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soulsoffairlight · 5 months ago

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Can you tell me a little bit about Radlynn in your AU? Like her backstory? I’m very curious(the statement about her not having a childhood makes me wonder: is she an experiment?)

I WAS PREPARED FOR THIS MOMENT.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE ASK YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH IT MEANS TO :D

In the name of not spoiling too much for the sake of planned projects, I won't give TOO much information. Just enough to answer your questions. :)

Short answer: Yes and no.

Long answer:

So, in a sense, very technically, she did have some sort of childhood. She was raised in the large Loulean city of Frigidare within my worldbuilding -- a large city known for its population of Tierkno (TYAIR - knah) of an unknown species, a shapeshifting creature in this world with a large diversity of species. However, very early on in her life was when she was unfortunate enough to be blinded - something that would affect her quality of life significantly … very unfortunately.

She would long for her ability to see every day -- she was very young and finding it difficult to adapt to her situation. Nobody would tell her what happened ... all she remembered was her brother pointing at something on the way to school on a dark winter morning. Then everything sort of went black on her ... permanently. Seemingly permanently.

She would need to be homeschooled, for losing sight so early in her life was something incredibly difficult to adapt to. And every moment of spare time Radlynn got she'd spent outside on the front porch, longing for the sight she once had... and desperately holding onto all the slowly fading memories of sight she still had. All she had memory of was her brother's face... and even that had become a mess of unintelligible geometric shapes in her head.

Meanwhile, Radley, the sole survivor of the mass freeze on the Avidran moon of Calyx sent by the a goddess named Oblivion to keep his aggressive family of Radishes known for the life of a god they had claimed at bay, was able to come to Avidra after finding one of Oblivion's dropped feathers, which had a hidden ability to open portals to both Avidra and its moons. He had found the other two sole survivors of freezes on the other two moons of Apica and Cocillion -- Sarge and Luau LePunch, respectively. They came up with a plan: they'd observe human and tierkno civillizations while wearing disguises that made them appear more human-like and find a way to scare them into submission and turn them against the gods.

They began to recreate the organized collaboration that their families would take on against the gods. Because Radley was so intelligent and had access to so much important information, the other two trusted him to be the one in charge... and he was very successful in doing so. He was able to find ways for them to steal important resources from the civilization and benefit their plan's progress as a whole. In doing so, they learned about the main ability of tierkno: shapeshifting. And that made them realize that if they could get some in their possession and train them... perhaps modify them, they would be extremely powerful.And so, they each researched extensively to make sure they had a clear understanding of how to care for tierkno and keep them happy. And they all agreed to choose a tierkno that was younger -- for they were easier to train from a young age. This phase of their plan would take a few years, but they were dedicated.

While Sarge and Luau were rather quick to find young tierkno to take under their wing (who had also been in tricky situations), Sarge Fan and LePete respectively, Radley wasn't afraid to take his time. He supposed that finding the optimal individual for their plans was more important than the time he spent doing so... and for a good few days, he had an eye on Radlynn ... who eventually ventured further from her porch and hung out near some crates Radley intended to take back to Calyx. She was clearly blind and seemingly lonely and depressed... something that, of course, was painful for him to see. But he had an idea... curing blindness was a simple breeze based on the resources available to him in the lab his family left behind on Calyx. He could simply help her get her sight back... and just like that, he'd have the trust of this intelligent girl who had already figured out navigating the world around her without sight.

He approached Radlynn, and he told her that if she could just sit and guard the crates for just a few more hours, he'd cure her blindness. The girl, whose life had seemingly crumbled apart since she went blind, took on the request without question. Soon, Radley took this young tierkno back to Calyx to give her what he promised... and to take her under his wing.

He cured her blindness using some methods he found in his family's resources, and she was crying tears of joy when she could see again. She became extremely loyal to him, and he felt some sort of connection to her... a familiar one. He treated her like a daughter of his own, and together, they agreed that her name would be Radlynn from then on.

The three raised and educated their adopted children with determination to give them the best they could while simultaneously continuing their business in Avidra and claiming territory-- adjusting the three to this kind of life. Sarge Fan learned to communicate and cooperate with Sarge’s army onions effectively, especially in his rottweiler form, which allowed for more efficiency in herding the little things. LePete gained a deep understanding of how to take advantage of both human/tierkno psychological and physiological weaknesses to become a fierce opponent in combat… sometimes without needing to lay a finger on anyone. However, he was already a natural fighter as a spectacled bear tierkno, so he was just as good at dealing physical damage.

And Radley had trained Radlynn in weapon combat… and she became so enthusiastic for it that she learned much of it – and an impressive amount more – on her own. She was a horrifying opponent when it came to fighting with a sickle. But one day, when Radlynn accidentally cut her arm on her sickle, leaving a deep gash without her noticing, Radley realized that there was a side effect to the curing-of-blindness method he didn't consider. Testing his theories, he took her in to stitch up the wounds without any form of numbing or something of the likes. While she was really scared about it, she... wasn't feeling any pain. This was pretty dangerous for her... but at the same time, it would make some ideas in the back of his head significantly easier. He figured that if he watched her very closely to make sure she didn't get hurt, he could keep her safe while still keeping that side effect.

From that point on, Radley began to take a fascination with her. It began with some smaller experiments to slowly funnel into the main one he had planned-- Radlynn was scared but not unwilling. It started with him applying small genetic samples of a certain Tierkno species he had managed to get his hands on, and she grew scenting glands on her neck and arms that she could use to recreate just about any scent-- a unique ability of this species that had piqued his interest. He was fascinated. He trained her to control it. And she, too, loved it.

When they began to train the three to start putting their new learned skills to use so they could commence with their plan, Radley was shocked by how quickly Radlynn was able to catch on. She discovered that she could feel pain if she wore a blindfold, and so she learned to pretty accurately fight without sight. She also learned to use her new scenting abilities to her advantage to distract people as she stole things or something of the likes, and she was extremely creative in completing tasks, something he was impressed by.

She pointed out that if they targeted the people who were dissatisfied with the government and tried to initiate them into their little group, they would be advantaged pretty well. And he was amazed by her reasoning.

As more targets were initiated on a seemingly life-or-death basis, they formed an entire mob of rebellious individuals who hated the government with a burning passion, and were destined to burn it to the ground. The people of the city were terrified of this mob -- to demonstrate their power, they would severely wound, if not kill, anyone who tried to cross paths or stop them. As they claimed more lives and even began to threaten government officials, even the government became scared of them, and many people started to believe that they had some control over it.

The gods were not pleased, and they knew they had to put a stop to this... somehow. Oblivion knew that if Radley, the mastermind behind this all, was to be gone, it would all fall apart. And so she commanded Poltergeist, a lower god who could easily interact with the world, to try and bring him to her. However, when he tried to grab him somewhere on Calyx, Radlynn ended up pushing him out of the way and being grabbed instead. Noticing she was being grabbed by the arm, she was quick to escape in a rather risky manner: she ripped off her blindfold and cut her own arm off with her sickle, freeing herself. Enraged, Radley ended up attacking him and managing to kill him... proving that he was just as dangerous to the gods as his family was.

Quick to do something about her missing arm, he performed another experiment on her. This next experiment was definitely more stressful for Radlynn--, but again, she was determined to push through for him. He replaced her now, missing left forearm with a bionic one - something else left behind by his family. It could easily be disguised as a real one and functioned just like one, even being able to experience touch, except it was bionic and had extremely sharp claws. Radlynn adapted quickly and was even able to teach herself some interesting strategies with it, something he was very impressed by. She enjoyed her new modifications... unlike the typical person would.

As much as she liked her modifications... that experience… it stuck with her. She couldn’t feel the pain, no… but she could definitely see what was happening, and it made her feel incredibly horrified. She would often find herself reliving the experience in her dreams, and every time, it just got worse and worse… but she tried to just ignore it: because she knew she was helping Madish, and she wanted to help him. He saved her.

Seeing how everything seemed to be going well, a few days later, he finally decided to perform the main experiment on her. When he applied his own DnA to give her a radish form, it worked... to extents beyond his intentions. The cambiregen (tierkno hormones giving them ability to shapeshift) had combined with this DnA aggressively, and he accidentally created a reckless, 10-foot-tall beast that tried to attack him. He was quick to corner her, but he still started to panic. But then he got an idea. He was able to gain control over the beast by tricking it into falling into obedience any time he said [her original name] to it. And it worked. He had turned a dangerous mistake around to his favor. He spent weeks training Radlynn and her new form, eventually being able to split into two: an 'antrhopomorphic' form more reminiscent of his own kind and then a 'feral' form closer to a werebeast, and everything was pointing in his favor.

The latter experiment traumatized her even more. She couldn’t see it that time, which only made it even more stressful for her… because she knew he was doing something to her cambiregen gland… and to her, that felt like something was being taken from her. And on top of that, she could tell he felt bad for it… and that look in his eye never left her. She had no idea what to do with herself. She was afraid of this new form she had. When she went into it, she couldn’t remember anything that she had done in it, and she knew that she could easily kill people in it. It felt like she was in the back seat of her own body sometimes.

But she was fine with it…

…for Radley.

If it hadn’t been for him, she’d probably have died somehow.

WHEW, THAT WAS A LOT.... But this is just the background context/base I plan to build a fic on... stay tuned guys. ;)

And also as a bonus treat, have the characters that inspired my representations of her and Radley:

Lynette Guycott from Scott Pilgrim (comics specifically)

C.A Rotwang and (Human) Maria from Metropolis (1927)

And the AU is named after and overall based on this song:

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lovelyasfcuk · 4 years ago

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Voyager

A Mandalorian Story | Din Djarin x F!Reader

V: Sacrifice

Summary: Din starts to unravel the mysterious shroud you’re hiding under and the legend of the Jedi. In the hope of finding a lead and repairing the Razor Crest for the journey, you make a difficult decision in any possible chance for success.

Word Count: 2,120

Warnings: Mentions of death. Internal struggle. Protective Din.

A/N: Starting to post longer chapters because there is...a lot.

The gentle hum of the atmosphere in the Crest crept into his consciousness, as he started regaining awareness of his extremities, slowly shifting his body about the small cot. He glanced at the monitor next to him, displaying various readings of within the ship. He sighed, realizing he had only slept for not more than four hours.

The truth was, he couldn’t remember the last time he fully rested; definitely not while the child had come into his life. It also didn’t help there was a stranger onboard. He listened harder, trying zero in on any foreign sound outside of his quarters, but the only sound that he found was the gentle coos of the foundling, deep in sleep.

The vastness of space was insurmountable. How could any thing exist at all? It had been so long since you had seen the stars so clear. You sat in the pilot seat, legs pulled up into your chest and arms wrapped around them, gazing at the delicate swirl of colors against the harsh black. You had heard the clanking of his boots long before he had quietly cleared his throat in an attempt to make his presence known.

“Couldn’t sleep?” You quietly asked.

“Had to make sure we were still on course.” He replied.

Realizing your potential faux pas, you dropped her feet to the ground and standing to leave the cockpit. Din watched you gather your cloak, pulling it up to your lips and clutching your text in hand.

“You said this might hold the next clue?” He asked pointedly.

You stilled at his question, watching him sit in the co-pilot’s chair. Slowly sitting back down yourself, you tried your best to read the air. “I believe so. I believe there is someone in Black Spire that may be able to help me with…”

Hesitating, you glanced up at Din, who made no effort to interrupt your thought.

“How do you know of the Jedi?” You asked him.

“One of my creed told me about them. Some kind of…sorcerers…who can move objects with their mind. Enemies to Mandalore.”

You chuckled quietly at his assessment and peered down at the text in your hand, gently swiping your thumb over its cover. “Long ago, the Jedi were peacekeepers in the galaxy, but they were deceived. Manipulated like puppets by the Republic. By the time it became clear, it was already too late. They had their faults, to be sure, but I believe they were just misunderstood by everyone on the outside.”

“You sound confident.”

You paused for only a moment, before opening the text to a page. Holding it up to Din, you pointed to the geometric drawing. “That…is the next clue – a Holocron. Said to hold vital information used by the Jedi. If I can find one, it may be able to tell us the location of any that remain. If any survived.”

“Survived?” Din gently prodded, his voice soft and thoughtful.

“Yes. They were all but executed and the few that remained abandoned their lives, going into hiding to protect themselves from the Empire. After that, it’s almost as if the utterance of the word “Jedi” put you in immediate danger. They became a legend. A myth.”

The air around you both seemed to grow heavy, as your voice became merely a whisper. You closed the text, laying it on your lap, becoming self conscious of the weight of the conversation.

You smiled bashfully and glanced up at Din. “…But you cannot kill the force. I believe your little one possesses the talents that would make a very strong Jedi. I have never seen anything like him.”

“Like you.” Din responded.

“No.” You chuckled, “No, I am of no importance.”

“You have the same power that he does. If the Jedi is where he belongs, then you must too. Is that why you have these texts?” Din asked, but received no answer. “Where is it that your people are from?”

“I hardly know anymore.” You responded, looking down at the text in her lap. “I am without a people”.

———

The Razor Crest touched down, landing within a dark hanger. The grinding groans of its mechanisms giving away the tell-tell signs of much needed repairs.

A young man approached the ship’s ramp, pulling his googles on his forehead and grease-stained gloves from his hands, watching as you made your way down alone. A smile broke across your face as you eagerly took his hand in yours.

“Just where have you been, cuyan?” He asks you, his wide smile matching yours.

“It’s been sometime, hasn’t it?”

“…and still getting into trouble, no less.” His smile leaving his face, as his focus was stolen by the beskar clad Mandalorian making his way down the ramp. His eyes met yours again, filled with questions.

“This is my friend Coltan. He’s the best mechanic I’ve ever come across, and he’s going to get the Razor Crest repaired so we can be off planet quickly.” You spoke to Din, but kept your eyes on Coltan’s, his own gaze still fixed on yours intently.

“The faster, the better. And discretion…” The modulated voice directed.

“Let me just grab everything I need. If you wouldn’t mind just walking me through the problems? I’ll meet you inside.” Coltan interrupted Din, quickly turning and jogging off to retrieve his tools.

You turned to the man at your side, stepping closer and lowering your voice, though the hanger was empty except for the humming of the buildings generators. “You can trust him. I’ve known him for many years and he’s never once let me down. In the meantime, I’ll head out and see what I can find.”

You looked down at the child in the knapsack slung around Din’s chest, finding him peeking out from behind Din’s arm. You reached down, rubbing the pad of your thumb against his cheek. “I will be back.” You promised, your eyes meeting the wide stare of the child and returning to Din’s visor.

“And if things go wrong?” He challenged.

“It won’t. There won’t be a Mandalorian with me to give me away.” You smiled. “And with Coltan working on the Crest, I’ll have to be quick.”

His helmet lingered in your direction after you spoke, left you wondering what expression shone through his eyes. He nodded once and made his way back into the Crest.

“What are you doing?” Coltan’s voice appeared from behind you, making you jump slightly while you watched Din disappear into the ship. You turned to him, meeting his inquisitive expression.

“I don’t know anymore.” You sighed.

“No. You don’t. Have you learned nothing? Do you know anything about him? Where he comes from? Who he belongs to? What if he is one of them?” Coltan lectured, his voice in hushed frustration.

“No, I don’t know any of it. But I do know is this - nothing will ever change unless someone takes a stand.”

“And you’re the one that’s going to change all of that?” He asked skeptically.

You paused, your gaze falling to the ground. “When will it ever be enough? I’m…so tired, Colt.”

He reached a finger under your chin, lifting your gaze. “But are you ready for what this might bring?”

His words stung and you winced as your mind conjured up every possibility laden in his meaning. Before you could dwell on any one possibility, you began to feel a light bloom in your chest, melting any frayed edges of your doubt.

“I believe he is different.” Confidence ringing in your tone. “I feel it.” You spoke quietly, bringing your hand to your chest, fingers splayed over your heart.

A slight smile played on Coltan’s lips, but failed to touch his eyes. He sighed and nodded, slinging a thick leather band of tools around his shoulder. You returned a single nod and patted his arm before heading out of the hanger into the dimming light of the afternoon.

———

The settlement was calm as the sun began to fall on the dark spires that pierced the orange and red sky, casting a fiery hue against the cylindrical structure in front of you. You took a deep breath and entered the doorway.

