Descending Ashtray

One of the most interesting things about gouache is its opacity, which allows you to paint white on dark ground, in this case, cardboard. I’ve always saved the last page of sketchbooks, but not done much with them. Now I know what to do!

One interesting note - I used pencil to draw the concentric circles on top of the gouache. It’s visible mainly in the white areas, but the flash on my camera really picked it up on the black areas as well. Image rotated 90 degrees clockwise for clarity, meant to be horizontal.

Just a little doodle. It did give me the idea of a 5×5 windmill, though.

Earlier this year I grew out my beard while I was living on the farm. It took me two months!

Here is the drawing that I did of Shawn Hart, the descending ashtray somehow made it in the picture. This was drawn in December of 1998.

Get with it, man. Also, send me the photo/drawing of the old descending ashtray, circa 1998.

I’ll finish mine if you start yours.

I was also thinking perhaps we could come up with a theme and then each do a piece based on it. What do you think? I picked up a copy of Art News today with the cover story “Why Small Sculpture is Big,” so maybe that’s an idea. Do a small sculpture no bigger than … what?

The magazine also had an article about a female artist named Tara Donovan whose work is really impressive. She accomplishes a lot with everyday materials. The cube photo is made entirely of toothpicks, with no glue or anything else holding them together. Here are a few more of her works.

To draw from life
To draw from memory
To produce some clever idea
Only to be consumed and forgotten

To set up a payment plan with low financing
So that we can appear to own everything that we do not
What would our economy be like if we had not set up all of our little number tricks?
What would our community be like if we did not work so hard to be so selfishly alone?

The fear of confronting truth governs so many of our actions
We all see things
We can feel certain subtle changes
We know the reaction and response that the eyes reveal
Are we simply afraid of seeing our own reflection in someone elses eyes?
Why does it make us want to run away, hang up the phone or deny it completely?

There is a constant battle between
What we know we should do
and
What we feel like doing

Most of the time we know the difference
But the line between is never clearly defined
And sometimes the weight of actually knowing becomes such a burden
that we will do anything to avoid carrying it

So we use this uncertainty to our advantage
And claim that we can not see
unless,

we feel like it