rebecca coleman visual studies notebook

The word for this week is "Totem/Guide," but I was thinking about feedback that I received during last week's class when I made this latest drawing -- so this is actually "Trace Part II."  I thought more carefully about the materials that I am using this week -- the feedback that I got last week is that construction paper might not be accomplishing what I want it to. So I bought a sheet of soft, handmade pale green paper from the art store on Shattuck and made it even softer by crumpling it up before smoothing it out to work on. (Thanks for the idea, Benjamin!) I then used pen, marker, and colored pencil for the drawing. I want the overall effect to look foggy and indeterminant.

The word for this week is "trace," in the sense of the passing of something. My drawing is of a desert storm. I was thinking about stormy weather because I went to Yosemite with some friends for Presidents' Day weekend, and it was snowy and foggy. Whenever I visit Yosemite I think about the passing of time. The park is significant to me (as it is to a lot of people) because I used to visit every summer with my family. There is a writeup in The New Yorker that was published earlier this winter about the death of a sequoia in a winter storm. I had not "met" the tree that the essay is about but the way that Nathan Heller writes about it describes how I feel about Yosemite in my most solemn, macabre moments. Visiting a place again and again, year after year, annunciates the slow progress of human growth. A kid that you recall shows up, abruptly, with the problems and the powers of a woman or a man. That’s what the tunnel tree in Big Trees State Park ...

My drawing this week is of the San Ysidro mountains, above Borrego Springs in Anza-Borrego. I accentuated the peak of the mountain to relate it to the word for this week, which is "reach." In connection with this drawing, a friend recommended that I read Mary Austen's 1903 "Land of Little Rain," a series of essays about her travels through the Mojave desert.  I have hiked through the Mojave desert. Last summer my partner Johnathan and I hiked through a 42 mile stretch of the Mojave desert that had no natural water source, carrying 20+ pounds of water each. In December we also spent some time in the desert -- in Anza-Borrego, south of the Mojave. (This time it was winter and it rained and we were also not as adventurous -- we stayed in a hotel).  Here are some passages that seemed most important from "Land of Little Rain:" What the Mojave desert looks like: This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blun...