Herion- the Velvet Underground

Heroin.
You think, female hero? Then you think...no. That's not quite right. (I mean, that could be the stuff that the heroine was on to save the world...but heroin does not equal heroine and that's that!) But that's just the heroin part.. (and how I thought of Alice, who is a hero in Wonderland).

I love the name "The Velvet Underground​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​". It makes me think of moles in mauve velvet waistcoats and spectacles a-rest on their noses scurrying through their doily infested chambers which are their homes. And with that, I think of Wind in the Willows. And childhood. And my all time favourite Disney movie from way back when, Alice in Wonderland.

This is photo from my bedroom. Tiny tiny chair with a tiny book with a dusty red leather cover, gold trimmed pages and black and white sketches of the original Alice In Wonderland. The point? General love and adoration of Lewis Carroll. He is an inspiration for weird thinking. And we all need more weird in our lives..

So back to songs and meanings and cool band names. I had originally done a drawing of moss, and the ground beneath it, put it upside down so it was the velvet (moss) under the ground.

It was terrible.

Luckily old Lewis, ever faithful, was sitting on my chair...

The velvet part is the ribbon in Alice's hair...and she's underground because silly thing fell down that rabbit hole..

And as for the whole heroin thing-I am reminded of when Alice drinks a bottle of unknown stuff because the label told her to. Similarly, she eats that mushroom from a hubbly-smoking caterpillar with millions of feet.
That sort of naivety is often how people get into drugs, that and pressure. Pressure from the general cool, no exact face. A label on a bottle...

(Lastly I have done two cover arts. The second with no banana skin. This is the alternative cover, which had a banana peel sticker on top of it, and you'd peel it off.)

I love this page.

The Boxer

2 playlists down, 25 days left, 8 to go! (Pressured much?) 


And so we come to The Wonderful Playlist of Fantastic Mr Fox. (Background info...Fantastic Mr Fox is Matthew. And he is this cool guy who is simply mad on the guitar.) 
Miles Wavis aka 47 ft. Fantastic Mr Fox - "the Mighty Bosch" from Matthew Dickinson on Vimeo.



So from his playlist I've chosen two songs, the first being The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel.



I then went all nature lover on my sketchbook and decided to show a figure putting up owl boxes.
In the shadow you can see the owls that are there thanks to it (and how far it gets determines the amount of homes for the owls...) Another thing...the figure doesn't have a gender, or a name, or represent someone. It is a representation of man. And how a single, anonymous person can made a noticable impact. 


The circle thing is the sun setting, I think. The sun setting on an idea, the idea finished. Completed. (Hence the red background).


Sometimes I don't know why I draw what I do...

Nevertheless.

Hero

People of the world, Happy Christmas!

Well it's been ages since I touched my sketchbook, and what more perfect a day to fill it than an overcast day, with Love Actually on a loop and eating marzipanned fruitcake day?

I chose another song from my playlist, "Hero" by Regina Spektor. (Awesome song. I did know it before I met the 500 Days of Summer playlist, however. (http://www.500days.com/500-days-of-summer-soundtrack-listing.html) A note on the movie, it had lovely clothes and actors and music...but that is it.)

Back to Hero, and what I did.

I decided to show a patriotic side, and with it, South Africa's pride in Nelson Mandela.

We are known as the rainbow nation, and his is the face of it. That's why it only made sense to show his face in all the colours of the South African flag (namely black, white, yellow, green, red and blue).

Here's to you, Madiba!

Ps. For interest's sake: Madiba is the name of the Xhosa tribe to which Mandela belongs. Culturally, it is a sign of respect to call someone by their tribe's name.

T-Dogg's playllist

My friend, Tyler, is a genius at making paper aeroplanes. In class one day he made about six different ones (which, coincidentally, hung in my res room for the rest of the semester).

So I decided to download this ebook (Campbell Morris's Advanced Paper Aircraft Construction to be exact) from res net, on how to make advanced paper aircraft, you know, out of jealousy and feminism and all things rivalling Tyler's skills.

Forgot about it. Until it came to Tyler's playlist...

Tyler's playlist I actually made as a sample to my friends who I mailed to ask for their playlists...I showed the example to Tyler, who decided to keep the playlist as it is because of the personal jokes associated with the songs.

(For instance Club Can't Handle Me, Indian Style). Too many procrastination nights with internet I'm afraid...

I still laugh every time I hear this song out.

Paper Planes- M.I.A was one of the songs that I'd put on the playlist. I remembered Tyler's nifty talent and my ebook...I found the most complex and cool plane and made it in the fold of the book. (Not so easy a task might I add!)

The writing is an exerpt from my mum's recipe book. No particular reason for it being the background other than the fact that I love the olden day look about it. It has my grandmothers writing in too, which adds sentimental value to me.

I hope people will realise that they need to tuck the plane's tail in before closing the book(!)