Dim lights filled the space below the vaulted ceiling. Various artifacts hanging from the long walls, filled every open space. Mounted heads of trophied kills, murky green water filled glass canisters of ancient creatures - the room was a menagerie of the disgraced and forgotten.

You looked around in awe, recognizing some and curiosity drawing with others. From behind the ornate metal counter within the room, an Ithorian appeared speaking his native tongue.

“I’m…sorry. I do not understand.” You smiled apologetically, approaching him.

The Ithorian continued to speak, deep gurgled sounds filling the room, and waving you closer to him. He waved his hand over the counter, encasing artifacts of higher value, and to the wall behind him. You reached into your knapsack, retrieved your text and laid it upon the counter.

“I’m looking for one of these.” You said, pointing to the holocron.

His eyes widened and blinked, as he made a deep grumbling sound from his chest. He disappeared behind the counter, gurgling and rustling items as we went. You reflexively looked over your shoulder but was immediately distracted when you heard the clank of an object set down in front of you. A holocron.

You reached out hesitantly, but was stopped by the Ithorian’s hand, his palm facing upwards. Reviewing your pockets in your mind, trying to conjure up any amount of credits to offer for the relic. Your face fell knowing there was no financial value to your name, until a thought flashed across your mind.

Taking a deep breath, you reached into your jacket and pulled out a delicate silver chain that hung against your chest. Slowly, you unclasped it from you neck.

You draped the chain around your fingers, holding it up for the Ithorian to survey - a long silver, diamond shaped pendant. Pointed at the top and bottom, its flat sides embraced a turquoise stone at its center.

It swayed heavily in the air between you. He squinted his eyes and, after a moment of consideration, nodded. You took the pendant in your hands and brushed your fingers against the stone.

You felt tears well in your eyes, quickly sniffing and straightening your shoulders, attempting composure. You brought the pendant to your lips, quickly kissing it and placed it in the the Ithorian’s palm.

———

“Everything should be running smoothly now. Quick fix.” Coltan called out, making his way off the loading ramp of the Crest, tools in hand. You had just returned to the hanger, meeting him at his work station.

“Too quick, I’d say.” You responded as lightly as you could.

“And that kid is…wait…how could you ever doubt me?” He feigned shock at your assessment, before turning to see your expression. He recognized it immediately. “What happened?”

You shook your head, your eyebrows furrowed in concentration and trying for the best smile you could. “Nothing. Just…focused.”

Coltan grunted in disapproval. “You may be able to lie to him, but you won’t ever be able to fool me.”

You smiled at your old friend but found no other words to offer in your defense.

“You were right, you know - he’s not like them. But that doesn’t mean…just…be careful, please?” He quietly pleaded.

“I will. I have to help him. That child…he’s too precious.”

“Yeah, there’s been a lot of talk about a bounty hunter in town, but I had no idea it was that one. You sure know how to avoid trouble.”

“I’m starting to think that maybe I’m just destined for it.” You chuckled darkly. “How could I ever repay you?”

A smug look flashed across his face, “Well, he already did. Truthfully, I’m just honored that I got to see you again.”

You held steady your trembling lip as your eyes glossed over with fresh tears, threatening to pool. You tightly wrapped your arms around him, hiding your face to quickly clear the emotion that dared to break your visage.

“If you ever need me, I’m never far away.” He said, holding you at arms length, his hand framing the side of your face.

You nodded, composed again.

“Be strong, ner kote.” He said softly, before taking your hand in his, bowing his head, and placing a kiss upon it.

.........

Taglist: @babybelou @pascalsky @ayamenimthiriel

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sasodei-is-real · 4 years ago

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Hiii! 💙I'm alive !!!(/*u*)/

Yes) I missed You very much *^*💖👾

And now I will quickly tell you what↖️ and how↘️ and what ⬆️plans. In general, yes.

As a content maker, I'm not really very good, because I don't keep up with anything😅

But I love you))💙

And miss you, so at least I will tell you what is planned and where I spent.

Well, everything is the same Classes at the university . I passed the humanitarian subjects! ) But then, of course, it came to drawing and painting. I'm a third year student. And now our main task is portraits The third course is perhaps the most difficult Difficult not because a lot of work But because this is a very important moment for understanding

First of all, understanding the meaning and feeling of the portrait

The complexity of the portrait is not really about the face. Just the opposite. The face in its structure is imprecise, which means it is easy to get. The point is how you look at your nature and the sitter

You need to balance on the brink when a portrait is an academic construction consisting of geometric shapes, and when a portrait is a person whom you pass through yourself

You try to catch the mood of the sitter, feel his character and let him create a character through yourself

And it's emotionally draining. Well, at least at first) But I compensate for this exhaustion with sasodei fanfics 😂😅. Recently I started to read a lot of fanfiction👀

Well, in short, I practiced a lot, I thought how I see and what I want

And as far as I understand, in principle I am already renting in this. It remains only to practice more))) Not well, of course, in terms of meaning, the artist always changes and moves I think; Well, I mean, that the start is founded. I at least understood how to move. how to rearrange my legs🙃

So, with the most important thing, the problem is solved

Now we have quarantined at the university for two weeks. After these two weeks we will have humanitarian exams🌚. Again🌚 Yay

Soo, I will prepare for an exam in art history and anatomy

On April 1, I am leaving for Russia again.But this time I won't be there long. I just need to go to Natarius and I will return on the first flight.

So here

Since I have already solved the main problem that took a lot of time (perception), it means that I will stay to create exams and I will have time👾

I really want to go to sasodei again

1. I miss you

2. I have so many plans for sasodei (my live🥺💛❤) and analyze in general

And I really want to discuss all this with you as soon as possible.👀🤎

So yeah))

About the analysis about the age difference. I'm still thinking it over. The fact is that, as I said, the topic is quite extensive. And it touches on many aspects of our life. And one of these aspects slowed me down. I'm talking about how strongly virtual norms can affect a person's understanding of what is the norm in real life. Well, at first the answer seemed simple to me, and then I thought. it's just a pretty serious topic, and I'll talk about it with you. And I always want to be as honest with you as possible, and will discuss this issue also honestly and openly. And for this I need to think seriously, and not write the first thing that comes to mind. Yes, I think this particular one will not be released as soon as I hoped. But I think it's worth it) The topic is always relevant and we will have something to discuss) Perhaps most of all I want to quickly write and publish this analysis so that I can read your opinion and discuss with you))) (/^*^)/💙

So here

In short, I breathe🌚

I am a little unhappy because of the constant pepenos of plans, I do not like it. But yes. You never know what might happen. But now my plans in my head go to April👀

I'm really ashamed that I didn't write😅

But in general, I really want to talk to you

But okay, soon)

Oh and by the way. I've been falling asleep all the time lately to one of the covers of Isabella's song from The Promised Neverland

Here : https://www.google.com/search?q=isabella%27s+lullaby+cover+by+aviance&client=ms-android-samsung-gj-rev1&sxsrf=ALeKk00IHFgVQwpa0j_blm9H936RXMclTg%3A1616450786110&ei=4hRZYLirBsXIaOjBqbAI&oq=isabella%27s+lullaby+cover+by+avi&gs_lcp=ChNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwEAEYATICCAAyAggAMgUIIRCgATIFCCEQoAEyBQghEKABMgUIIRCgATIFCCEQoAEyBAghEBU6BAgAEEc6BQgAEMsBOgQIABBDOgcIABCHAhAUOgQIABAKOgYIABAWEB5Q9AxYiCRgni5oAHABeACAAaUEiAGWIpIBCzAuMS40LjUuMi4xmAEAoAEByAEIwAEB&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp#

I want to share with you, I loved this one so much

Oh and a dose of sasodey of course(^*^)/

1artist - @Mello0519

2,3,5 - @fountain0109

4 - @_Collapse_19

All on twitter))

I would like to write so much more, but I have very little time. In general, we have night now) So good night⭐

🌻

Know that I love you💙💖

I hope you are healthy and safe🤲💗

Heck

I went to GIFs to send you a cute kitten, but I found THIS😅🤣

God I've never seen such an angry cat🤣😅

Aahhh it's time to sleep😅

Good night)💙🤲

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fascinatedhelix · 4 years ago

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More spoilery Pathless thoughts, notes, ideas, etc:

So, from the limited glimpses I’ve gotten of the Shark Temple monks, the hoods they wear don’t look like scarves like I initially thought when I saw them in Abzu. The texture and hard shapes give off the impression of something more along the lines of a gabled hood, reinforced with buckram or something similar to keep the geometric shapes.

Also, though I couldn’t get a super long look at the faces of their skeletons, they look... weird. The eye sockets are small and the rest of the face looks blank. Maybe the developers borrowed from the Diver’s model, or they’re wearing masks. Either way I’m not 100% convinced they’re normal humans. Jumping off that point, it does kind of weird me out that the ancestors from Abzu appear to be human, at least to some extent. It doesn’t quite make a ton of sense, given how the architecture in Abzu is rather amphibious (yes, there are stairs underwater that would imply they used to be above water, but also, the more “urban” areas (such as the area where you find the bird mural) seem built specifically for exploration above and below water, implying the inhabitants could travel both ways). Than again, magic is a thing in-universe, or at least a rather unusual form of it. Somehow the Godslayer managed to grow twice the height of a normal person and attained a tail and claws, so I don’t think its a stretch that a society might develop where the people figured out how to give themselves gills or something. Or they were never human in the first place and just lived alongside the Isle humans for a while before they were ousted.

It is very difficult getting good references for the characters from screenshots. Since I can’t play it myself, I have to rely on Youtube videos, and even those aren’t super reliable due to basically nobody taking the time to take a close look at the skeletons and stuff, and the constant movement making it difficult to get any clear shots. Even the OST videos, as recommended, aren’t very good because the concept art featured is all either scenery or the Hunter, so while I might have no problems with her, everything else is kinda bust. Godslayer in particular is a pain in the ass because he’s always shot with this low red lighting, to the point you can hardly make out the details of his arms outside of a few blurry shots.

It is implied that the Tall Ones took the physical bodies of animal-headed humanoids before the Godslayer killed them and corrupted their spirits, as evidenced by some stele text and the giant fucking skeletons that are revealed after one completes the different plateaus. I suppose the size of the skeletons would explain why they’re called the Tall Ones in the first place, though I can’t imagine being one of the Isle’s humans, living a normal life, finding out about all sorts of drama off at the monasteries, and then one day looking out my window and seeing a 100 foot tall streaker with a deer’s head carefully tiptoeing over pine trees. I say streaker because the giant skeletons sure as hell didn’t look clothed, and the statues of their humanoid forms imply a rather... limited wardrobe. But then again, if the statues were accurate, then the Eagle Mother and Nimue would have masculine bodies, which would be kind of weird, but they’re not human so I suppose one can excuse them not being super well versed in human sexual dimorphism.

Also, going by the singular lore video I can find on Youtube, I think the Pathfinder had already slipped into being a little crazy before he donned the Mask of Ancients, got his hands on the Sun Sword, and started demanding human sacrifices. Case in point, he had a bunch of his followers sacrifice their lives to set off the traps to get to the Mask instead of doing the rational person thing and just working on the puzzles. Their spirits even say as much. I don’t think he was put in prison for just voicing an opinion contrary to the popular doctrine of the time, I think he was already stirring up a violent cult following before that point; the prison break was just the earliest point in which people really started to notice him. Or at least, start dying.

I don’t think the time period between the fall of the Isle civilization and the Hunter’s arrival was much more than maybe a generation or two. For starters, the Hunter and the Godslayer speak the same language, and don’t seem to have any issues understanding each other despite presumably a long time for linguistic drift to set in. Additionally, the dead, while skeletal, seem to be in relatively good condition (with clothing intact, no less), and while the buildings and such are in ruins in many cases, they don’t look like they’ve been overtaken by the elements like one would expect from a centuries old ruin.

#the pathless #spoilers #abzu #giant squid games

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boreothegoldfinch · 3 years ago

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chapter 10 paragraph xvi

Gyuri left us out in the Sixties, not far at all from the Barbours’. “This is the place?” I said, shaking the rain off Hobie’s umbrella. We were out in front of one of the big limestone townhouses off Fifth—black iron doors, massive lion’s-head knockers. “Yes—it’s his father’s place—his other family are trying to get him out legally but good luck with that, hah.” We were buzzed in, took a cage elevator up to the second floor. I could smell incense, weed, spaghetti sauce cooking. A lanky blonde woman—shortcropped hair and a serene small-eyed face like a camel’s—opened the door. She was dressed like a sort of old-fashioned street urchin or newsboy: houndstooth trousers, ankle boots, dirty thermal shirt, suspenders. Perched on the tip of her nose were a pair of wire-rimmed Ben Franklin glasses. Without saying a word she opened the door to us and walked off, leaving us alone in a dim, grimy, ballroom-sized salon which was like a derelict version of some high-society set from a Fred Astaire movie: high ceilings; crumbling plaster; grand piano; darkened chandelier with half the crystals broken or gone; sweeping Hollywood staircase littered with cigarette butts. Sufi chants droned low in the background: Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Someone had drawn on the wall, in charcoal, a series of life-sized nudes ascending the stairs like frames in a film; and there was very little furniture apart from a ratty futon and some chairs and tables that looked scavenged from the street. Empty picture frames on the wall, a ram’s skull. On the television, an animated film flickered and sputtered with epileptic vim, windmilling geometrics intercut with letters and live-action racecar images. Apart from that, and the door where the blonde had disappeared, the only light came from a lamp which threw a sharp white circle on melted candles, computer cables, empty beer bottles and butane cans, oil pastels boxed and loose, many catalogues raisonnés, books in German and English including Nabokov’s Despair and Heidegger’s Being and Time with the cover torn off, sketch books, art books, ashtrays and burnt tinfoil, and a grubby-looking pillow where drowsed a gray tabby cat. Over the door, like a trophy from some Schwarzwald hunting lodge, a rack of antlers cast distorted shadows that spread and branched across the ceiling with a Nordic, wicked, fairy-tale feel. Conversation in the next room. The windows were shrouded with tacked-up bedsheets just thin enough to let in a diffuse violet glow from the street. As I looked around, forms emerged from the dark and transformed with a dream strangeness: for one thing, the makeshift room divider—consisting of a carpet sagging tenement-style from the ceiling on fishing line—was on closer look a tapestry and a good one too, eighteenth century or older, the near twin of an Amiens I’d seen at auction with an estimate of forty thousand pounds. And not all the frames on the wall were empty. Some had paintings in them, and one of them—even in the poor light—looked like a Corot.

I was just about to step over for a look when a man who could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty appeared in the door: worn-looking, rangy, with straight sandy hair combed back from his face, in black punk jeans out at the knee and a grungy British commando sweater with an ill-fitting suit jacket over it. “Hello,” he said to me, quiet British voice with a faint German bite, “you must be Potter,” and then, to Boris: “Glad you turned up. You two should stay and hang out. Candy and Niall are making dinner with Ulrika.” Movement behind the tapestry, at my feet, that made me step back quickly: swaddled shapes on the floor, sleeping bags, a homeless smell. “Thanks, we can’t stay,” said Boris, who had picked up the cat and was scratching it behind the ears. “Have some of that wine though, thanks.” Without a word Horst passed his own glass over to Boris and then called into the next room in German. To me, he said: “You’re a dealer, right?” In the glow of the television his pale pinned gull’s eye shone hard and unblinking. “Right,” I said uneasily; and then: “Uh, thanks.” Another woman—bobhaired and brunette, high black boots, skirt just short enough to show the black cat tattooed on one milky thigh—had appeared with a bottle and two glasses: one for Horst, one for me. “Danke darling,” said Horst. To Boris he said: “You gentlemen want to do up?” “Not right now,” said Boris, who had leaned forward to steal a kiss from the dark-haired woman as she was leaving. “Was wondering though. What do you hear from Sascha?” “Sascha—” Horst sank down on the futon and lit a cigarette. With his ripped jeans and combat boots he was like a scuffed-up version of some below-the-title Hollywood character actor from the 1940s, some minor mitteleuropäischer known for playing tragic violinists and weary, cultivated refugees. “Ireland is where it seems to lead. Good news if you ask me.” “That doesn’t sound right.” “Nor to me, but I’ve talked to people and so far it checks out.” He spoke with all a junkie’s arrhythmic quiet, off-beat, but without the slur. “So—soon we should know more, I hope.” “Friends of Niall’s?” “No. Niall says he never heard of them. But it’s a start.”

