rebecca coleman visual studies notebook

Thank you (Tony) for all of the reading materials about processing election results. The aftermath of the election has continued to feel strange and disturbing. Of course on campus in the days following the election we have been organizing against sexual assault in the College of Environmental Design following the Chronicle  story that broke news of the case in our department last weekend. Prof Nezar wrote a note to our class in which he said that he was the victim in this case: I believe the campus’ current hyper climate has encouraged the filing of exaggerated complaints of which I am now a victim as time will ultimately tell.  During the same week, my coop had our own regular election for house leadership positions and the election had some odd and upsetting parallels with the national election -- in terms of displays of sexism/misogyny in discussions by and on behalf of candidates. A woman at my coop, who is a PhD in the math department at Berkeley, put it all best ...

What a disturbing week. I am glad that we spent election night in class together. Particularly, I am glad that we read "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" the night of the election. We read it before we knew the results, but you seemed to know what would happen. Or maybe you thought it would make sense to read it regardless of the outcome, because it would still apply in a tight race. In the poem, Icarus drowns, and everyone is too preoccupied by the beauty surrounding them to notice. Further, Icarus drowns because of his own hubris. The poem is so disturbing to me because I recognize myself as the farmer. And I see many on the political left as Icarus -- because we dreamed big dreams (some even hoped for this outcome so that we might see more grassroots organizing and a political revolution) but were at the same time complacent. As a Hillary supporter since 2008, I have felt like I didn't do enough during this election cycle. I haven't felt like drawing hill...

The word for this week is "Love." The team that manages UC Berkeley's social media accounts posted something on Instagram this week that I think perfectly explains why I love it here so much, and why I missed it so much during the time I was gone (in between undergrad and grad school): "You'll get a strange feeling when you leave a place. You'll miss the people you love, as well as the person you are at that time and place. Everything changes and yet, I am more me than I've ever been."

My drawing this week is of the desert hills that I passed through when walking out of the San Bernardino mountains this summer. (We were on our way to Cajon Pass and then on to the San Gabriel mountain range.) I switched over to markers from colored pencil this week and used a light pink construction paper for the background color. The markers have a soft, pointed tip sort of like a paint brush. I also used some pigment from a stamp pad (sky blue and silver gray) on top of the marker. I unfortunately missed class this past week, so I don't have context for the word, which is "Near." So I drew on my own source material for this week -- my favorite artwork and writing by women who have recently hiked the pacific crest trail. My favorite paintings are by Lindsey Fox, who hiked the trail this summer as well (although I did not meet her in person, and she hiked the entire 2,660 mile trail). Here is one of her recent watercolors: Pacific Crest Trail Postcard, Lin...

My drawing this week is of the Tahquitz River in Palm Springs. I used a snapshot that I took this summer (below) as a reference. My partner and I had just arrived that day in Palm Springs from Boston. We were days away from beginning our 700 mile hike north. After stopping for some Mexican food we walked with our 30 pound packs in about 95 degree dry heat from the airport about five miles to the Vagabond Inn, where we stayed that night. The next day we walked from the motel to the aerial tramway that we would take up into the San Jacinto mountains. It was unexpected to see this dry riverbed at this point in the trip. We had been walking through neighborhoods and then, unexpectedly, the landscape sort of opened up and we came across it. I knew I wanted to draw something related to Palm Springs after we looked at the painting by Albert York in class last week of the palm tree. I couldn't quite put my finger on it at the time but I think that what I like so much about the pai...

I completed this drawing late afternoon on the Friday that we had all of the rain last week. I used blue as the background color for the drawing because of all the rain. I used a gold pen to sketch out the outlines of the round, rolling hills. I next used colored pencils to fill in the hills, along with more of the gold pen. I used gold and copper pigment from a stamp pad to give the hills some texture, and then some pearl white and blue puff paint to give the chaparral in the foreground some dimension. I love the poem that Tony posted this week by Peter Everwine along with the word "round." I am reposting it here because I think it is so beautiful and want to remember it as part of this past week. How It Is  This is how it is --        One turns away        and walks out into the evening.        There is a white horse on the prairie, or a river        that slips away among dark roc...

