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I'm going to stop the Ruby's Escape drawings; they're not what I wanted and I don't know where to go next. When I'm like this, wondering about what next, I go back to doing simple drawings, sometimes iconic little things, just looking for an image, a motif or a line, a shape or a space, just looking for a launching point into something else.
I don't know about your monitor, but on mine that blue surrounded by red just pops, even though it dramatically drops back behind the red. Drawing-wise the blue is the figure and the red is the ground, but spatially, forced by color, the red is the solid and the blue is a void.
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Reading material:
I repeat, the latest issue of Rudolf's Diner, the theme of which is Gratitude, December 2003, is now online.
The December Interactive University News is out.
Some people asked me, "What happened? Did Ruby escape?" No, I've just had this title in mind for awhile; what Ruby escaped from was a bad home situation into our lives, which of course, if I do say so myself, is an excellent situation. These drawings are about her leaving one place for another, for a better place. There's no narrative, and I don't know where these will go or how many there will be.
The drawings of last week, "Smokey, Jackie, Jackie, Mookie," culminated in a final set that evolved out of six iterations. Sometime back I had written down chains of names based on first and last names: Smokey Robinson's last name leads to Jackie Robinson, whose first name leads to Jackie Wilson, whose last name lead to Mookie Wilson. All of the names I did like this were of African Americans. I could've gone from, say, Jackie Wilson to Flip Wilson, or any other variation. I liked the symmetry of singer, baseball player, singer, baseball player. Also I like the sound in each name of the hard "k" and the ending "y" vowel. Originally the list was six or seven names, but I lost it, and just did these four. For a bunch of silly drawings based on blocks of color doing four of these drawings everyday, each an extension of the previous day's drawings, was pretty engaging and a little challenging.