Parasite of the Ripening Fruit: New Drawings in Progress

I’m working on a few drawings in the evenings to get that 2013 into my portfolio! Neither of these is done yet. I’ve just been drawing in graphite and laying in some watercolor washes. I plan on going in with some ink and more graphite. I have another drawing planned out in my mind to start on next, as well. It involves some goats.

I’ve set up the kitchen table as my drawing space while Blake is away. There’s great light in here with the double glass doors, plus I’ve left the art up on the walls in this room and I can make hot tea anytime I want it! I need to finish painting this table one of these days. I rescued it from behind a screen printing place I used to work, where it had just been sitting outside in the rain for weeks, months, years–who knows! I figured it must be a good table if it was still holding up after that.

I took this photograph last night while I was working on drawings and watching things on Hulu. You can see to the left the beginnings of a long row of boxes. Most of the downstairs is packed, besides my little corner of the kitchen. Not too much left to do upstairs, either. I’m taking a break from packing right now, though, while I make some art and get my Online Art Appreciation course set up.

Also in progress is a hand bound book I’ve been working on for several years now. It’s called, ironically, Field Guide to Brevity, VOL. V., and it is approximately 380 pages in length. Progress is slow on this project. It is difficult to be pithy. Basically, as a long-time collector of quotes (who actually feels that, in general, it is a silly and dumb thing to do–collecting quotes. I mean, they never really say what the full work intended. It’s like making Cliff’s Notes for a life’s worth of reading, and that just makes me feel like a cheater. I always think of the rather naive character in Sunshine of the Spotless Mind who is forever quoting from her Bartlett’s as if it were something profound,) I’m compiling a book of quotes drawing from my 3 Rubbermaid containers full of sketchbooks created since the 2nd grade. In addition to drawing, making collages, and writing down embarrassing statements about boys-I-liked, I also copied down quotes from whatever I was reading at the time. I’m now culling through these pounds and pounds of third-hand, cut-short knowledge and regurgitating it into a new completely-useless form. Perhaps there will be a Kindle Edition one day.

To complete this cycle, I shall now share a quote from this Field Guide to Brevity, which is, itself, a quote from Nabokov’s Pnin:

“This research had long entered the charmed stage when the quest overrides the goal, and a new organism is formed, the parasite, so to speak, of the ripening fruit.”
–p. 143