LOL of the medusa

original url http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Meadows/7173/

Now you’re diddling. Now you’re diddling.

Gary Panter is someone who knows very good things about keeping a sketchbook. I’m looking forward to seeing what you do in you composition notebooks while I’m away.

Love,

Professor Sluggo

From the “Unbored” website:  from the great GARY PANTER INTRODUCTION

Get a book-size (or paperback-size)d sketchbook. Write your name and date on an early page and maybe think of a name for it — and if you want, write the book’s name there at the front. Make it into your little painful pal. The pain goes away slowly page by page. Fill it up and do another one. It can be hard to get started. Don’t flunk yourself before you get the ball rolling.

You might want to draw more realistically or in perspective or so it looks slick — that’s is possible and there are tricks and procedures for drawing with more realism if you desire it. But drawing very realistically with great finesse can sometimes produce dead uninteresting drawings — relative, that is, to a drawing with heart and charm and effort but no great finesse.

You can make all kinds of rules for your art making, but for starting in a sketchbook, you need to jump in and get over the intimidation part — by messing up a few pages, ripping them out if need be. Waste all the pages you want by drawing a tic tac toe schematic or something, painting them black, just doodle. Every drawing will make you a little better. Every little attempt is a step in the direction of drawing becoming a part of your life.

TIPS

1. Quickly subdivide a page into a bunch of boxes by drawing a set of generally equidistant vertical lines, then a set of horizontal lines so that you have between 6 and 12 boxes or so on the page. In each box, in turn, in the simplest way possible, name every object you can think of and draw each thing in a box, not repeating. If it is fun, keep doing this on following pages until you get tired or can’t think of more nouns. Now you see that you have some kind of ability to typify the objects in your world and that in some sense you can draw anything.

2. Choose one of the objects that came to mind that you drew and devote one page to drawing that object with your eyes closed, starting at the “nose” of the object (in outline or silhouette might be good) and following the contour you see in your mind’s eye, describing to yourself in minute detail what you know about the object. You can use your free hand to keep track of the edge of the paper and ideally your starting point so that you can work your way back to the designated nose. Don’t worry about proportion or good drawing this is all about memory and moving your hand to find the shapes you are remembering. The drawing will be a mess, but if you take your time, you will see that you know a lot more about the object than you thought.

3. Trace some drawings you like to see better what the artist’s pencil or pen is doing. Tracing helps you observe closer. Copy art you like — it can’t hurt.

4. Most people (even your favorite artists) don’t like their drawings as much as they want to. Why? Because it is easy to imagine something better. This is only ambition, which is not a bad thing — but if you can accept what you are doing, of course you will progress quicker to a more satisfying level and also accidentally make perfectly charming drawings even if they embarrass you.

5. Draw a bunch more boxes and walk down a sidewalk or two documenting where the cracks and gum and splotches and leaves and mowed grass bits are on the square. Do a bunch of those. That is how nature arranges and composes stuff. Remember these ideas — they are in your sketchbook.

6. Sit somewhere and draw fast little drawings of people who are far away enough that you can only see the big simple shapes of their coats and bags and arms and hats and feet. Draw a lot of them. People are alike yet not — reduce them to simple and achievable shapes.

7. To get better with figure drawing, get someone to pose — or use photos — and do slow drawing of hands, feet, elbows, knees, and ankles. Drawing all the bones in a skeleton is also good, because it will help you see how the bones in the arms and legs cross each other and affect the arms’ and legs’ exterior shapes. When you draw a head from the side make sure you indicate enough room behind the ears for the brain case.

8. Do line drawings looking for the big shapes, and tonal drawing observing the light situation of your subject — that is, where the light is coming from and where it makes shapes in shade on the form, and where light reflects back onto the dark areas sometimes.

9. To draw the scene in front of you, choose the middle thing in your drawing and put it in the middle of your page — then add on to the drawing from the center of the page out.

10. Don’t worry about a style. It will creep up on you and eventually you will have to undo it in order to go further. Be like a river and accept everything.

This is very good advice.

Sincerely,

August 2015

October 2016

April 2017

July 2017

September 2018

December 2018

June 2019

February 2020

August 2020

[I was going to send a letter about this article, but the comments section was such a trash fire that I’m just going to put it here.]

I absolutely agree that Twitter and Tumblr viral call-out culture is destructive and in some cases abusive. And it is sadly true that queer women’s history is fragmented, poorly archived, ignored, and swept under the carpet.  As a bisexual GenXer who grew up under the shadow of the Lesbian Sex Wars, i believe it is vital that we know our history to avoid repeating it.

When I was a teenager, lesbian feminism and lesbian separatism were the only visible queer women’s community and they represented a very narrow segment of the spectrum of queer women’s identities. All the messy, imperfect, visceral parts of lesbian history and sexuality: butch/femme, bisexuality, sex work, addiction, BDSM, trans people, as well as feminist thinkers whose views were considered insufficiently ideologically pure, were excluded from the conversation and from lesbian spaces.

Reading Adrienne Rich in a feminist literature class in high school is how I learned that I was not pure enough to call myself a lesbian, and pushed me towards identities like queer and bisexual.

As a queer kid in the late 80s, I already felt like a pervert. Having my desires branded false consciousness and collaboration with the patriarchy by the dominant strain of puritanical feminism only pushed me away from feminist spaces and in search of something else. What I found were the seedy, luminal spaces. Rocky Horror Picture Show, the first generation of internet cafes, queer BDSM, drug user and sex worker activism.

When years later I read Ellen Willis, Pat Califia, Dorothy Allison, and Gayle Rubin (all early second wave feminists who got purged from the movement) I learned that the history of second wave feminism had always been richer and more complicated than it appeared.

A hyena murdered this man.