
8. black & white and colour
A lot of times when we work overseas we tend to put the experience of someone who lives overseas, a Chinese person or a Korean person or a Bosnian person, within the prism of an American life. – John Pomfret
9. obstacle and solution
It seems to me if we help each other make our best creative work, there’s room for everybody, the art gets good, and maybe even both art and people have a snowball’s chance of being great. – Rebekah West
10. aversion and desire
Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more – more unseen forms become manifest to him. – Rumi
11. humility and arrogance
I’ve never felt any sense of competition with anybody, and we’re all friends; we’re all good friends. - Jim Henson
12. service and servitude
A face is too slight a foundation for happiness. - Mary Wortley
13. dignity and shame
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. – Howard Thurman
14. illuminated and hidden
By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive Truth. - Yukio Mishima
15. cradled and liberated
In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours. – Ayn Rand
Solution – Walk the range from one extreme to the other
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