The wine was bad: supermarket Syrah. Because I did not want to be anywhere near the bodies on the floor I drifted over to inspect a group of artists’ casts on a beat-up table: a male torso; a draped Venus leaning against a rock; a sandaled foot. In the poor light they looked like the ordinary plaster casts for sale at Pearl Paint—studio pieces for students to sketch from—but when I drew my finger across the top of the foot I felt the suppleness of marble, silky and grainless. “Why would they go to Ireland with it?” Boris was saying restlessly. “What kind of collectors’ market? I thought everyone tries to get pieces out of there, not in.” “Yes, but Sascha thinks he used the picture to clear a debt.” “So the guy has ties there?” “Evidently.” “I find this difficult to believe.” “What, about the ties?” “No, about the debt. This guy—he looks like he was stealing hubcaps off the street six months ago. “ Horst shrugged, faintly: sleepy eyes, seamed forehead. “Who knows. Not sure that’s correct but certainly I’m not willing to trust to luck. Would I let my hand be cut off for it?” he said, lazily tapping an ash on the floor. “No.” Boris frowned into his wine glass. “He was amateur. Believe me. If you saw him yourself you would know.” “Yes but he likes to gamble, Sascha says.” “You don’t think Sascha maybe knows more?” “I think not.” There was a remoteness in his manner, as if he was talking half to himself. “ ‘Wait and see.’ This is what I hear. An unsatisfactory answer. Stinking from the top if you ask me. But as I say, we are not to the bottom of this yet.” “And when does Sascha get back to the city?” The half-light in the room sent me straight back to childhood, Vegas, like the obscure mood of a dream lingering after sleep: haze of cigarette smoke, dirty clothes on the floor, Boris’s face white then blue in the flicker of the screen. “Next week. I’ll give you a ring. You can talk to him yourself then.” “Yes. But I think we should talk to him together.” “Yes. I think so too. We’ll both be smarter, in future… this need not have happened… but in any case,” said Horst, who was scratching his neck slowly, absent-mindedly, “you understand I’m wary of pushing him too hard.” “That is very convenient for Sascha.” “You have suspicions. Tell me.” “I think—” Boris cut his eyes at the doorway. “Yes?” “I think—” Boris lowered his voice—“you are being too easy on him. Yes yes—” putting up his hands—“I know. But—all very convenient for his guy to vanish, not a clue, he knows nothing!” “Well, maybe,” Horst said. He seemed disconnected and partly elsewhere, like an adult in the room with small children. “This is pressing on me—on all of us. I want to get to the bottom of this as much as you. Though for all we know his guy was a cop.” “No,” said Boris resolutely. “He was not. He was not. I know it.” “Well—to be quite frank with you, I do not think so either, there is more to this than we yet know. Still, I’m hopeful.” He’d taken a wooden box from the drafting table and was poking around in it. “Sure you gentlemen wouldn’t like to get into a little something?” I looked away. I would have liked nothing better. I would also have liked to see the Corot except I didn’t want to walk around the bodies on the floor to do it. Across the room, I’d noticed several other paintings propped on the wainscoting: a still life, a couple of small landscapes. “Go look, if you want.” It was Horst. “The Lépine is fake. But the Claesz and the Berchem are for sale if you’re interested.” Boris laughed and reached for one of Horst’s cigarettes. “He’s not in the market.” “No?” said Horst genially. “I can give him a good price on the pair. The seller needs to get rid of them.”

I stepped in to look: still life, candle and half-empty wineglass. “Claesz-Heda?” “No—Pieter. Although—” Horst put the box aside, then stood beside me and lifted the desk lamp on the cord, washing both paintings in a harsh, formal glare—“this bit—” traced mid-air with the curve of a finger—“the reflection of the flame here? and the edge of the table, the drapery? Could almost be Heda on a bad day.” “Beautiful piece.” “Yes. Beautiful of its type.” Up close he smelled unwashed and raunchy, with a strong, dusty import-shop odor like the inside of a Chinese box. “A bit prosaic to the modern taste. The classicizing manner. Much too staged. Still, the Berchem is very good.” “Lot of fake Berchems out there,” I said neutrally. “Yes—” the light from the upheld lamp on the landscape painting was bluish, eerie—“but this is lovely… Italy, 1655‥… the ochres beautiful, no? The Claesz not so good I think, very early, though the provenance is impeccable on both. Would be nice to keep them together… they have never been apart, these two. Father and son. Came down together in an old Dutch family, ended up in Austria after the war. Pieter Claesz…” Horst held the light higher. “Claesz was so uneven, honestly. Wonderful technique, wonderful surface, but something a bit off with this one, don’t you agree? The composition doesn’t hold together. Incoherent somehow. Also—” indicating with the flat of his thumb the too-bright shine coming off the canvas: overly varnished. “I agree. And here—” tracing midair the ugly arc where an over-eager cleaning had scrubbed the paint down to the scumbling. “Yes.” His answering look was amiable and drowsy. “Quite correct. Acetone. Whoever did that should be shot. And yet a mid-level painting like this, in poor condition—even an anonymous work—is worth more than a masterpiece, that’s the irony of it, worth more to me, anyway. Landscapes particularly. Very very easy to sell. Not too much attention from the authorities… difficult to recognize from a description… and still worth maybe a couple hundred thousand. Now, the Fabritius—” long, relaxed pause—“a different calibre altogether. The most remarkable work that’s ever passed through my hands, and I can say that without question.” “Yes, and that is why we would like so much to get it back,” grumbled Boris from the shadows. “Completely extraordinary,” continued Horst serenely. “A still life like this one—” he indicated the Claesz, with a slow wave (black-rimmed fingernails, scarred venous network on the back of his hand)—“well, so insistently a trompe l’oeil. Great technical skill, but overly refined. Obsessive exactitude. There’s a deathlike quality. A very good reason they are called natures mortes, yes? But the Fabritius…”—loose-kneed back-step—“I know the theory of The Goldfinch, I’m well familiar with it, people call it trompe l’oeil and indeed it can strike the eye that way from afar. But I don’t care what the art historians say. True: there are passages worked like a trompe l’oeil… the wall and the perch, gleam of light on brass, and then… the feathered breast, most creaturely. Fluff and down. Soft, soft. Claesz would carry that finish and exactitude down to the death—a painter like van Hoogstraten would carry it even farther, to the last nail of the coffin. But Fabritius… he’s making a pun on the genre… a masterly riposte to the whole idea of trompe l’oeil… because in other passages of the work—the head? the wing?—not creaturely or literal in the slightest, he takes the image apart very deliberately to show us how he painted it. Daubs and patches, very shaped and hand-worked, the neckline especially, a solid piece of paint, very abstract. Which is what makes him a genius less of his time than our own. There’s a doubleness. You see the mark, you see the paint for the paint, and also the living bird.”

“Yes, well,” growled Boris, in the dark beyond the spotlight, snapping his cigarette lighter shut, “if no paint, would be nothing to see.” “Precisely.” Horst turned, his face cut by shadow. “It’s a joke, the Fabritius. It has a joke at its heart. And that’s what all the very greatest masters do. Rembrandt. Velázquez. Late Titian. They make jokes. They amuse themselves. They build up the illusion, the trick—but, step closer? it falls apart into brushstrokes. Abstract, unearthly. A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing. I should say that that one tiny painting puts Fabritius in the rank of the greatest painters who ever lived. And with The Goldfinch? He performs his miracle in such a bijou space. Although I admit, I was surprised—” turning to look at me—“when I held it in my hands the first time? The weight of it?” “Yes—” I couldn’t help feeling gratified, obscurely, that he’d noted this detail, oddly important to me, with its own network of childhood dreams and associations, an emotional chord—“the board is thicker than you’d think. There’s a heft to it.” “Heft. Quite. The very word. And the background—much less yellow than when I saw it as a boy. The painting underwent a cleaning—early nineties I believe. Post-conservation, there’s more light.” “Hard to say. I’ve got nothing to compare it to.” “Well,” said Horst. The smoke from Boris’s cigarette, threading in from the dark where he sat, gave the floodlit circle where we stood the midnight feel of a cabaret stage. “I may be wrong. I was a boy of twelve or so when I saw it for the first time.” “Yes, I was about that age when I first saw it too.” “Well,” said Horst, with resignation, scratching an eyebrow—dime-sized bruises on the backs of his hands—“that was the only time my father ever took me with him on a business trip, that time at The Hague. Ice cold boardrooms. Not a leaf stirring. On our afternoon I wanted to go to Drievliet, the fun park, but he took me to the Mauritshuis instead. And—great museum, many great paintings, but the only painting I remember seeing is your finch. A painting that appeals to a child, yes? Der Distelfink. That is how I knew it first, by its German name.”

“Yah, yah, yah,” said Boris from the darkness, in a bored voice. “This is like the education channel on the television.” “Do you deal any modern art at all?” I said, in the silence that followed. “Well—” Horst fixed me with his drained, wintry eye; deal wasn’t quite the correct verb, he seemed amused at my choice of words—“sometimes. Had a Kurt Schwitters not long ago—Stanton Macdonald-Wright—do you know him? Lovely painter. It depends a lot what comes my way. Quite honestly— do you ever deal in paintings at all?” “Very seldom. The art dealers get there before I do.” “That is unfortunate. Portable is what matters in my business. There are a lot of mid-level pieces I could sell on the clean if I had paper that looked good.” Spit of garlic; pans clashing in the kitchen; faint Moroccan-souk drift of urine and incense. On and on flatlining, the Sufi drone, wafting and spiraling around us in the dark, ceaseless chants to the Divine. “Or this Lépine. Quite a good forgery. There’s this fellow—Canadian, quite amusing, you’d like him—does them to order. Pollocks, Modiglianis— happy to introduce you, if you’d like. Not much money in them for me, although there’s a fortune to be made if one of them turned up in just the right estate.” Then, smoothly, in the silence that followed: “Of older works I see a lot of Italian, but my preferences—they incline to the North as you can see. Now—this Berchem is a very fine example for what it is but of course these Italianate landscapes with the broken columns and the simple milkmaids don’t so much suit the modern taste, do they? I much prefer the van Goyen there. Sadly not for sale.” “Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot.” “From here, yes, you might.” He was pleased at the comparison. “Very similar painters—Vincent himself remarked it—you know that letter? ‘The Corot of the Dutch’? Same tenderness of mist, that openness in fog, do you know what I mean?” “Where—” I’d been about to ask the typical dealer’s question, where did you get it, before catching myself. “Marvelous painter. Very prolific. And this is a particularly beautiful example,” he said, with all a collector’s pride. “Many amusing details up close—tiny hunter, barking dog. Also—quite typical—signed on the stern of the boat. Quite charming. If you don’t mind—” indicating, with a nod, the bodies behind the tapestry. “Go over. You won’t disturb them.” “No, but—” “No—” holding up a hand—“I understand perfectly. Shall I bring it to you?” “Yes, I’d love to see it.”

“I must say, I’ve grown so fond of it, I’ll hate to see it go. He dealt paintings himself, van Goyen. A lot of the Dutch masters did. Jan Steen. Vermeer. Rembrandt. But Jan van Goyen—” he smiled—“was like our friend Boris here. A hand in everything. Paintings, real estate, tulip futures.” Boris, in the dark, made a disgruntled noise at this and seemed about to say something when all of a sudden a scrawny wild-haired boy of maybe twenty-two, with an old fashioned mercury thermometer sticking out of his mouth, came lurching out of the kitchen, shielding his eyes with his hand against the upheld lamp. He was wearing a weird, womanish, chunky knit cardigan that came almost to his knees like a bathrobe; he looked ill and disoriented, his sleeve was up, he was rubbing the inside of his forearm with two fingers and then the next thing I knew his knees went sideways and he’d hit the floor, the thermometer skittering out with a glassy noise on the parquet, unbroken. “What…?” said Boris, stabbing out his cigarette, standing up, the cat darting from his lap into the shadows. Horst—frowning—set the lamp on the floor, light swinging crazily on walls and ceiling. “Ach,” he said fretfully, brushing the hair from his eyes, dropping to his knees to look the young man over. “Get back,” he said in an annoyed voice to the women who had appeared in the door, along with a cold, dark-haired, attentive-looking bruiser and a couple of glassy prep-school boys, no more than sixteen—and then, when they all still stood staring—flicked out a hand. “In the kitchen with you! Ulrika,” he said to the blonde, “halt sie zurück.” The tapestry was stirring; behind it, blanket-wrapped huddles, sleepy voices: eh? was ist los? “Ruhe, schlaft weiter,” called the blonde, before turning to Horst and beginning to speak urgently in rapid-fire German. Yawns; groans; farther back, a bundle sitting up, groggy American whine: “Huh? Klaus? What’d she say?” “Shut up baby and go back schlafen.” Boris had picked up his coat and was shouldering it on. “Potter,” he said and then again, when I did not answer, staring horrified at the floor, where the boy was breathing in gurgles: “Potter.” Catching my arm. “Come on, let’s go.” “Yes, sorry. We’ll have to talk later. Schiesse,” said Horst regretfully, shaking the boy’s limp shoulder, with the tone of a parent making a not-particularly-convincing show of scolding a child. “Dummer Wichser! Dummkopf! How much did he take, Niall?” he said to the bruiser who had reappeared in the door and was looking on with a critical eye. “Fuck if I know,” said the Irishman, with an ominous sideways pop of his head. “Come on, Potter,” said Boris, catching my arm. Horst had his ear to the boy’s chest and the blonde, who had returned, had dropped to her knees beside him and was checking his airway.

As they consulted urgently in German, more noise and movement behind the Amiens, which billowed out suddenly: faded blossoms, a fête champêtre, prodigal nymphs disporting themselves amidst fountain and vine. I was staring at a satyr peeping at them slyly from behind a tree when, unexpectedly —something against my leg—I started back violently as a hand swiped from underneath and clutched my trouser cuff. From the floor, one of the dirty bundles—swollen red face just visible from under the tapestry—inquired of me in a sleepy gallant voice: “He’s a margrave, my dear, did you know that?” I pulled my trouser leg free and stepped back. The boy on the floor was rolling his head a bit and making sounds like he was drowning. “Potter.” Boris had gathered up my coat and was practically stuffing it in my face. “Come on! Let’s go! Ciao,” he called into the kitchen with a lift of his chin (pretty dark head appearing in the doorway, a fluttering hand: bye, Boris! Bye!) as he pushed me ahead of him and ducked behind me out the door. “Ciao, Horst!” he said, making a call me later gesture, hand to ear. “Tschau Boris! Sorry about this! We’ll talk soon! Up,” said Horst, as the Irishman came up and grabbed the boy’s other arm from underneath; together they hoisted him up, feet limp and toes dragging and—amidst hurried activity in the doorway, the two young teenagers scrambling back in alarm—hauled him into the lighted doorway of the next room, where Boris’s brunette was drawing up a syringe of something from a tiny glass bottle.

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deathsmallcaps · 4 years ago

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July’s Story

My fifteenth Win A Commission contest is Crystal the Wise! If you would like to see my version, and see all my drawings together, please

There once was a gentleman who had quite a daughter. Whatever her teachers gave her to learn, she gobbled up. Foreign languages, geography, so—all were unspeakably easy for her. And mathematics! She could add up columns of figures far better than her father’s accountants could. Before long, she could have taken their place.

When Crystal (for so she was called) grew a bit older, the neighboring children came over to ask her to explain the problems their tutors had set. Soon everyone came to learn from her. In time, word of this reached the king. He wrote to the young woman, saying, “My son is nearly grown, but my daughter has trouble with her lessons, and needs a teacher who could make her understand. Will you come and stay with us for a few months?”

Crystal was delighted to do so. When she arrived at the palace, the king, queen, and princess greeted her warmly. The prince, however, sulked like a little child. He had offered to tutor the princess himself, but the king had said, “You’re too impatient. I have found someone else who can do a better job than you can.”

Over the next few weeks, the prince sat in the back of the classroom and contradicted Crystal whenever she spoke. His interruptions grew more and more frequent. Still, Crystal continued to teach, because she liked the little princess and wanted her to do well. Tired of being ignored, the prince stood up one day and said, “This isn’t how I learned it. Everything you’re teaching my sister is wrong.” Crystal walked right up and slapped him! After that, the prince kept away from her lessons.

When the time came for Crystal to leave, the prince went to his parents.

