rebecca coleman visual studies notebook

Kate, Varun and I have decided to get together when we can over a series of dinners to continue the spirit of this class. It will be different -- we have all since graduated, and Tony has retired from teaching. But it felt important to continue to make drawings and to have them be a visual record of our thoughts. Also, as Robin says, it is important to continue to hold within ourselves and practice what makes us human, even when our values are tested and our (democratic) institutions unwind. Our first dinner will be this Wednesday, which I am hosting at my place. (Varun is in India, but he will join us when he returns to Berkeley.) I have never been a cook; there has never been enough time to learn, and besides I never wanted to come anywhere close to becoming the trope of a 'domesticated woman.' But lately I have been trying to make more of an effort, because dinner is sometimes the best time to see friends when we're all working full time. I will probably make spaghe...

Newt in Briones Regional Park. My friends in Briones this weekend. The newt.

I spent my spring break in Los Angeles at my parents' house. I normally do -- I like to see my family and grandparents down there -- but I also had to go down to LA over this particular spring break to do some survey work in Boyle Heights and MacArthur Park. While I was down there working I pictured what it would be like to work in LA after I graduate. Doing community-oriented work in Los Angeles felt a lot more personal to me than it does in the Bay Area, because Los Angeles is where I'm from and I feel like I have a higher stake in what happens down there. But I also felt a general malaise and I missed my friends and the community that I have built in the Bay Area. As I enter this final month of graduate school, there's so much work I need to do to wrap up my work here in a solid way, and after that, then the real work begins of starting the task of building an adult life for myself.

Tiny house village version two. I used pastel and colored pencil over a monotype print that I made a couple of weeks ago. Additionally, here are some references that I used for the drawing:

Still life of some ceramic cups made by the mother of one of my housemates. I tried to draw it to look like the small cups might contain a small world. "The rounded body of all things in one..."   (Ovid: The Metamorphoses, Horace Gregory translation) CHAOS AND CREATION   Before land was and sea — before air and sky    Arched over all, all Nature was all Chaos,   The rounded body of all things in one,   The living elements at war with lifelessness;    No God, no Titan shone from sky or sea,    No Moon, no Phoebe outgrew slanted horns    And walked the night, nor was Earth poised in air.   No wife of Ocean reached her glittering arms   Into the farthest shores of reef and sand.    Earth, Air, Water heaved and turned in darkness,   No living creatures knew that land, that sea    Where heat fell against cold, cold against heat — ...

Tiny house village monotype made with oil paint on canvas paper.

Pastel of house plant called a "Peace Lily." Among the Shadows at Home Life after life at nightfall in houses I have loved I see them now here at home where I walk in shadow through open doorways from room to room leaving the lights off as I always loved to do knowing beyond belief echoes of no sound from other times other ages how did I ever find my way to these rooms now these shadows one after the other through all the loud flashing days how could I have known the ancient love of these shadows with the lights on — W.S. Merwin. from The Moon before Morning

I was cleaning the stairwell that leads up to where I live this past weekend and noticed this moth on the windowsill. I wanted try doing a quick study using oil paint for the underpainting and pastel over that -- an approach I used last week. I chose a color scheme of pinks and grays to match the colors in the Fairfield Porter painting. It's domestic and yet the moth is like a pilgrim in many ways. I don't know where it came from, or why it landed there. Fairfield Porter, Sunset, Southhampton, 1967 Moth on windowsill, Berkeley, CA

I made this using oil paint as a base layer and then I let the paint dry and I used pastel on top of the paint. The reference is the set of photos (below) that I had taken last fall of a moth on a stainless steel countertop in the industrial kitchen of my co-op. I think that the phrase the "back and forth between these worlds of feeling and meaning" is what I am aiming for in the work that I am doing. The work that I do in my professional life is all about "meaning." This class is a space where I can try to convey pure "feeling," and yet I hope to also continue to refine my work so that it includes elements that are anchored by some elements which are more grounded in the real world.

This is a quick study of California hills that I did in oil paint on canvas paper. It's been over ten years since I have used oil paint, and I felt a little tentative about it! When I previously read John Berger's essay "Field" from About Looking these were the parts that stood out to me: From the beginning of the essay: "Shelf of field, green, within easy reach, the  grass  on it not yet high,  papered  with blue sky, through which  yellow has grown to make pure green , the  surface colour  of what the basin of the world contains, attendant field, shelf between sky and sea, fronted with a curtain of  printed  trees,  friable at its edges , the  corners of it rounded , answering the sun with heat, shelf on a wall through which from time to time a cuckoo is audible, shelf on which she keeps the invisible and intangible jars of her pleasure,  field I have always known , I am lying raised up on one elbow  wondering wheth...

The above drawing is in pastel and it is of white and cream colored silhouettes of plants that I found on the sidewalk on a street in Berkeley a few blocks from where I live. The idea for it comes from Sam Falls, an artist whose work I saw at the UCLA Hammer over winter break. Falls, a photographer by training, created what he called a map of photograms of flora from forests in California. The color scheme (mainly the pinks) is inspired by Philip Guston. For the start of this semester I wanted to return to a landscape theme, but see if I could get at the emotional quality/feeling of being outside rather than a literal or more illustrative depiction of hills or another type of landscape. I was mainly focused on the composition, colors, and the concept for this drawing -- it didn't turn out exactly how I wanted but hopefully it's something that I can build on.