The word for this week is "reach." This made me want to incorporate something three-dimensional into the drawing and so I used black and yellow sculpey (quick drying clay) and then scraped some of it off (that's what the black and yellow marks on the drawing are). I used colored pencil (my favorite medium for the past few months since the summer) around the markings from the clay. The drawing is an attempt to depict this unexpectedly beautiful manzanita and oak forest that I passed through on my backpacking trip this summer on the way into Lancaster in Southern California. It was around 4:30 in the afternoon when we got to this point. It had been uncomfortably hot in the previous days but that day was in the high 80s and there was a cool breeze. It was unexpected after passing through some terribly burned areas in the Angeles National Forest. We walked a total of 26 miles from the San Gabriel mountains into the western edge of Lancaster (in the Mojave desert) that da...

The word for this week is "treasure." To match the theme for this week I tried to draw the California hills that I normally draw but in a way that made them look more gem-like and luminescent. Building on last week, I used construction paper rather than white watercolor paper to see if this made for a more interesting drawing. But, I wanted to do something less dark than last week, so I used orange paper rather than black paper. To create the hills I cut a triangular shape out of a linoleum block and stamped a few different pigments - sky blue, gold, platinum, copper, and moss green. I used the stamps as a first layer because I wanted to create a more painterly effect than what I have been able to achieve with just the colored pencils alone. I then brought the colored pencils in on top of the pigmentation from the stamps to tighten up the drawing. Tony shared a poem along with the word this week. I think it is related to what I drew but since I was not directly inspire...

The word for this week is "mend." What immediately comes to mind, of course, is my mother (and her illness). My mother loves to hike. I get my passion for hiking from her. Because we both love hiking, I am planning a short backpacking trip for us this winter. My partner and my brother will also join us. We will be attempting to thru hike the recently established Back Bone Trail in the Santa Monica Mountains. The trail is about 70 miles and is close to where my family lives in Los Angeles. The drawing I made this week is of Malibu Creek State Park. I chose to draw Malibu Creek State Park because it will be one of our stops along the trail. (Also, I booked the tent site earlier today. So it was on my mind.)  I did not take the photo on which the drawing is based. The bottom half of the drawing is collage. I made it from shredded magazine covers. The top half of the drawing is someone else's original image as well. I used black construction paper and a silver pen to crea...

The word for this week is "gather." This word -- along with the image of the haystacks that we looked at in class last week, and the Ryder painting of the cow in the "ambiguous pasture narrative" -- remind me that fall is coming quickly. But, to be honest it has also felt like fall ever since I began graduate school about a month ago. The beginning of school has always felt like fall to me. Fall brings pronounced changes to the landscape, even in Northern California. There is still a shift in the quality of light and a chill in the air here. Leaves on deciduous trees still fall here. Fall has always seemed to signify both "beginnings" (the beginning of a new school year) and also "decay" as we approach winter (something that I would begin to anticipate with horror when I lived in Boston). The image I chose to draw this week is of some dried flowers that I snapped a quick photo of when I was in Lafayette in the east bay about a month ago. T...

This weekend I visited my grandfather at his home in the Monterey area. I don't own a car, and so through a combination of walking, taking the train, and connecting to a shuttle, I finally arrived in downtown Monterey. Needless to say, the trip took nearly twice as long as driving and followed a much less direct route. Once there I spent a foggy, cozy weekend mainly inside of a warm house. On the way back in the shuttle I was in nearly touch-and-go traffic outside the San Juan Bautista area and I snapped a photo of hills scattered with oak trees, which I chose to draw for class this week. This week's word is "meander," along with a still life painting by Adrian Stokes (and a poem, but it is too much to discuss both here). I am interested in Stokes's idea about carving and painting, which is described in more detail on the Tate website here . Essentially, the idea is that the painter explores form by the "color he attributes to the surface of the canvas, ...

I went rock climbing at a gym in West Berkeley this weekend with some new friends. It's been a very long time since I've been climbing but my new friends were pretty expert and I was able to learn a great deal from them. The climbing walls in a gym, compared with climbing in the mountains, are not at all authentic. And yet, the feeling of working through the puzzle of a route to make it to the top of a vertical climb indoors was very real. In thinking about the word for this week, "touch," it struck me that these manmade climbing walls in the huge warehouse that is the climbing gym are very sculptural. And the physical activity of climbing these walls created a sense of closeness and familiarity and changed the way I perceived them. This drawing is a (quick) attempt to represent this.

These are colored pencil drawings I created this summer. I went on a long backpacking trip (700 miles), starting in Idyllwild, CA in the San Jacinto Mountains to Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite. I created these drawings as part of reflecting on the experience. Hills south of Acton, CA. San Gabriel Mountains, CA. Northern California.