“I’m grateful for all Crystal taught me, and after all, she’s the cleverest woman in the kingdom. May I have your permission to marry her?” The king and queen eagerly agreed, and Crystal also accepted, figuring it was a good marriage. She hadn’t realized she was worth more.

After the wedding, the prince took his bride to a secluded cottage deep in the forest. As she was changing into her nightclothes, he came in and said, “Well, Crystal, are you ready to apologize for slapping me?”

“Apologize? I was right to slap you! And I’ll do it again if you keep on about it.” Crystal didn’t enjoy violence but knew when to defend herself.

“Is that so?” the prince snarled. He and a couple servants dragged her down to the cellar, where he thrust her through a trapdoor, into a little cell under the floorboards. There was a bed and a table and almost nothing else. In the morning, he asked her if she’d changed her mind, but she said no. Every day he came down and demanded she repent. Every day she refused, despite knowing her chances of survival were diminishing rapidly in such a dangerous situation. She had tried to run away when he first grabbed her, but even her considerable talents were no match against ten armed men.

Crystal grew weary of her imprisonment, but there was no way she would apologize. One day, she noticed a corner of her cell was blowing air, due to a spider’s web flying into her face. She blessed the spider for alerting her, tand investigated the hole. There, she discovered a rushing underground stream. She dug a hole big enough to squeeze through, and managed to swim all the way to her father’s house.

Her father was appalled to find out how she’d been treated. “I’ll see the king immediately.”

“Oh, no, don’t,” Crystal said. “Just dig a tunnel into my cell and bring me some decent food, and of course, my books. The prince only lowers bread and water.” And Crystal swam back to her cell with the prince none the wiser.

At last, he grew tired of her refusals and called down, “I’m going to Paris to enjoy myself. I’ll have a servant feed you while I’m having fun.”

“Go ahead,�� she called back cheerfully.

As soon as the prince had left, Crystal bribed the servant to stop lowering bread and water, telling him to lie to the prince should he come back. She ran to her father and, with plenty of money from him, hurried to Paris, formulating a brilliant plan to ruin him forever with her father. There she disguised herself as a girl named ‘Marie’ and bought a house next to her husband’s.

She then forged a letter to the prince’s parents, explaining that ’Crystal’ had died en route to Paris, and that he was going to mourn for a while. Somewhere in the back of her head, she knew this was a dangerous course of action, and very unhealthy emotionally. But she was SO angry.

Then, each day, she drove out in her carriage behind four white horses. Her gown was thick with embroidery, and her fan was trimmed with delicate lace, and she adopted a beautiful Parisian accent. When the prince saw her, he was dazzled by her beauty, though he didn’t recognize her in Parisian fashions. He began courting her, and wedded ‘Marie’ inside a month, never mentioning, of course, that he had another wife back home. Nor did he notice her glittering intellect, and thought her a dumb but lovely creature. Nine months later, she gave birth to twins, a girl and a boy. Since Crystal had learned a bit, she made the prince sign a contract, vowing the children would be his heirs. He signed it, thinking it would be invalid, for she had drawn it up herself and he thought her stupid. He was mistaken.

Three years passed. Then the prince told her he had been summoned home, but didn’t tell her it was for a new marriage. He didn’t know that this third bride had been set up by Crystal’s father. Feeling bored with his (supposedly) new and beautiful wife, he agreed to return home and decided to leave Crystal and his children behind.

Returning home, the prince hurried to the cottage but discovered the cell empty. The servant told him Crystal had died of loneliness, so the prince thought he was in the clear.

His family got him all set up for the wedding, disallowing him to meet his match, claiming superstition. When the day finally came, he said the vows, and everyone cheered. He raised her veil, and saw Crystal grinning triumphantly back at him. His children toddled out from the audience, and he knew he was in trouble.

Stunned to see his triply-wed wife, the prince knelt down before the court and begged her forgiveness. But it turned out, she didn’t have to forgive him.

Her father produced the contract proclaiming the children as the prince’s heirs and a written account of what had passed by Crystal verified by many sources, including the servant who was supposed to feed her. Disgusted by their son, the King and Queen banished him and stripped him of his personal land, money and title, immediately giving them to Crystal. She and her family promptly lived happily ever after.

My Notes

Now, you may not have noticed, but this story? Extremely messed up. I mean, this woman is degraded and goes on the biggest revenge plot I’ve ever seen a female character do in a fairy tale. She even has revenge babies! They are going to have a pretty messed up childhood.

Why did I choose Crystal the Wise? Well, for three reasons.

One, I heard it on, you guessed it, the Myths and Legends podcast. I really liked his rendition, but I did NOT want to type the whole thing out (I did that with a different story of his that I’m going to give to a different little cousin). I found this version online. And this all happens in the story! Crystal is just that machiavellian, and I applaud her! I kind of wish she didn’t feel like she had to continue having relations with her abuser, or to change herself so completely, but she really hit him with the ol’ one-two, and I like it when people can dole out justice like that. Hopefully she had someone to talk to afterwards? Also its pretty problematic the King and Queen did not realize how much of a little creep they raised to be their heir.

Two, I realized I hadn’t done a story from South America yet! I realize its definitely a more modern story, with less ties to the Native people of Chile (btw the royal family of Chile isn’t a real thing), but I really liked it.

Three, I was looking up the Aymara people of Chile for unrelated reasons when I realized I would love to draw the women! I don’t know what the textile industry over there is like, but it must be pretty entrenched in the culture, because they have so many pretty patterns and colors in their everyday wear! Combined with the bowler hats (legend has it that a shipment of bowler hats made it to Chile just when they went out of style, so the haberdashers marketed them to women!) with all the lovely flowers added on, I was excited! So I wanted to draw an Aymara girl.

Now that I’ve explained that, I’d like to explain my drawings. They weren’t as full of background as some of my other drawings, but trust me, I put a lot of effort into them! I had a kabillion reference pictures.

The title is not based off of any movie logo I’ve seen, for once. Rather, it is based a bit off of the ACDC logo. I was working one day, when someone with that logo on his shirt came up to the register. I was inspired! So I quickly sketched out a sort of geometric, sort of lightning-bolt-esque title in between customers. And I liked it!

The second picture, the slap, was a difficult one for me. It combined an unusual perspective, unusual clothing, and unusual face shapes for me. As you’ve seen with my art, and maybe with your own art, it is often very easy to have a character face you and not interact with another object or person, You can’t really have that happen with a slap.

This story is supposed to be set in the early 1700s, when Paris was very in vogue. But as I really wanted to draw a modern Aymara woman, I did play little fast and loose with the fashion. There isn’t too many reference pictures for old Chilean fashion. I had to reach a little. Which led me to using a more European style of dress for the Prince. And this is the only time you get to see *Crystal dress in a way that is normal and comfortable to her. This is an important ‘theme’ of the story - sorry to go all English class on you!

*Just remembered that Crystal is not a very Spanish-sounding name. I’ve never found the story outside, even when I try to look it up in Spanish, so some part of me is worried that someone made it up and pretended it was Chilean. Please let me know if you find anything.

Their faces are different than what I’ve drawn before. As you can see on the prince’s face, he has serious acne. I’m not trying to demonize acne, but I decided that he’s one of those boys who hates getting clean and despite literally everyone telling him so, will not stop touching his face and causing acne. I went through a stubborn phase like that. But I also wanted to show how young and already so privileged the guy is. I really wanted to make him annoying. Crystal also has a bit of acne, to show her youth, but what really makes her face different than my usual fare is the fact she has a mole, never gets to smile of joy in my illustrations, and she is plump. I have a tendency to draw skinny characters I’m trying to get rid of as an artist - I want to be able to draw everyone, anyone. And i think she turned out quite pretty!

Third picture, the cave, was again sort of a challenge. I wasn’t sure at the beginning how to place Crystal so you could sort of see the hole that leads into her room, while also showing her climbing down and the underground waterways she is going to enter. And as you’ve might’ve seen before, when I draw caves and rocks, all I think of is really ‘geometry’ but in the way the guy in this meme thinks of aliens (look up history channel aliens if you don’t know).

But I guess I did it? As for Crystal, you can tell she’s uncomfortable, she’s skinnier in an unhealthy way and colder than before, her hair isn’t in the customary braids but in a crappy bun to keep it off her face, and her dress is in tatters. Not a happy camper, and understandably so.

Last picture, Crystal’s wedding dress, was sort of hard in a different way, again! I decided early on I wanted to base her dress off of Elizabeth’s wedding dress from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. But I had to draw that while Crystal was holding her two kids on her hips, and smirking. I think I managed it, though. I think it’s interesting to note that the look epitomizes the kind of person she had to emulate while tricking the prince; a meek, european-mimicking little wifey. Totally different than the person she really is, the person she is illustrated to be in the first picture.

Anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed that! Another problematic story will be the one for next month! Thanks for reading!

@boopboopboopbadoop

#crystal the wise #wac #win a commission #marital abuse tw #commissions open #piff-paff #piff-paff: or the art of government #smack-bam #smack-bam or the art of governing men #Smack-Bam or The Art of Governing Men: Political Fairy Tales of Édouard Laboulaye #Smack-Bam or The Art of Governing Men: Political Fairy Tales of Édouard Laboulaye (Oddly Modern Fairy Tales)

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ckret2 · 5 years ago

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What’s your personality headcanon for rodan?

I’ve had this in my inbox like a week because I wanted to wait until my TF big bang rough draft was done to write this, and then i spent several days recovering from the rough draft lmfao. OKAY SO

The tl;dr is “Rodan assumes everything is normal, no matter how weird it is, and that basically informs his entire worldview. Also he wants to be everyone’s friend and fight them at all times.”

First let’s talk about instincts. Because Rodan’s species plops their eggs in volcanoes and flies off, there’s basically nothing in the way of parenting. If an adult Rodan sees a baby Rodan flopping around its volcano like a fool, it might swoop down to check on the kid and show it how to do something it’s struggling with—like, if an adult human saw a five-year-old trying to get on the subway, thought this was a perfectly normal thing for a small child to do, checked to make sure they knew which line they were taking and where their stop was, showed them how to use their card to get through the turnstile, and sent them on their way. Because Rodan eggs take so long to incubate and don’t depend on a parent sitting on the nest to do so, a hatchling might pop out long after its parents are dead, or even—as in this Rodan’s case—when no other members of its species are alive at all.

So because of that, and the way evolution ran to compensate for the fact that these hatchlings might be getting zero adult education, Rodan runs on intuition, moreso than titans who raise their kids. He was born knowing how to fly, hunt, fight, defend his nest, patrol his territory, find and judge potential mates, establish more nests. He was born recognizing many titan species that had been around most prominently during his species’s evolutionary history, and knowing whether they’re likely to be friends, foes, or food. (Mothra is “friend.” Godzilla is “proceed with caution.” Ghidorah was only active for one or two generations of Rodans, not long enough for them to evolve an instinctive reaction to multi-headed yellow fliers, so Ghidorah was a total unknown when he charged his happy flappy ass into Rodan’s territory.)

So Rodan was born with a immense amount of knowledge about the world around him.

Most of it’s wrong.

Since the day Rodan hatched, he’s been faced with nothing but weird shit. So he has no sense of scale for weirdness. Fishing boats are weird. The fact that the sky isn’t thick with giant stony pteranodons is weird. The lack of a land bridge between Alaska and Russia is weird. The Himalayas are weird. The shape of that tree over there is weird. Three-headed two-tailed lightning-spewing siren-singing hurricane-summoning golden dragons from outer space are weird. The size of the Sahara is weird. A bird accidentally flying up Rodan’s nostril is weird. Farms are weird. Bells are weird. All of the above things are equally weird to Rodan.

As a consequence? He’s extremely chill with weird shit. You throw something wild at him and he thinks “I guess this is just what we’re doing now, huh,” and rolls with it. He’s willing to immediately embrace anything as the new normal. He just finds a convenient spot to jam it into his pre-existing conception of the world and rolls with it.

Which is why, when Three-Heads McGee appears, Rodan is like, “… Well, okay, apparently this is just what other members of my species look like and i somehow didn’t know it until right now" and does what he knows he’s supposed to do when he meets one of his kind: see who can win a fight. Ghidorah beats Rodan up, Rodan expects that if they impress each other then the loser promises to follow the winner and they go make nests, so he yields and swears to follow Ghidorah; but instead they fly several hours north to knock over the weird square hives made by tiny apes? Does this mean they’re hanging out first? That’s fine, anyway Rodan swore to follow so he’s gonna keep doing that, destroying cities is now the thing that they are doing. Maybe they were always supposed to be destroying cities and he just didn’t know it. Now they’re fighting Godzilla and Mothra for some reason? Yeah, alright, sure, he’s not sure if this is a turf fight or a grudge match or just for the absolute hell of it, but Ghidorah has clearly got dibs on Godzilla which Rodan is NOT gonna argue with so Rodan’s taking Mothra. He doesn’t know why they’re fighting. He doesn’t know why they’re in Boston at all. He doesn’t know what Boston is. It didn’t exist the last time he was awake.

And days or weeks after the fight, he still doesn’t know why they were fighting. He’s got no clue Ghidorah was trying to destroy the planet. He didn’t think to ask what they were doing.

So you can throw the weirdest thing in the world at him and he just sort of assumes that it’s perfectly normal, he just hadn’t heard about it yet. Like, someday somebody is going to tell him Ghidorah is an alien, and he’s going to spend about twenty seconds freaked out, and then it will be just a fact, and nothing will ever throw him for a loop again. When everything is weird, nothing is weird.

The good side of this is it makes him very open-minded to new and different things. He’ll accept just about anything and anyone. He’s not resistant to new ideas, and he’s got an advantage over a lot of other titans socially because he’s a lot more able to accept members of other species on their own terms. The bad side is that it makes him very uncritical—he’ll accept anything presented as the norm, often even negative situations that can and should be changed. And, very frequently, he just doesn’t think to ask questions: “when did THIS become a thing??” or “why are we doing this, exactly?” or “why is this the new normal” or even “IS this the new normal??” He’s as curious as any other titan, but he rarely asks questions, because if he doesn’t see anyone else asking questions he sort of assumes that everyone else already knows what’s up and so he should be figuring it out the way they did. So he observes closely and puzzles things out alone.

Also because he assumes Everything Is Normal, he’s oddly spontaneous—in the sense that, if a massive life change is thrown his way, he’ll decide whether or not he wants to roll with it for the next thousand years in about a minute. And then he’ll stick with it. Even if he doesn’t have to, even if circumstances change so that he COULD go back to how things were before, even if it gets a lot more difficult/complicated than he was expecting—he already made his decision, this is The New Normal, his old status quo is dead, he’s sticking with it. After the decision’s been made it’s next to impossible for him to let go of it unless a new decision is offered.

One of the biggest disappointments between what Rodan expected the world to be like and what it’s actually like is that there are a whole lot less people in it. There’s like… seventeen people. (Humans don’t count as people. You can’t talk to humans. Humans are to Rodan as bees are to humans: they make interesting clever geometric homes and they’ve clearly got a very complex organization system in their colony—they can even communicate information to each other, how interesting—but they certainly aren’t people.) And this is a shame because Rodan is a major extrovert. When there are other people around to bug, Rodan is there, bugging them. He’ll just flap around getting into other titans’ business and asking what they’re up to. He’s down for joining it, whatever it is. If they don’t want him joining, he might just find somewhere nearby to perch and watch. Other titans’ opinions of him vary from “he’s very friendly and helpful” to “he’s an obnoxious pain in the ass. And he’s violent, too.”

He’s so violent.

He’s one of the only titans who just, attacks people out of nowhere, for no reason. His species has got a permanent suit of armor on, so fighting doesn’t come at the same cost and risk to them as it does to other creatures, so they’ll skip past the intimidation displays and warnings that most other species use to try to avoid a fight and just charge straight in to battle. Which is why Ghidorah managed to completely KO him and he still thinks that was a courting dance rather than a real battle; his species’s courting dances can get that violent.

But, even beyond courting dances or defending himself and his territory? He’ll still pick fights, with anyone. He’ll pick fights with total strangers. He’ll see a titan, go “Hey there my name is Rodan what’s yours!” and dive for their eyes. He thinks fighting is fun! His life is a sports anime about martial arts whose main plot is a tournament arc and he’s the plucky happy-go-lucky protagonist who’s determined to win every fight and befriend every single opponent he defeats, while everyone else thinks they’re living in a medium-difficulty survival sim. It’s impossible to teach him not to attack strangers. If a new acquaintance tells him they don’t like fighting he will respect that and not do it again, but no matter how many people tell him they don’t want to fight, he will not stop going “maybe the next one will” and trying again.

