Conversation with Amy – restraint, genre, tag-clouds.

Amy is a friend and artist in San Francisco. On the phone today she told me she was working on the blog for Public Smog she is one of the collaborators on Invisible 5 What is Public Smog: “built in the economic realm of carbon offset trading”. At least it is not built on sand, or in cyberspace like this project.
Amy was complimentary about the project, appreciated, thanks. What was of value to me in our discussions were simple off-the-cuff comment like “you have a good sense of line” (Marion Harvey told me that in 1970, same words) it is good to hear because I become conscious of line. Is that good? I am all for it, consciousness is OK. She said I had a sense of “restraint”. Restraint. I am not sure what that means yet. Dan just said I was flowing. Flow & restraint, probably work ok together. Perhaps it is something about a sketch as opposed to a drawing, restraint.
I am restrained in posting up stuff! I am am learning what I want here, and so holding back what I don’t like, does not fit with my process, the project process. I want to use the 1,000 for so many ideas, shapes & colours, soon they will be all gone!

Genre

Amy asked if she could put in a request. Sure. NZ landscapes. She is missing NZ. But would that be the wrong genre? The genre question was raised in the conversations with Alex as well. This is such an amorphous lot of sketches that anything can go in the melting pot. Anything. I’d like to do landscapes. I love a lot of NZ landscape artists – if you call them that, McCahon, and Marilynn Webb, she particularly inspires me at the moment.

Another great comment – on the genre question: “Draw your way out of it!” Thanks Amy.

Where this project is unified is through the conversations. So I will do landscapes. I’ve done one already in response to the request. (it is no good!) I told Amy I want to get the light right. She told me about the “Bay Area School” capturing the colour of the light – something to research.

We spoke of tag clouds, with a 1000 sketches there is unifying that can be done post-facto, by the user – now there is a word for people viewing art!