Hiatus till December 2011

I am currently working on an A5-sized drawing. I will probably complete it some time in November or December.

Some Thoughts

I had wanted to say this since a while back, but I never had the discipline and time to blog about it till now:

I have stopped taking pictures of dead animals. I have stopped drawing dead animals.

I do not want to dwell on depressing stuff; I do not like depressing stuff anymore.

Art does not have to be spiritual all the time or to solve the world's problems, but the very least it can do is to be hopeful and realistic.

Art should give people courage and strength.

Down with depressing stuff, down with depressing art. That is too easy; try something harder.

Yes, I am still working on incomplete drawings, but I want to move on from here. To what, to where, I do not know, but it must be something more hopeful.

sin X Carl Andre

Like Eva Hesse, Carl Andre uses the language of repetition.

My drawings of walls were inspired by Tapies's works. These walls reveal the beauty in "poor objects" and weathered surfaces, and they are about the passage of time.

I was also exploring the visual language of repetition within each drawing -- the bricks of a wall, the wooden boards of an old house, the patterns on a sewage cover etc.

One of Christopher Alexander's fifteen fundamental properties is alternating repetition. Personally, I think banal repetition without alternation can be interesting too.

When I did my drawings, I was looking at art of the sixties such as works by Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Tapies, and a few others. I chose my subject matter carefully -- it must have a certain appearance or aesthetic to it. The similarities between my works and art of the sixties have not occurred by chance.

sin X Joseph Beuys

I could not find the beautiful drawings of the stag skeletons online. I am not sure what Beuys had intended his drawings to express; my drawing is about mortality and the impermanence of life.

sin X Eva Hesse

The truth is, I know nothing about Eva Hesse's works. I only know she uses the language of repetition. The above is a comparison of my drawing Sewage Cover with her work Schema (1967-8) and an untitled drawing (1967).

When I was working on the drawings of the walls and sewage covers, I was also looking at quite a bit of Minimalist Art and Conceptual Art. I guess that is why I can see Eva Hesse's influence in my own work.

Tanjung Pagar Railway (KTM)

Notes July 2011

1.
Question: What is so Japanese about the circle?
Answer: Zen.

2.
I drew my headless Buddha before I saw the photo of the headless Christ by a Japanese photographer.

3.
Seeing is everything.
The truth is, my drawings do not heal.
My drawings are about seeing.

4.
I imagine myself falling in love with a beautiful lady, and she says to me, "You are dull, just like your drawings." (I took this line from Toni Takitani, the film based on Haruki Murakami's short story of the same title.)