Mothra, he’s learned, does not like fighting, and he understands how her reincarnations work just enough to know that he can’t attack new Moths the way he would a New Person; but every time Mothra’s reborn he’ll hope the new one likes fighting and ask. She’s always like “it’s still no” and he’s like, “someday. Someday.” He’s not sure why Boston was the exception, but thinks maybe she likes group brawls more than one-on-one fights? Maybe he’ll fight her the next time they’re in a group and see if she’s into that.

His favorite people are the ones willing to throw down, any time, any place. He sometimes mistakes eagerness to fight back as a confirmation of friendship rather than as, like, “I hate you so much I wanna kick your ass every time I see you” or something. Friends that spar together fly far together.

Aquatic titans are the few exceptions. They freak him out. Water is already an inherently terrifying location because you can’t breathe in it, you can’t stand on it and yet can’t fly through it, it washes off your armor—it’s just Bad, it’s a Bad Place. And then there are things in it?? Things living underneath the surface, unseen and unknown, that can crawl out when you’re asleep and try to eat you if you’re not completely under your lava? Gelatinous color-changing things? Long cold things that can wrap around you and crush you? Oh no. No thank you. Rodan doesn’t mess with that stuff. To him Godzilla is no King of the Monsters, he’s Ambassador of the Nightmares. He’s one of those terrifying subterranean guys except he’s got LEGS which somehow simultaneously makes him just barely tolerable but also a bigger threat than the other water things. Godzilla is Cthulhu in a business suit: an eldritch abomination masquerading as a normal person.

And, that’s about what I’ve got worked out so far. Since I’ve spent less time writing inside Rodan’s personality than Ghidorah’s, he’s less developed than they are lol. It’s a continually evolving work in progress

#rodan #godzilla #kotm #headcanons #anonymous #ask

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sammerrickblog · 3 years ago

Text

Animation Foundations: Drawing Cartoon Characters by Dermot O'Connor

The resone i chose this tutorial is becasue i want to improve my charicter desighns and also improve on my drawings ofanimals and monsters wich are both apart of this corse

Proportions

I have never really experimented with proportions for a character and seeing this tutorial really helped me to realise this I want to experiment with more creative body types and not just have all my characters look the same size and weight. Along with this I really liked how creating these characters was explained by breaking them down to there most basic shapes and building up from there. Breaking down the character like this was really helpful to me to design these characters and better understand the postures.

tangents

tangents are where a line conects with another but isnt ment to in a 3d space the example given in the tutorial is a mans hair tuching his nose, this isnt men to happen and onlt likkd like this because of how it was drawn tangents arnt something i have really been looking out for however from now on im going to try to improve on thisas i know know how inportant it is it can be really destracting or confusing for a viewer. the examples given really helped me to understand how much these things stand out and howto fix them by simmply moving the charicter or objet thats doing this.

eyes

i didnt expect to see this when going throuhg the tutorial however i found i really usefull as i find eyes one of the more difficult things to draw, i really liked all the examples given andseeing them really made me want to practis wich ones i prefure to use and how to use them realistacly and intresting. the rotation is something i espesualy strugle with such as if a charicter islooking up or down and this tutorial helped me to lay this out and simplyfy it.

nose

along with the eyes i really wanted to pratase more on drawing the nose as i findit difficult to make it look threedamentonal. becasue of this i desided to experiment on my previos drawings by addind diffrent nose styles and angles.

mouth

with the mouth i wanted to experiment alot more i really liked the idea ofimproving on the origanaleye and nose drawings by using this tutorial to make intresting charicters while also helping me to improve the basics of charicter desighn

hair and aditonal detail

finaly i added hair to the drawings and extra detail to make them look more refined, the hair is something that i really strugled with but will practis more in the future, i like how most of them have turend out i wanted to experement with each of them i think the only one i dont like is the bottome middle as the proportios are realy off and dosent really look that apealing, however istill feel as though i have learnd alot from doing this

i really liked doing this i found the experamantaition really helpfull and feel as though i have really improved in creatingintresting looking charicters. these are my three favorat that i have colored and added detail so that i could see what the final cariter would look like and im really happy with the outcome.

clothing

i wanted to become better at desighning cloths and make them realisticfor my chricers i espesualy struggle with dresses becasue of this i faund this part really usefull to learn abourhowfabrics flow and drag relating to the position of a charicrer.along with this headgear is something i never really thought about. you need to really know what the charicters head is like under for example a helmit and how it fits and rests on the charicters head.

animal

this is one of the main resons i wanted to do this tutorial and i found it really really usefull. the first thing that i found really intresting wasthe examples given when it comes to drawing dogs for example one style is very simmiler to bugs bunny whereits esentualy a man in a sute it has all the posture and stanse as a human but with animal feachers. another style is an anitomicaly corect dog but have the animal pose simmiler to a human. i want to practus both of these style to see what i prfure but with a diffrent animal.

i based both f these drawings on the bird in the middle but only cahneged thestlyle i drew it in and i was suprised at how diffrent the two haricters look even thogh there based on the same thing. after doing this i can see how both styles are intresting in there own way i feel as though with the more anthropomorphic animal on the left can be more expresive and have morea cartoony qualatys, however i really like the one on the right too as it feels more life like and i feel has more personalaty.

the most important thing that i took from this section is how important it is to consider a animals bone structure, an example given was a gorses leg has bent joints and would bedrawn vastly diffrent to a elifent who has streght legs this is important becasue if a elifants legs where like this it would look strange and not atomicly corect it would seem as though the animals leg would sna because of its wght. in adition to this reserch is a huge part on drawing a animal its essentalto know the anatomyof the animal no matter what style your working in so that it looks belevable,

creatures/monsters

when creating monsters one thing streght away apeeled to me and thatsthe freedome these things dont exist there is no real refrance you are fully free to explore and create really outlandish consepts wich is something i want to implament in to my work in order to make relly intresting and uniqe chaiters. another thing that was taked about was creating robots, there simmiler tomonsters in the fact that you have compleate fredomto crate anthing you want howver robots more than often use very geometric shapes.

these are the creachers imade from this prosess some monster and some robot i really enjoyed creatingthese and beleve that if it wasnt for what i learnd erlyer in this tutorial about slowly building u and bloocking out a charicter i wouldnt have been able to do this each one is made up ofsimple shapes then slowy built up on to create the finishedimage even with charicters like theres, for example the first charicter started of as a simple blob shape then basic guidlines for the tentucals and eyes and detail was slowly added, i find this prosses works reallly well dor me and im glad i know understand it alot more.

conclusion

after finishing this tutorial i am now much more confident in creating my characters whether that be a person animal or monster i believe that doing this has dramatically improved my skills and helped me to better understand what makes a character interesting. going forward I want to practise more on drawing animas as this sis the thing i believe I struggled with the most.

#ax3001

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tillymint7 · 4 years ago

Text

Rick Creed 😎

Rick lectures was great, his humour and the relaxed way he speaks about his work it speaks volumes to me about how comfortable he is with how he creates. I hope Im lucky enough one day to attain that sense of depth and self knowledge.

To Rick life is a circle ⭕️ he talks so beautifully about all the world being drunk and he is just trying to make some sense out of it through his work. I love this analogy so much.

His works with mixed media found objects and geometric shapes that create a sense of perspective in his paintings. Ricks says his paintings are very urban due to his love of the city. To me they also have a sense of journey, like a story of colour and emotion. Rick also talked about the countryside unnerving him, he gets confused by all the green 😂He talks about how the more dangerous an area is the more he is attracted to it. His paintings explore painting beyond the frame. He talks about going for a walk on the canvas, which sounds really romantic 💓

Rick also uses Latin words for his titles, which is a language that I find fascinating. My generation just missed out on learning Latin in school, but Iv always heard how difficult it is to learn.

It’s interesting to see that literature plays a big part in Risks inspiration as well as the fabulous artist Piet Mondrian. I can see Piet Mondrians influence in Ricks work through his use of colour and geometric shapes.

In particular Rick is inspired by a 12th century poet called Rumi ❣️ I’ll definitely have to investigate this poet, the one poem he read was absolutely beautiful. 🥰

Titles are very important to Rick giving the viewer a way in to maybe understanding or reading his work.

His atitude to his work is amazing he has gotten to that comfortable place with his work that ability to stay out of his own head so he can create, which is a great skill. Iv always been able to zone out so much so thats sometimes I even do it unconsciously during conversation, not through being consciously rude or bored, but it’s just how my mind travels. I can still get too stuck in my head at times with my own work and it can stop the creative process for me entirely. I hope through years of practice I can hone that fabulous skill.

Rick talks about remembering to be true to our inner selves, thoughts and emotions and not over thinking or allowing outside influences to hinder our genuine self.

Rick’s attitude of doing what you love and being true to ourselves is the best advice. It’s definitely something we all need to remember create work from our hearts without external influence or expectations.

He talked about the time a lecturer told him his work was terrible. He spoke with such passion about his lecturers at uni being ‘a bunch of bastards’ and how that stopped him in his tracks creatively and how destructive that can be for any artist.

To be honest I had happen to me recently with me print work and I havent looked at them since. So I know how he feels. It’s hard to move passed being deflated. Another person aggressively and negatively commenting is so unhelpful. It’s about the wording, critiqually constructive advice helps the person progress and doesn’t hinder the creative process.

I always find Rick really welcoming and lovely to speak too. I know we are constantly being assessed, but Rick it great at making you feel relaxed. He always makes you laugh and listens to what you have to say. He always has time for a natter he is a true legend and a genuinely kind hearted person that doesn’t suffer fools gladly. My favourite Rick moment was catching him walking into our studio making the crucifix sign .....😂🤣 probably best to be safe than sorry.

The Q&A was amazing, Rick’s insight is so reassuring and supportive to us all. I look forward to seeing his new works. He is such a wise and fabulous artist. I hope to be that focused someday.

Rick talked about how we are all embarking on a career where we are always having to start at the beginning. When you look at it that way it makes you realise how much work goes into dedicating your life to art.

I said to Rick once ‘being an artist is like we are dancing in the dark’ We are dancing around hoping not to miss that next step that helps our work come into its own.

Rick Creed - my lecture notes

Robert Crumb - cartoonist

What am I doing in this dimension

Most of the world is drunk - making sense of the none sensical 🥰

Latin - forms our language- English

Abstract shapes bright colour perspective mixed media geometric

Social life inner life - what is is to be human

Tractus- path Latin

Find countryside very strange - smells green

P Mondrian - dedication to trees and the spaces between the trees, which became his geometric shapes ❣️

More dangerous the more attractive something is.

Rock against drugs 🤪

Everything is a circle ⭕️ always feel like that 💖

Unlocking unpicking our practice

Pushing the boundaries

Found objects

Sense of city and furniture 🪑 creates perspective

All end up on the skip recycling 😜

Loves response/ reactions-

Almost like it tells a story?

Eaggemearc- eye Mark

Titles important interesting

Load of bastards hehe 😂 love that term like a room full of bastards - very negative 👎 stops progress completely agree

Show in Turkey

Lacus - not being bound by the frame painting beyond the frame 🖼

Hockasy?? Can’t spell

Recino -

Screw the history - my work for me not for others sod expectations- 🙌

Caput - making a portrait

Paperwork- through a window like a blur or a memory

Drawing good for not being self conscious? Automatic writing ✍️

Trying to be a poet

Volantes- looking down looking through

The Rebel - Doesn’t know he is a genius - is genius real?

‘Your colours are the wrong shape’

Alister Grant - paintings in movie 🍿

Rumi - poetry 12th century?

‘Only from the heart you can touch the sky’

Q&A - work everyday 2 -3

Intuition - I use this

Albion - book 📚 Peter Ackroid

Choosing to explore - I like that

Very urban

Uncertainty and chance

Leaving an imperfection int he work to remain human. Not too perfect.

About me and my head

Built on - go on a walk on the canvas

Seeing the world as shapes

It’s a sensation

Never think I’m making a picture

I became the drawing man 👨

Positivity madder and wilder

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356mission · 7 years ago

Text

Interview with Ruth Root and Laura Owens

Interview with Ruth Root and Laura Owens September 2017 Conducted on the Occasion of Ruth Root’s exhibition at 356 S. Mission Road/Ooga Twooga

Laura Owens: Tell me about Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

Ruth Root: When I was starting to really crack down and work on this show was right when Trump was elected. The election itself was really contentious and distracting and I kept thinking that as soon as it was over, thinking Hillary was going to win, I would stop watching the news and be able to concentrate and get work done. But instead, after Trump’s win, I was in complete shock and just kept reading articles analyzing the election and trying to understand what happened.

I kept running across statements and interviews by Ruth Bader Ginsberg that were really amazing thoughts and started to follow everything she was saying. She seemed to speak clearly, and in an inspiring way about things. So an image of her made it into one the fabrics.

LO: And you collect a lot of images of textiles and bits and pieces of vintage fabric, but all of the textiles used in the show you actually designed yourself so nothing is found.

RR: I designed all the fabric using Photoshop, but much of the imagery is found. There’s a fragment of a Sonia Delaunay textile and a Wiener Werkstätte textile, and a security envelope pattern. Also Frank Stella paintings, part of a Leger painting, and many saved images of artists’ work from my computer desktop that I’ve pulled off the Internet and wanted to revisit it for some reason.

Some of the fabrics are more complex than others; they contain a density of images, and some of the fabric pieces are just geometric with lines, or dots, and one is a monochrome. Within the indexical image fabrics that are also images of my older work and images that reference other paintings in this show.

LO: For people who don’t know your early work, you made these paintings that the textiles remind me of because the scale shift is so intense between the scale of the piece and then the detail. The paintings had little cigarettes smoking or little eyes that you would find when you got closer, but otherwise from far away, it felt like an abstract painting.

RR: Yeah, they looked like regular abstract paintings and then the space rearranged itself depending on if the eyes were in the negative or the positive space. I love when there are big things and small things in a single painting and the scale shifts. I like when you can get an overall sense of what’s going on in a single painting and then you can keep looking and looking and see smaller elements.

LO: What so great about the new work is that there’s so much going on and they speak to the idea or the potentiality of something that’s two dimensional being three dimensional, not only within the textile design, but in the shapes you’re making with what’s painted. The pieces to me have this unrealized potential that I feel like infuse them with this world of possibility.

RR: Well, two things. One is that my friend Miranda Lichtenstein once said that the paintings reminded her of a flattened sculpture. Like the way in the Road Runner cartoon, where the coyote character runs into something and just falls down or is flattened by a car and then he pops back up in two dimensions instead of three dimensions. But the other thing is that after those cigarette and eye paintings, for the longest time I made shaped aluminum paintings with a concealed hanging cleat mechanism that were supposed to look as if they were installed flat against the wall. So now, I feel that this newer series of paintings has a completely exposed hanging mechanism. You can see where they attach to the wall and where they loop through. So these are actually really three dimensional compared to my previous work. And they are kind of like one sided sculptures.

LO: We had talked in New York when I visited your about how this work makes explicit the fact that something is hanging: hanging on the wall, hanging off itself, that the apparatus of hanging itself on the wall is actually a mode of decision making and a subject of the work.

RR: The wall is just key to my understanding of the painting and how the negative and positive space will function in the work. I think about the stretcher and canvas and what the variations are - how far you can go from that and it can still be read as the same thing. I think of these a variation of a stretcher and canvas.

LO: I was also thinking about the year a while back when you were not feeling so great and you ended up staying home a lot and making a lot of quilts. I remember you sewing a lot and these quilts being something that could go on a bed or on a wall. Also that a quilt is never a perfect rectangle or square, it always has a slight shape to it. I’m wondering if that year of sewing influenced you at all?

RR: I think that year was about 20 years ago. I was having really bad migraine headache and was in bed a lot. I was living in a tiny apartment, and when I had studio visits, I would always lay things out on the bed to see them. Around the same time, I had seen the Gee’s Bend quilt show at the Whitney and just loved those quilts and really thought of them as abstract paintings. And Amish quilts as more hard edged abstract paintings. So somehow I started making my own quilts around that time and it was as if lying in bed with a quilt was like being inside an abstract painting. I also liked experiencing a painting as something functional or something that involves the way in which we experience material things.

