rebecca coleman visual studies notebook

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.