Staple it Together-Jack Johnson

This is a drawing of the cover art of Jack Johnson's album, In Between Dreams, from which Staple It Together comes. It represents the album covers which pop up when songs play on later generations of iPods. 

(The iPod in this sketchbook is actually a mixture of an iPod Classic Forth Generation, mixed with iPod Nano Second Generation and iPod Nano Forth Generation. It was a compromise of colour and font and memory space and size. And also shows my development of music through iPods as the iPods themselves developed. Just a quick footnote.)

The bottom border is a drawing of backwards staples and the real things are used on the left. And the yellow paper is from a Kodak photo envelope. Thanks Kodak, Jack Johnson should have shares in your paper!

The actual piece is inspired by Jeff Nishinaka's paper work animals which I found on a blog I was browsing. I was mind blown. I wanted to be him. I wanted to be that good.               (http://www.jeffnishinaka.com/)

I decided to try...but I had no glue. And I had no pencils...so no designing, scissors to paper, I cut and cut and masking taped and stapled. And I made something that, I'll admit, was not what I expected, but altogether something cool. I scouted the house for a pencil and eventually found the glue.. And that is how my interpretation came about!

Jessie's Playlist

Someone had to get the ball rolling....


My playlist may have possibly the most boring name in the world, and not quite my favourite songs, but I looked to the songs I do genuinely like which were inspiring me at 22:00. 
And these were them. 
Voilá.

(Yes, the background of this playlist is the Classified section of the newspaper. Part cover-up from the left-handed curse of smudging and part self-entertainment are the snippets included around each song title. My personal favourite being "There Are Tiny Beasts In Th...foldable toy watches".)

Back to six songs...I think I'll use three in my journal. So far...I've used one.

The Playlists

Going back to the sketchbook which is actually an iPod, but not...I'm one of those people who has a gazillion playlists on my iPod, you know.... from driving to get x-rays playlists to late night studying ones, I've pretty much seen them all..

And I have awesome friends.

So the logical conclusion was to have 9 friends to join me in making a playlist for my iPod sketchbook. Six songs are all that show up on the screen...that and the playlist's name.

Ten playlists, 6 songs, an iPod with 60 songs.

I asked them to get creative.

They include their best songs, and what songs best describe them. The symbols and letters and wording used is entirely up to them...

As are the songs. 

From these songs I choose one, maybe four, and use the name or meaning or what-not from the songs to fill this book of mine.

Not all of them are in yet, but so far I'm boggled by the song choices, learning some more from the friends I thought I knew so well.

This way, music and love are tied in to one. 

(Which, let's face it, they always are.)

This is not a sketchbook

In 1968 artist Michel Foucault painted "Ceci n'est pas une pipe". When translated it comes down to "This is not a pipe". 

Bizarre? Certainly.

Welcome to the art movement Dadaism. This post WWI movement abandoned all tradition and form of usual art. The mind frame in this work is this-is-art-because-I-say-so.Dadaism was anti-art in the academic sense. Most works involved taking something useful, and usual, and making it have no use. 

This was then called art. 

Another example? Marcel Duchamp's work, "Fountain", which is, in effect, an upside down urinal signed R. Mutt. There were 15 identical artworks of "Fountain". The price tag on one of these is $2.5 million these days...

So with an anti-art, anti-theworld, anti-conforming, and $2.5 million in my mind, finally realised how I'd show that my book is not what it appears to be...hence the giant purple iPod below!

I was shocked when I realised that iPods only came into being for the first time in 2001. Check out their history and development over the years...truly mind boggling! http://www.ipodhistory.com/ 

A new blog, a new project

It's called the Sketchbook Project.

An initiative for which over 28 000 artists this year will vouch. You pay $20 for an 80-paged sketchbook. With creativity as your only boundary artists are encouraged to put their all in to make their book enticing enough to be taken out...again and again and again.

The beauty of this project is that the aim is to create one global piece of art. Work to which numerous cultures and ages and countries have contributed, and the final, single collection to be exhibited around America and then remain in a private collection at the Brooklyn Art Gallery.

Exciting, huh? I thought so. I was so intrigued that I joined all the way from South Africa.

This blog is going to be a follow-up on my progress and development of my sketchbook, before the crunch date-15 January.

Some time killers: For more info on the Sketchbook Project follow the link http://www.arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject

Oh and the tiled background image of this blog is "Seamstress" by artist James Jean. Check out his amazing postcard works and sketches! http://www.jamesjean.com 

Is is now, I'm afraid, a past tense. James Jean, for all his brilliance was emperor of all things wallpapery on my blog. But then....his colours...my colours...not quite contrasting enough to be complementary, more accurately they became a soup of mediocre. So I looked to no other than Walter Battiss, South African artist extraordinaire! This is his work, he is my favourite South African artist who, along with Norman Katherine (whom I love too) invented Fook Island. (If you don't know what Fook Island is now is the chance to do yourself a favour and google it!) So yes...this is Walter Battiss's work.