LO: Right. I think in some ways with these works you are creating and making textiles, but the textiles are never subservient to what’s painted, it’s really on an equal footing. Also the hanging mechanism and the fact that they are flatter to the wall than a traditional stretched canvas is somewhere in between a number of different things; a sculpture, a textile, a painting. It’s slipping between all these different…

RR: Right and a macramé plant holder, a shaped holder for a typewriter or a gun, or a soft guitar case.

LO: I know you worked for a long time trying to figure out how these things would get constructed. There were a couple years where you were really figuring it out.

RR: There were actually a lot of construction issues because I’m not a sculptor and I didn’t really know how to sew very well. There were a lot of issues around the weight of the Plexiglas and how to make something that could actually support 20 to 30 pounds without puckering up. And how perfect the fabric had to be or how imperfect it could be and still look right to me. If they are too perfect, they look machine-made, or too graphic, or if they are too hand-made they look too folky. The past few years I have been figuring out how to have a hybrid of soft and hard, handmade and polished.

LO: That’s cool. I think that finding the hybrid is really interesting because there’s these unpredictable juxtapositions that happen with shape and color and texture that ultimately feel so complete and so perfect in a way. There’s an unpredictability between the pieces, but then you see these types of images morphing and changing throughout the show.

RR: One of the paintings has parts of all the other painted components of the paintings, and it functions as a kind of microcosm of the show. The painted parts echo each other and the fabrics similarly have a relationship to each other. Some of the fabrics will repeat imagery from other fabrics; the background pattern becomes the foreground or a negative space becomes positive space. I’m trying to make them operate like that.

LO: Also you made a decision to allow each to have their own freestanding wall in the space, which does a bunch of hybrid things as well. It makes it so the show as a body of work dissolves hierarchies and they keep re-dissolving as your body walks through the show. You think some particular view or piece is prioritized, but then because of the configuration the whole show builds in your memory when you get these added layers of information. Also the walls themselves sort of enunciate the object-ness of the work and also the impact of each one as its own figure.

RR: I think that’s true. I don’t have anything to add, I just think that’s so true. The other thing that’s playing with my mind is that working on eleven paintings, to hold that many paintings in my mind at once has been difficult. I’m used to seven paintings or eight paintings at one time. The show reinforces that it’s hard to see them as a whole.

LO: No, it’s not possible and you’ve made it not possible.

RR: I’m used to the idea that once you bring the show together, you get to see the group.

LO: In this space especially, when people make things like paintings, there’s always been a privileging of these two side walls, and so you can be in the whole show at once. You might have to turn your body around but you can get a glimpse of it all at once. And this is completely denying it.

RR: It’s funny because there is repetition within the paintings, but it’s kind of just like they’re scattered and you have to find other connections or just start over with a new painting.

LO: But it’s really privileging the viewer and saying your body and your memory, and your walking through the show, you determine how you combine and see this work together.

RR: You either notice the juxtapositions of things or hold them in your head a different way.

LO: A lot of what you’re doing refers to things in the real world, like Ruth Bader Ginsberg or actual textiles, or three dimensional flattening, but your work definitely seems to be in love with the history of abstraction and where it comes from in design, textiles, modernism and all kinds of places where we find non- representational color and shape. Why do you think that’s important for people to look at now? That might be a really pedestrian question for two people so invested in painting!

RR: Oddly enough, I think that’s my inner world. That’s what I’ve always paid attention to and it gives me so much pleasure to think about and to look at. These are what influence me and they are the things in my head all the time. It’s cumulative - I think we’ve looked at so many things, paintings, books, internet images and they are all forming relationships within our heads. And the context of painting is so many other paintings. I’m not sure why it is important to look at now. I think it’s just the way I’ve been looking at things now and the way as painter I’ve started to just feel like I’m holding so many things in my visual memory.

LO: It just also dawned on me that these also refer to pattern design for clothing.

RR: Right, like origami or folding, pant sleeves and belt loops and pockets. I think also after painting what I thought were abstract paintings for so long and showing them and figuring out the layout, I had this idea that I wanted to make the exact opposite of my work, the alternate universe or parallel universe of my work. The concealed hanging mechanism became the hanging mechanism as a main, exposed part of the painting. After doing geometric paintings, the freedom of letting all these things into the painting was a way of making something that was the old painting’s opposite. Having the world come in, rather than reducing things down.

LO: It’s interesting because the hanging mechanism actually does hang the artwork and you basically do want it to hang a specific way, there’s a functionality in it that one associates with “form following function”, which is a more design or craft idea, but you expose that as a, no pun intended, weight bearing decision. You’re going to have to make decisions based on whether this amount of weight will hang off of this textile?

RR: Yes and how many legs do I need to make so that it levels itself out, if it’s an asymmetrical shape.

LO: Just thinking about just one of them, they are very complex. There’s a lot to hold in your head. Just the construction and then I know there’s also just basic painting decisions about proportion.

RR: That’s my favorite part, the non-painting part. The light engineering of figuring out how they hang is so fun. And to make a million screw holes in the fabric before its covered to see if something moves slightly, how it levels, and if something moves in another direction, what that does, and then if you add another support leg, what that does.

LO: I’ve thought about that a lot, that one of the fun parts about art is recognizing a problem and then trying solve it and that you get great satisfaction out of creating a problem that you then have to solve. And you have one that’s a truly functional problem.

RR: But after doing paintings that don’t have that as a problem, then somehow that’s the really fun part and the interesting part. But then it becomes the part that’s so invisible once they are done.

LO: Right, you don’t even think about it and take it for granted. Of course it’s this wide and there’s this many screw holes. I like that all of them are these diptychs. These are, for lack of a better word, two paintings combined into one object.

RR: Yes, one continues the other.

LO: And we were also talking that you still make these shaped bookmarks and we were talking about how the show unfolds like the pages of a book. I know you love books and are always looking at images of abstract art and textiles in books and I feel like we’ve bonded over liking similar books and finding obscure books.

RR: For a press release for Die 2008 show at Andrew Kreps I bookmarked around 80 books in my studio of images that related to shaped paintings and foreground- background relationships, negative spaces and positive spaces. Images like shaped bathmats, that took a negative space and made that space positive and Bruce Nauman’s cast of an empty space under a chair. They were bookmarked with post-it notes and scraps of paper that were the right size to stick out from a large art book. From those bookmarked images I made a press release of just images that were influences and alternate way of thinking about shaped paintings.

Then, it was as if my work just became bookmarks for a year or two. I kept thinking about what was important to me and why I liked certain work and certain paintings. and I was making shaped scraps of paper to use in the books. And if I had to start over and I had the freedom to make anything, what would I make? My old work became part of my source material. And from working with paper and folding it and messing around with it, these paintings started to emerge.

LO: I think that’s something that a lot of people don’t understand. You’ll take a turn in your art and god only knows where the art is going to come out of it. Because that kind of investment in making bookmarks can just take over. I know that living in New York and the New York art world, it’s literally the opposite of the kind of impetus to make gallery-ready art.

RR: I basically needed an “L” shaped bookmark. Or a bookmark that would go from the top of the page to the bottom, or one that would bookmark an exact line of a beautiful book that you don’t want to mark up, and a post-it wouldn’t stick out far enough. So cutting a piece of paper that doesn’t harm a book, that fits exactly where the image or sentence on a page that you want to come back to. I wanted a bookmark that was one sided so you could place it in one direction and really be able to get back where you wanted to be. A book is so linear so you don’t want to get confused. I think that was also the way I let so many other influences into my work and let the context expand to be the overwhelming amount of information that we’re so interested in that we’re trying to synthesize or trying to hold at once.

LO: A lot of really great art is that the decision making and the habitual brain that says “this is good” or “this is bad” keeps switching in terms of taste, because you’re combining these almost clashing fabric and paint and your brain is stunned, almost like a stun-gun, into no judgement. I feel like that’s the mark of great art when good and bad become completely irrelevant.

RR: And you have to surprise yourself, or you have to change it if it’s not surprising.

LO: Do you want to talk about La Collectionneuse?

RR: That’s from a 1967 Eric Rohmer film that I saw probably 25 years ago. When I saw it, I loved it so much. An art collector, a playboy, and a young woman are all staying at a villa on the seaside in the South of France. La Collectionneuse refers to the woman who has tons of boyfriends and for some reason that title and the film have been in my head stuck in my head for a long time. Visually I loved the film because the characters seem like they’re just wearing whatever clothes have been left at the villa. The men are wearing short sleeved angora sweaters and whatever floral bathrobes are around. It’s just visually really funny.

LO: Maybe we should screen that here?

RR: You know, I re-watched it and it was like a Neil Labute play. I didn’t like it. The characters were all really loathsome to me. And I didn’t love it visually as much as I did when I first watched it. La Collectionneuse was going to be the title of this show but when I watched it again, I realized that I wasn’t that so interested in it and it was no longer the film itself, but more just the way it lasted in my memory. For the past three shows of this new work, I have always had one painting that contains all the other painted parts of the show’s paintings. My paintings are always Untitled but I call the microcosm painting “The Collectionneuse” in my mind, as a nickname. I created a fabric from the film’s title sequence because it was meaningful to me, but I don’t have a real affinity for the film anymore.

#Ruth Root

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floraexplorer · 6 years ago

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The Witches of El Alto, Bolivia: Traditions & Superstitions at the World’s Highest Market

Up in the mountains above La Paz, Bolivia, there’s a market called El Alto.

On a Sunday morning under a crisp blue sky, I stepped out of a minibus beside the ‘Mi Teleferico’ station and felt the air stop in my throat.

Before me lay Bolivia’s El Alto market: a chaotic sight of stalls, products, people and activity, sprawling everywhere and overtaking every block in sight with seemingly no end.

Everywhere I looked there was movement. Huge sheets of corrugated metal were lifted onto men’s backs; long planks of wood were manoeuvred through the crowds; cages filled with the blurry shapes of moving animals; babies passed between women’s arms and deftly tucked into bright aguayo cloth slings.

The noise, the activity, the chatter, the colours: all densely packed together like this, it made me struggle to catch my breath. My head swam and my fingers began to tingle.

This was not what I’d expected.

Although as it happens, there’s a perfectly good reason for feeling dizzy at El Alto market.

The El Alto market, also known as Feria 16 de Julio, is held twice a week (every Thursday and Sunday) throughout the year. It draws so many visitors from the surrounding valley that it’s hailed as one of the biggest markets in South America – if not the world.

It’s also one of the world’s highest markets, however odd a claim to fame that might be.

Sitting at an altitude of 4,150 metres (almost 1,000 metres higher than nearby La Paz), El Alto – a city in its own right – is the world’s highest major metropolis. Tourists fly into El Alto airport before driving straight down into La Paz so they often don’t think to visit, but El Alto is quickly increasing in foreign popularity thanks to the bi-weekly market, the female cholita wrestling matches, the beautifully strange architecture from indigenous Aymara architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre, and the La Paz cable car which takes passengers clear above the city’s rooftops and up into the mountains.

Still, getting altitude-sick in El Alto is totally understandable. The sun beats down stronger, the air is thinner, and your body can often struggle to adjust. It’s why you’ll see so many bags of coca leaves for sale, and so many people absent-mindedly chewing on a handful of them while they walk.

What exactly can you buy in Bolivia’s El Alto market? (Hint: the easy answer is ‘everything’)

Unlike the street stalls which pop up on every corner in La Paz, there are no tourist-friendly Bolivia souvenirs for sale in El Alto: no alpaca jumpers with geometric patterns; no bumbags or pencil cases or backpacks.

This is a local market – so we’re talking hardware, furniture, car parts and mechanical tools.

Hot tip: don’t go shopping in El Alto market for souvenirs! Hit the streets of La Paz instead.

My first visit to El Alto market was with Ivonne, Jorge and Florencio, three of the Bolivians I volunteered with at the artificial limb clinic. Their plan was to pick up various supplies for the clinic, but they also thought I’d enjoy seeing the market too.

Of course, that was the moment for Ivonne (a Bolivian mum) to start worrying about my safety as a white female foreigner.

In the traveller circuit, El Alto market has a reputation as a somewhat dodgy place, mainly because of potential pickpockets amidst the sheer number of people. Ivonne told me repeatedly not to speak – not in Spanish if I could help it, and definitely not in English – and to wear my sunglasses if possible so I wouldn’t draw too much attention to my evidently non-Bolivian face.

So I wandered through the biggest market in South America with my backpack securely on my front while watching people bartering with wizened old cholita women for the price of fluorescent double strip lights, discussing the advantages of curved back chairs, and sawing pieces of hardwood in the middle of the street.

Huge swathes of products for sale in El Alto are second-hand, from CDs and DVDs to furniture and musical instruments.

Jorge took me to the stalls filled with car parts and happily pointed out the makings of an entire car, if we’d wanted to build one from scratch.

I watched dozens of men dragging carts through the street to carry heavy new purchases, and I wondered how long it would take to erase the traces of this market from the city when Sunday finally finished.

But the more intriguing parts of El Alto were the ones I couldn’t quite see.

Small potholes on the roads we walked along eventually made way for huge gashes in the road, exposed pipework and piles of sand and cement. There, away from the hardware and the second hand goods, hidden around corners and amongst tight bunches of gossiping women were where the unidentifiable things were sold.

Unknown things in crates, balanced in the dirt.

There were tiny glimpses of things I knew I shouldn’t be seeing. The used syringes laid out on a blanket. The flash of bright metal from the inside of a man’s open jacket as he boasted to a friend about the gun he’d just bought.

Ivonne wouldn’t let me walk towards the stalls which were selling animals – illegal and exotic ones; monkeys, parrots, frogs and ocelots; both alive and dead.

These are the places of black magic. The market stalls which sell provisions for rituals, spells, and witchcraft.

In Bolivia, traditions and superstitions make up a huge part of the country’s culture.

Despite a firm adherence to the Spanish Catholic faith, there’s also a wealth of indigenous spiritualism and religion woven into Bolivia’s belief system.

Ever since the Spanish arrived to colonize South America in the 1500s, Bolivians have been happily combining elements of Catholicism with their already-existing indigenous Aymara beliefs and customs.

It’s led to a wonderful mixing of worlds: on any given day you could see a solemn religious procession in one neighbourhood of La Paz, and a joyful celebration of local Bolivian traditions in another.

Read more: Learning my way around the neighbourhoods of La Paz

It’s not just about processions, either. Adherence to Bolivian traditions can easily shape a person’s life.

In the city of Potosi, ancient legend says the devil lives inside the El Cerro Rico mountain – which also happens to be where many Bolivian men mine for silver each day. El Cerro Rico is known as ‘the mountain that eats men’ because so many have died here over the years; approximately eight million deaths since the colonial era. Even today the average life expectancy of a Potosi miner is about 35 years.

Because it’s seriously dangerous work, the miners leave daily offerings to El Tio (as the devil in the mountain is known) for protection.

There are statues of El Tio scattered throughout the mine shafts inside the mountain, surrounded by small piles of cigarettes, alcohol, coloured streamers, candles and coca leaves. The miners will often sit with their nearest El Tio: apparently he doesn’t like to be left alone.

[Photo courtesy of Matias Recondo]

Protection is a common theme throughout Bolivia. When any new building is constructed, builders ‘bless’ the project by burying a llama foetus beneath the foundations.

This offering of a pure, innocent creature is regarded as a gift to Pachamama (mother earth) and will hopefully bring good luck and protection to both the builders and the new residents.

Officially, all these foetuses have either been miscarried or were born dead – but it’s difficult to reconcile that fact with the amount of foetuses visible for sale throughout Bolivia. It’s also difficult when you learn that living llamas are often sacrificed as part of a ceremony. Every August in Potosi, the yatiri healers (mentioned later!) will sacrifice a llama at Cerro Rico to appease El Tio.

Daily life in Bolivia means riding a bus filled with Bolivians who cross themselves when we drive past a church. It means scrupulously avoiding the capture of women’s faces on camera, because many believe a photo will steal away a part of their soul.

Somehow I can’t think its a coincidence that seconds after taking this photo (accidentally!), my camera completely stopped working…

But what’s the easiest way for tourists and travellers to get to grips with Bolivia’s superstitious side?

Simple. Just head to the local witches market.

‘El Mercado de las Brujas’: the Witches Market of La Paz

In La Paz, El Mercado de las Brujas is a popular tourist attraction. It sits in the touristic centre of the city close to San Francisco church on Calle Jimenez and Calle Linares, and on first appearance it’s little more than a small cluster of stalls.

