:::this is the way the world ends:::

Month: October 2008

Frightening Project

Ned, thanks for the quick examples of your take on the frightening theme.  About two weeks ago I started digging through my art from college because I had a hankering to start in on my work again.  I hadn’t looked at my work since college in many cases, and was surprised by what I thought was crap then didn’t seem so crappy.  I worked on "restoring" a couple of drawings that had gotten smeared from my few moves since an undergrad and fixing some parts that I wanted to alter.  A couple of drawings I thought would be fine contributions to Project Frightening.

I am hopefully going to post a couple of creepy things that aren’t mine and one that is mine in the comments later today.  Click on the thumbnails to see an enlarged view.

Frightening-Art-Death

Study of Bernini’s Death on the Tomb of Pope Urban VIII

Frightening-Art-Box-Elder

Box Elder, Part of the "My Icons" Series

I had to take photos of these both and adjust them in Photoshop, so they look much different in real life.  The Box Elder piece is at least five feet in height, so I had to take two shots and seam them together.  The Death study is on white paper, but I created the effect you see in Photoshop and thought it created a nice mood for this project.  Hope you like my additions!

Frightening II: The Bear (Tentatively Titled)

Here’s my newest painting. You can also see it and a close-up on my website. The Bear refers to the market and who actually pays for our financial miscalculations – a weight no one can really carry. The text is Wordsworth’s "Lines in Early Spring." If you want to know how Toby influenced this painting, I can tell you.

 The Bear 001

Frightening Entry: I

So I was flipping through some files on my computer at work before I take off for MI, and I passed this sketch from an old sketchbook that I scanned into Photoshop. I have a bunch of these that I intended as chapter headings for a story I wrote. Here’s the first one done in pencil w/ Photoshop duotone. I think it is in the spirit of Tob’s pumpkin.

Duotone Face 02

Frightening

All-Hallows It’s October.  A few thoughts have seized my mind about posting some sort of collaborative challenge for the group.  I don’t mean to add to anyone’s burden but I thought it might be fun to participate in a sort of group exercise.  The poetry writing turned out really well during Beckett’s Baby Shower, and while I don’t imagine it taking the same shape as it did this summer, I thought it would be fun to engage the creativity of the group. 

My challenge: create something scary or frightening.

The events that precipitated this were:

1) One of my favorite novels had it’s genesis in the "ghost story" challenge (Frankenstein).

2) I read "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and it frightened me more effectively in short story than many things I see or read today.  It’s amazing to me the atmosphere Hawthorne (and Washington Irving) both were able to create in the span of their short stories.

3) I had a very vivid dream last night that Steph woke me up in the middle of.  Curiously, after being awake about fifteen minutes, I resolved the dream by coming up with an ending.  It was really hard to shake it before that.

Now, this only has to be as complicated as anyone wants it to be.  And each person can create as much as we’d like.  For instance, I could (and plan on) describing this dream I had last night.  I also had a story idea that I could flesh out for everyone, or just give plot points to.  I could haiku, write about the scariest moment in my life, take a photo, draw something, link to something scary.  It can be supernatural (ghost, demons, etc.), unnatural (politics, the economy 🙂 ), or even natural.

What say you all?  Is this a good idea or bad one?

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