But this is where you’ll find talismans and effigies shaped from stone and painted sugar to ward off evil and impotence; spells and potions for falling in love and winning the lottery; huge white sacks of coca leaves, used in all manner of ceremonies – and, of course, the interminable llama foetuses.

Many of these parts will be collected together and assembled to make a cha’lla, a ceremony or offering to Pachamama.

The first day I arrived in La Paz, I went on a free walking tour which explained some of La Paz’s history and Bolivia’s focus on witches and superstition while we explored Mercado de Las Brujas. The place I ended up renting for the next month was close by too, so I often wandered the market as I got to know the area better.

It’s a fascinating area of La Paz, but the market itself always felt much more like a tourist attraction than a genuinely sacred place. You’re more likely to see foreigners buying stone totems as souvenirs or gifts than Bolivians picking up their ceremonial supplies.

There’s still some intense superstition at play here, though.

Pointing to the llama foetuses, my guide said there are rumours about bigger buildings needing a more extreme sacrifice. People say homeless men often go missing in Bolivia: plied with high-strength alcohol until they pass out, they’re then placed in a hole lined with coca leaves in the building’s foundations and buried alive – a necessary element of the ritual to sufficiently appease Pachamama.

As you’d expect from a country steeped in superstition, there’s plenty more magic available in Bolivia.

You just have to know where to look.

Finding the darker side of El Alto market

My second visit to El Alto was with a group of people I’d met at Lake Titicaca. They were in the middle of a ceremonial retreat with the San Pedro cactus (which I’d been invited to join), and needed to pick up some supplies at the market.

As a group, we hailed from America, Australia, Chile, Germany and the UK. We were certainly conspicuous – but we were also there with a Bolivian healer-in-training. And he guided us to many of the areas Ivonne had warned me away from.

A German friend of mine tried to buy a piece of something he thought was dried aloe vera and the Bolivian woman told him it was actually for cursing. The fact that she had a whole bag of the stuff for sale meant there was clearly enough demand for it.

The stall beside hers had the skin of a cat in a plastic bag on display. I tried not to look too closely at it.

As we walked, our Bolivian friend told us that stallholders in El Alto and in the witches market in La Paz sell rituals and spells designed to inflict bad luck or curses on other.

It’s also entirely possible to buy quantities of the ayahuasca vine and powdered San Pedro cactus, both used for medicinal healing ceremonies throughout South America.

NB: as someone who’s taken part in ayahuasca and San Pedro ceremonies, I would highly recommend AGAINST purchasing either substance at a street market. You should only drink these medicines when brewed by a knowledgeable shaman in a trusted setting!

A jug of ayahuasca with two glasses

Read more: my experiences with ayahuasca and with San Pedro cactus in Bolivia

El Alto, Bolivia: where the real witches are

We were at the El Alto bus station getting ready to leave the market when I saw a row of little blue huts, with fire burners crackling merrily away beside their open doorways.

This is where the witches sit.

In Bolivia, they’re known as yatiri – traditional Aymara healers who are spiritually called to work with their communities. In the western world, perhaps we’d call them ‘witch doctors’ or refer to them (wrongly) as shamans.

Tradition demands that the Bolivian yatiri have to wait for someone to visit them with their problems, and also that they have to help whoever approaches. So if the fire outside their hut is lit, that means a yatiri is home and available for business.

These healers will tell you your future for a price. They’ll draw tarot cards for you, read your palm, and read coca leaves by throwing them into the air and interpreting meaning from how they land.

I didn’t get my fortune told by the Bolivian healers. Some part of me wishes I had.

But as we walked slowly past their huts on our way to the bus, my Bolivian friend whispered, “Many people say these witches have the ability to not just read your future, but change it.”

Would you visit the yatiri in El Alto market? More importantly, have you ever had your fortune told by a witch?

Info about El Alto market:

– How do I get to El Alto market?

There are a number of ways to reach El Alto from La Paz: via cable car, public bus or hired taxi.

For the La Paz teleferico, take the Red Line up to the final stop and turn left onto Avenida Panoramica. The ride costs 3 Bolivianos each way.

For the bus, take one of the local white colectivos from San Francisco Plaza and get off at the entrance to the market. It takes 30 minutes to get there and the bus ride costs 2 Bolivianos each way.

– When is El Alto market open?

The market is open all day on Thursdays and Sundays throughout the year.

– Is El Alto market safe?

Although I felt perfectly safe on both visits, pickpockets and bag slashers are known to operate in El Alto. Leave your valuables and original ID documents at your accommodation in La Paz and only take a small amount of cash with you/copy of your passport. If you’re self conscious or scared about visiting El Alto as a foreigner, there are guided tours which show you around the market.

– What else is there to do in El Alto?

El Alto is also the home of the infamous all-Bolivian cholita wrestling matches, which are held every Sunday afternoon at 2pm (cost is 50 Bolivianos / $7 on the door). There are various companies offering tours to the wrestling matches, but you can also make your way independently to the El Alto Multifunctional Centre. Either take the cable car and walk for ten minutes, or catch the bus from San Francisco Church in La Paz and get off at ‘CAJA’ – the ride takes about 30 mins and costs 2 Bolivianos each way.

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tjwilliamson21 · 6 years ago

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Final Evaluation

With this project I identified architecture as theme and specialism that I wanted to base my work around. I wanted to work within this industry for this assessment as this is the progression route I have decided to follow, after completing this course. Within this specialism I have established that I want to work outside of the studio to get away from the digital workspace and work in the 3D workshop. The purpose for this project was to redevelop a location that would bring economic growth and popularity to the area, however from my mid-term review I re-established the context of this assessment as I found through my site location another way of redeveloping the area by creating a museum that will generate revenue and increase the population of the area; this museum will be a celebration of architecture in the local area but also the ambition of where structural design is heading.

Something I asked myself early on was ‘why is the image of utopia always changing?’, it was something that I was intrigued about after my trip to the Sainsbury’s centre. Why I was interested by this statement was because people have previously stated that Utopia would be shaped in the style of specific appearances, however we have moved on from this perception being the ideal place to live. My understanding is that Utopia will always change to try and accomplish the ideal world to live in because we are always developing and creating new technology that allows the human race to discover new ways to push the boundary of design within structure.

Some problems that occurred when working autonomously in this brief was finding an opening where I could explore my specialism from another approach. I found it difficult to keep to my time plan as I was always finding myself engrossed in the practical aspects, from this I wasn’t always creating enough development pieces. I wanted to overcome this by throwing myself out of my comfort zone and experience new ways of working throughout this project.

By not having a clear prearranged pathway from the original brief did worry me at the beginning, but how I overcame this was by outlining what my ambitions and aims where going to be at the beginning of each week though the time planner.

My most relevant research came from trips to museums and locations of interest, I was able to see the structures in person which gave me a better representation of how I could produce some observational drawings but also experience the scale and shape of the buildings. This added depth to my visual research because its sometimes difficult to appreciate the size of the building or its features from pictures.

For this project I had a variety of research that I feel this has helped me observe different styles that people have introduced to the design industry. I would have never of found this through one source, I used some architecture magazines that I had previously brought, and they outlined the advantages and disadvantages of self-building your home, if I didn’t have these magazines I found have never of considered researching into property and house development. By having a breadth of books also helped early on, as I was able to vision my intensions from my proposal which had heavily been influenced by architecture in obscure environments.

By having an early range sources allowed me to develop and focus my research, for example from reading ‘Architecture Competitions’ I came across an architect called Zaha Hadid who later I researched further into and found her work to significantly influential to this project, due to her designs having irregular forms that could be distinguished as a Bespoke Building’.

I found that my research connected throughout the project as from my analysis of Zaha Hadid’s work it reminded me of another architect and designer called Frank Gehry whose work was also followed the irregular and chaotic pattern that I am interested, this was starting to establish a common theme throughout. My research did take a tangent in looking into more abstract and natural aspects of architecture, this allowed me to establish the context of my project in more detail as looking into the works of Theo Van Doesburg and understanding how he can make something with such detail be broken down into simple geometric form has helped me comprehend how this could be applied to almost anything not just natural forms

For this project my experimentations have been varied as I wanted to explore a range of methods of working in different workshops. The successes of this project were my wide range of drawing techniques that I have learnt overtime on this course such as continuous line drawing, quick observational drawing and having new abilities in digital that have allow me to alter imagery. With these drawing techniques it has given me the opportunity to develop them in an area that I am most confident in which is in the 3D workshop where I have been able to make model responses to classroom workshop and my drawings.

This allowed me to recap on my comfort zones and identify what they were but also how I could use the too effect my project. I was able to engage with areas that I’m not too familiar with for example the ceramics workshop. I outlined that there was a lot of potential in this area that I hadn’t consider before, which lead to me gaining a wider breadth of resources to experiment with to reach my final outcome.

I investigated my theme through an array of different resources that I consider. One task I created was a response to the work of Frank Gehry, by using wire structure that I could mould and manipulate to different positions that created a new drawing point. I felt this would allow me to draw freely and capture the looseness of Gehry’s sketching techniques.

My research was what helped me develop my experimentations the most because I was always able to respond to something that then could lead me on to further developments of the original Idea. For example, my location research was originally just quick rough sketches of interesting buildings in the area. However, from this I took this drawings into the workshop and made them come alive in a basic 3D form that gave them more detail and a purpose. I was always looking for how I could further my work, with this I used my wooden maquette I decided to cast them using plaster in the ceramics workshop where I was completely out of the comfort zone, but without this workshop I would never learned a skill that would influence my final piece.

With this project I have refined skills in the workshop that will help in my progression route at university. How I have done this is by speaking with the industry professionals at college and explaining my visions of what I intended my work to appear like. To get their experiences on the most effective way I could approach my task; this could have been though discussions I had about the best way I could shape and join my maquettes.

With this project I intended to produce a structure that would have the potentials to increase the economy in the local area and the popularity as well, the outcome as a whole has been a success in opinion as I have produced a body of work that supports my decisions through out the project.

Even though there have been developments with what I proposed to produce, I found that these differences have allowed me to lead this project in a more exciting way as I have been able to explore the development of architecture in how I see the perception of utopia is always changing.

The processes and materials I used for this project were the correct ones for me, because early on I identified my strengths and weaknesses to allow the time to explore into processes that aren’t first nature for me but also leave me enough time to develop my strengths in 3D to create a combination of a variety tests and approaches that I have taken to complete my targets.

The Duration for this brief was a factor that I wasn’t overly concerned about at the start because with the time planner it allowed me to see what was set out for that week ahead and where I had space to do research or develop work in. Further into the project I found myself getting to engrossed in the workshops which lead to me over running my own deadlines I set for myself, even though I was being productive and efficient there were times that I realised that I should have been trying to approach this project from anther angle.

The most successful outcomes I produced leading up to my final outcome were my loose drawing exercises based on research, why I believe that these little tasks were so successful were because at the start of the project I was overthinking my role, being the architect. I was always trying to complicate everything by already attempting to create a finished outcome without having any test pieces. Using these loose drawing exercises gave me more freedom to create a range of large scale imagery that was built up using linework, this then lead to me identifying ‘structures within structures’. I was able to later refine these drawings into more detailed representations of modern buildings.

By not only having tutor reviews but having peer assessment and discussions has allowed me to interact with people that are in a similar situation. Having the opportunity to compare my work with other peers is closest to industry standard where I can see the work of others and discuss the successes of their work or mine to identify what’s missing or what could be done better to improve the quality of the work. This opportunity has lead me to bounce ideas off a larger audience rather than just my tutor meaning their opinions have been more diverse slightly than just one dimensional. I believe by having this feedback has allowed me to improve and develop my project more than I intended as I had the ability to get my peers input in drawing tasks to see how they would possibly approach this from their perspective.

If I were to do this project again I believe I would consider taking a similar approach but possibly not restrict myself early on in the workshop. Something I would have been keen was experimenting with more materials to create test pieces and observe whether the visual language would change dependant on the materials or whether the different properties of the material could have made it easier or harder to work with. I did explore new processes for this project in the ceramics workshop, I feel this was only a start and I could have continued this further.

Another area for improvement that could have directed this project further would have been to use a broader range of research, since I may have been too conservative from mostly researching architects. If I had a breadth of artist and designer outside of the industry I believe it would have given me the opportunity to explore structural design from and outsider’s perspective this therefore could have meant my visions wouldn’t have been as one dimensional.

Something I would have liked to push further was my questioning of utopia because I believe that these statements could have as given some more clarity to my project on how my designs could fit into the ideal world. Is humanity too greedy in picturing Utopia? Or are we under valuing the image of Utopia?

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jodieedmundsclientstudies-blog · 7 years ago

Photo

After meeting up with the other curators we appointed someone to write a brief for the theme ‘wild’ to send out to the class so that people could start working on their illustrations for the show. We also decided on a deadline to make sure that all the work would be turned in with enough time for us to go through it and decide which pieces would be printed and showcased. We asked everyone to send the images to an email in PDF format or to put them in the drop box created on the computers on campus. We did this to make sure that we would receive the images all in the same format so that once we had chosen which images would be printed, they were ready to go and wouldn’t need any additional tweaking of sizing etc. We then made a plan to go away, do some brainstorming and come back next week with our ideas.

I set up a Pinterest board and started pinning ideas for how we could decorate the show. It was quite difficult to visualise because we were waiting for another team to set up which venue we’d be exhibiting in, but I was aiming to come up with ideas that would be cheap and more prop-like that could be inserted into any venue and then thrown away at the end of the show. So, I started thinking about what materials would be attainable and inexpensive, so I searched for origami-inspired paper-art that we could create ourselves that would fit into the ‘wild’ theme. I didn’t want it to be too obvious, like origami tigers and lions, but I did want to create a particular atmosphere through imagery. So, I found some examples of 3D paper leaves, that would’ve consisted of just finding some large card in a variety of colours, greens and browns for a ‘wild’ theme, and cutting out a large leaf shape to recreate. I have done a lot of paper folding in previous projects, so I felt it was something I could’ve achieved that would’ve added to the displays. I thought we could’ve hung them above all of the artwork, so that the illustrations emerged from underneath the tips of the leaves, creating ‘swinging through the jungle’ imagery. I also thought we could’ve made miniature versions of these paper leaves, and written out the labels on them, or at least mounted the labels onto them. Since we had access to the wooden boards that last year’s class had used, I thought we could’ve used those to display the artwork on which would’ve mimicked the texture of tree trunks. I also thought it would be eye-catching and theme-fitting to have someone live-drawing tropical leaves on the window of the venue using chalk markers that could be washed away after the exhibition was finished. While it was not my team’s responsibility, I felt as though the way we had to curate the artwork and choose what fit in with the theme, should be taken throughout the project and applied to everything.

Following this brainstorm, I took my ideas into my next group tutorial where we met with our tutor and original group to see what they had been getting up to within their own teams. I presented my ideas that I truly felt would’ve added to the overall concept, however I felt as though my ideas had been perceived as gimmick-y and a bit of a waste of time. To have combatted this, I think if I had gone in with images of what I aimed to create, and a mock-up of the leaf designs to show the level I could’ve executed it at, my idea may have been taken more positively, rather than relying on my explanation of it. I understand that others, and potential clients after I graduate, may not be able to visualise exactly what is in my head so in order for my ideas to be understood as I intend them to be, I need to use visuals to my advantage in the future. In hindsight, I should have made the Pinterest board public and informed the rest of the curation team via the Facebook group to allow them to all to contribute to it. Had I have done this, then they would’ve all seen what my ideas were and may have liked them, meaning I could’ve taken my ideas forward and been responsible for an extra dimension of the exhibition.

I came away from the tutorial feeling fairly misunderstood and stumped for what to do next to contribute to the show. Other people on my team were very hands on and while I had asked on several occasions if there was anything I could get involved in, I was met with the response that it was all under control as individual people had taken on more jobs than I personally think was their share, before anyone else had the chance.

Following these tutorials, I searched for a way to get more involved, so I spoke to a couple of teammates who seemed to not have anything specific to do either and we created a table on Word that we could upload to google drive that everyone could write the information in that they wanted displayed on their label next to their work at the show. We made space for people to write their name, the title of their artwork and their social media contact details so that visitors at the show would be able to find them if they enjoyed their work or wanted to commission some work. We uploaded it to google drive and people started to add their details, which then other members of the team used to create the display labels. I enjoyed doing this because I felt like I had helped to get something done.

In my own time I also worked on a new piece to submit to the exhibition as well as sifted through my archives of work from past projects that might fit into the ‘wild’ theme. I came across two old pieces of work (shown above), one is a portrait of Lana Del Rey will a lyric of one of her songs, “Come and Take a Walk on the Wild Side”, because while the image itself is not jungle themed, the use of the word ‘wild’ and the surrounding tropical leaves, could tie it in. I also handed in a couple of images that went towards an alternative poster I created for the film ‘Rio’, which is about tropical birds in Rio. I felt like this tied in because of the tropical nature of it, although I had originally designed it to come away from symbolic green leaves and use colour to express its animated genre, so I was unsure if this would fit but sent it in anyway. I wanted to hand in older work because it meant I could choose pieces that hadn’t been rushed in one week. However, I was unsure if these images would be chosen so I decided to create an illustration that would purposely fit the theme, because I felt it was important to take the opportunity to get my work seen by the public. I designed a simple, geometric Toucan that was intended to be a fun, short project that I could turn in quickly as I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it and develop it. I named it ‘Who can? Toucan.”, to show that it was meant to be a light-hearted illustration. I was thrilled to see that the Lana Del Rey and Toucan illustrations had been chosen to be shown because normally when I hear that something is ‘optional’ I will opt out but this time I ceased the opportunity to get my work out there, which is a feeling I will try to remember in future.

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vaanibct · 7 years ago

Text

Movement and Motion

Day 30 (19-09-17)

Today, I came to Studio ready to make progress. Recently, I had been feeling that we were facing some problems that we can’t seem to resolve quickly. I thought that we’d be at this stage a bit later on, but looking around, mostly all the groups seem to be stuck as well. So, I guess the only way out is to talk about it and get things done.

Yesterday, we thought of some conceptual ideas, and looking at them today, we’d like to focus more on the aspect of “confusion.” Like Ricardo said yesterday, we should look into “playing” with people’s emotions - like everyone in BCT is trying to do - but this will help us consider which methods are best at evoking a feeling and we could then develop / iterate it further.

When Miranda reached dour group, we were still a bit lost. Looking at the conceptual ideas we wrote yesterday, she suggested a thinking activity - Lotus Blossom [1]. So, following her suggestion, we used sticky notes to write down some emotions that we could test with. And then, we focused on each emotion to understand how that emotion is evoked in people.

Reflection on Action:

I quite liked this activity as we thought about how / in which situations are the chosen emotions stimulated in ourselves. Our main discussion was around “hunger” (because we’re hungry all the time), and when do we feel hungry / which senses evoke this feeling. But, we also liked the idea of confusing people. One of the suggestions I made - Deja vu - was taken considerably. However, this is a technique that would be extremely difficult to test or prototype. Since everyone’s day passes differently, we cant really use “deja vu” as a method of evoking confusion. In all honesty though, I quite liked this concept and wanted to research more about its principles, which I will.

Anyway, when Miranda came around again, she also seemed to like the idea of Deja Vu. However, we decided to see if “conflicting / misleading information” could evoke confusion as well. So, I brought up the idea of an impossible Sudoku (I love solving Sudoku’s) which then lead to an idea given by Kelvin - a crossword.

Thinking more about this idea, we discussed how a crossword would make people feel confused (although most of them are quite difficult and I can never do one). But we ended up thinking about something that we didn’t have to put a lot of effort into but we would still get similar results - a word search. Now, a word-find can be quite easy so we decided to insert words in the search that aren’t on the list. The words in the word-find would be “feelings,” however, the list of the words will contain the antonyms of the feelings. So, not finding words that are on the list would definitely confuse people as they wouldn’t know what they’re supposed to the looking for.

To be honest, I like this idea as it is simple to prototype now and we can definitely iterate after comparing the results. In terms of our brief, it relates to “ a (multi-sensory) work that stimulates the senses to evoke an emotional response within the participants.” - the only difference is that the work will not be screen-based at the moment. But, our purpose is still the same.

Using a “word search generator” (a website), we wrote down 16 “feelings” to include in the word-find, but we changed the list of words to the antonyms of the “feelings.” Kelvin and Shades both contribute to this, and Shades printed several copies of it.

We decided to leave it here for today and do the test tomorrow. Overall, I’m quite happy with our progress because, as said on Monday, we needed to have a Prototype done by Wednesday, so, we seem to be on track. However, secretly, I feel like we’re working too slowly, especially compared to other groups. The main reason for this could be due to the unawareness of our direction with this project, because we had been thinking out changing our idea a bit, and we just don’t know how to test it or what to do. Nevertheless, I may feel differently tomorrow, after we finally have a prototype tested.

Research - Déjà vu

Reading this article [2] I was quite surprised by how easily I could relate to the information.

“This mysterious feeling, commonly known as déjà vu, occurs when we feel that a new situation is familiar, even if there is evidence that the situation could not have occurred previously. For a long time, this eerie sensation has been attributed to everything from paranormal disturbances to neurological disorders. However, in recent years, as more scientists began studying this phenomenon, a number of theories about déjà vu have emerged, suggesting that it is not merely a glitch in our brain’s memory system.”

Recognition memory is the one that allows us to realise that the situation we’re currently experiencing has already happened before, because our brain fluctuates between memory and familiarity. Personally, I’ve felt like I have been in “this” situation before, many times, however, it could be possible that I may have either wanted to be in this position, or had just thought about / dreamt something similar. These situations leave me feeling extremely confused because I know that it will stay on my mind for the rest of the day.

In the article, they tested a scenario using Deja vu to understand how the brain recognises a re-occurring situation.

“...ran experiments to figure out what features or elements of situations could trigger feelings of familiarity. During a word recognition test, some of the words on the test resembled the earlier words, although only in sound (e.g. lady sounds similar to eighty), but the volunteers reported a sense of familiarity for the new words, even when they could not recall the earlier-presented, similar-sounding words that were the source of this familiarity. Previous research has also shown that people feel familiarity when shown a visual fragment containing isolated geometric shapes from an earlier experience. This suggests that familiar geometric shapes may create the sense that an entire new scene has been viewed before.”

I don’t know if this experiment counts as “deja vu” or more of a memory test, but I guess that deja vu is somewhat like an outburst from our brain, trying to remember if this situation is familiar or not - “déjà vu is a sign that your brain’s memory checking system is working well, and that you’re less likely to misremember events.” [3]

Overall, I found this research quite helpful, but I’m still unsure of which kinds of methods we can use to test Deja vu. I know that it definitely causes a sense of confusion, speaking from personal experience, but we will need to test it using different techniques on the same people so that they realise that they’re forced to feel confused. I think that I will try to come up with an idea that we can test, and tell the group when the concept seems doable. But I would definitely like to prototype using “deja vu” to evoke confusion because it seems like a fun way and messing with people’s head is kind of funny.

References: [1] https://thoughtegg.com/lotus-blossom-creative-technique/ [2] https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/the-psychology-of-deja-vu.html [3] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2101089-mystery-of-deja-vu-explained-its-how-we-check-our-memories/

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#Movement #Motion #ctec503 #ctec503Movement

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ryandrawsbirds · 7 years ago

Text

in medias res

Ashley and I are bound for Hampton Roads and I have ten minutes to make a bird happen. I’ve told myself all along that finishing a bird after midnight still counts—it’s the lived day that matters, not what the calendar says—but I can’t count on having enough time or space in the hotel for doodling. I already feel a latent pang of guilt at the thought of dashing off a piece of crap from the wooden comfort of a hotel couch. In any case, I’ll be tired. I need something quick—straight edges, not much variation in color—in order to complete my daily task, the new year’s resolution I’ve sustained more dutifully than any other I’ve taken up: draw one bird a day. Simple.

I rub my phone with my thumb impatiently, dragging my birding-Instagram feed upwards, bird after bird, until I stop on a handsome brown, white, and gold bird with one eye visible, a day-sky-blue iris and a night-sky-black pupil. The bird crouches on a light gray, leafless tree branch, hunched over as if listening intently to some noise, low and distant, off-screen. The branch bends slightly in the bottom right of the frame to give the bird a more comfortable 75-degree angle to cling to. I press ‘more’ below the picture to learn what it is: a white-throated laughingthrush, Garrulax albogularis. This will do, I say to myself, before expunging the trace negativity embedded in that remark with an unformed but distinct mental gesture toward the bird’s beauty. A majestic bird, I find myself thinking, correcting (correctly) any negativity by finding the same words I have repeated to myself many times this year, an incantation that functions as an exultation at discovery—“Eureka!”—but also as a kind of honorarium for the bird itself and the photographer who captured it.

I screencap the photograph, airdrop it to my laptop, turn to the next page of my sketchbook, and put pen to paper. I start, as I tend to, with its claws, inking their knotty shape before outlining the branch they cling to. The claws are anchors; they hold both the bird and my drawing in place. I outline the right claws first, easy enough, definite lines to mark. I glance at the photo on my computer, back at the page in front of me, then again to the screen before returning finally to the page to move my pen an inch-and-a-half downward from the right claws to where the left will be. I draw claws there that work; they’re slightly chubbier than the other ones, but, I note with relief, not out of proportion with the photo. It’s not my fault that bird’s left claws look bigger than its right ones, I tell myself.

My eyes move back to the right claws and, without thinking, a new trick begins to take shape in my mind’s eye. The edge of the bird’s wing––start there next, it’s just above the right claws and slightly, measurably, to the left. I draw the line quickly and decisively. There are few feelings better than moving a pen quickly across paper with a conviction that tells you what you’re doing is right. It is a sensation that says keep going, and it’s rare and fulfilling to find purpose distilled in life, especially when you weren’t really looking for it in the first place. The line is true, and I move the pen just as quickly upward, slanting the back of the bird’s head and pausing at the crown. A quick glance at the picture and I move the pen forward half a centimeter. I’m getting ahead of myself; the conviction does not grant invincibility, of course, and you’re always susceptible to screwing up. I move the pen forward again, hovering slightly above the page so that I don’t make a mark, to the point where the top of the beak should begin. I drop the pen and mark a small dot as a point of reference. I complete the shape of the bird’s head, this time moving the pen left to meet the crown.

I did something new there, I note quickly; rather than using the sides of the page or my own visual read of the entire photo as a frame of reference, I used the contours of the bird itself. I give a name to what I just did—I used variable scale, I have decided—and carry on drawing.

Other than getting the scale right, there is nothing I struggle more with than accurately shaping a bird’s head. Each is distinct and often intricately detailed; I have a bad habit of focusing so intently on those intricacies that I ‘zoom in’ and inadvertently enlarge them, rendering the bird’s head out of proportion with the rest of what I’ve already inked. I’m new to drawing and am likewise new to the rush toward completion that feels organic and thereby good. A line begun aches to be completed. When I’m moving my pen quickly, with purpose, I cultivate a distant glimmer of the final product, and if I’m not careful I grow disembodied from the real work of drawing: ‘This image will exist, by God, for my hand is divining it through magic.’ Pausing along the way only slows the magic down.

And so every time I pick up a pen there’s at least one moment where I think I’ll nail this one just by flicking ink onto a page majestically, an image of artistry born more of movie montages than of a fundamental understanding of what it means to create. The purpose I find intoxicating doesn’t come from magic, and it certainly doesn’t come from haste, but rather from the patience and focus that help me study the details of a bird as one approaches a language to be learned. My passive acceptance of a magic I know doesn’t exist feels related to that sense of immortality I’ve carried with me my entire life. Whenever my thoughts turn to death or dying, it’s there reassuring me: This is sad, yes, but you are immortal, so don’t worry—a childlike argument that my subconscious has never seen fit to alter, perhaps precisely because it’s childlike. It loses more of its believability with each passing year. One day I will die. This bird won’t draw itself.

I look at what I’ve done. This time it’s right: good. I put a dot where the bottom of the beak will begin, holding off for now before actually drawing it. If getting the shape of a bird’s head is difficult, the beak surely is the most challenging element of that task. I make quick, short squiggles downward and just barely to the left for the fuzzy white throat that must give this particular bird its name. Another thought takes shape: the bird’s throat runs to where its left wing begins, and that point is clearly an inch southeast from the back of the bird’s neck, which I’ve already drawn. I don’t think, Move the pen here; I just do it.

Whatever part of my brain connects to the muscle movement of my right hand is working faster than I can verbalize. The mechanics of this gives me pause, but only in retrospect: how can my non-verbal mind teach itself something? I understand what it means to learn from yourself—I am a teacher, after all, with some basic knowledge of educational psychology—but this feels different. It’s as if I’m learning from a different part of myself I can’t readily access or even detect. It feels not unlike learning from something or someone else. More questions arise: is what I learn from myself already part of me before I’ve learned it? Does my identity include the skill I have but haven’t realized, what I own but haven’t found? If the answer is ‘no,’ then the image of myself I present to the world—and I am very much part of that world—must be considerably reduced. Am I simply the culmination of what I’ve learned about myself and my abilities, and not much more? To answer this question is to decide whether I am a real artist, or at least a good artist: am I creative, tapping into genuine skill, or novice, tapping into… nothing?

It’s at moments like these, when question leads to question, that it’s helpful to return to all it is I’m doing: learning to draw by practicing, on the cheap, looking at pictures of birds and then trying to mimic them. Maybe the repetition of this act has allowed me to reach something deeper, to render in distinct and isolated terms the learning process: Here’s where I understood the variability of scale, I can think now, on April 21st. I learned a trick that day, or found one—somehow, from somewhere.

I’m not counting, but at this point I’m probably five or six minutes in. Four minutes until I have to leave. The shape looks good but the bird never seems real until I draw the eyes. Birds’ eyes are not usually perfect circles. They have funny little angles at either end of their equators, little dips into their face that extinguish any desire to plop cartoon circles above their beaks. I make a slight oval about 60-degrees northwest of the beak and draw a circular iris which I immediately ink. Things are moving more quickly now. I draw the patch around its eye that begins near the end of its beak and trace the stray indentation that moves toward the back of its head. The bird looks outward now; the bird feels real.

I draw the beginning of its right wing down to the branch before finishing the branch in hasty fashion. I’ve done this without pausing—without thinking—and the branch looks more authentic than any I have managed to pull off this year. By working quickly, I have captured each subtle dip and knot. I work just as quickly to sketch the tail feathers below the branch; I note that they end just to the left of an invisible line that extends 90-degrees upward to its eye. Variable scale.

Moving faster, with a couple minutes remaining. I don’t have time to stare deeply at the photograph to ensure accuracy, and yet a quick glance confirms that the tail feathers also look more authentic than I normally achieve. Drawn in haste, they look ruffled, layered; they’re not simple geometric patterns but textured surfaces that overlap.

It’s now almost time to go, so I stop to look at what I’ve done. My drawing is not what I call ‘finished.’ I like to begin with lightly drawn lines before darkening them to make the bird discrete from the whiteness of the page. If drawing its eyes vivifies the bird, so too does inking it give it a firmer claim to existence. But I like this drawing the way it is. Something about the way the bird bends; I have managed to convey real motion. The bird is not a silhouette but a creature with depth.

Time to go. I tell myself I can finish the drawing quickly and easily at the hotel, but I begin to suspect I’ll just leave it as it is: a lesson learned. Draw freely, Ryan, not with the careless abandon of a movie montage but with resolve, with the gift-whisper keep going that gives you something weighty to pick up and carry. The bird is more finished now than I could make it by adding to it. I leave it.

What did I do differently this time? One thing is clear: I didn’t think, or rather I didn’t settle on the kind of hapless fretting my anxiety often confuses with thinking. The truth is I don’t know what it means to be an artist, but I have discovered some of the artistic narratives I will naturally assign myself if I’m not careful: the frenzied scribbler, dashing away a drawing that will look good insofar as sheer luck allows it to; or the sluggish pedant, a wannabe ornithologist questioning each and every move my inexpert hands make—for it’s a surface sluggishness only, one that creates the illusion of composure simply by turning the frenzy inward. The purpose I covet resides somewhere in the middle.

I drew this bird on April 21, 2017, in the middle of what began as a yearlong project to draw one bird a day. I drew this bird by starting in the middle as well, beginning with a line at the back of its neck. There’s nowhere a bird ‘begins,’ after all, but you have to start somewhere.

#longform #essay #sketchbook #memoir #narrative #drawing

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