art and memory

I saw a sketchbook tour vid from an artist who basically only paints from her real-life experience, either plein air or from her own reference photos. She doesn’t enjoy painting from other people’s photos because she doesn’t feel a personal connection to the work. She’s all in on the “journal” aspect of art. And man, it feels like she’s constantly going places. Here’s pics from my vacation in France, the view from my balcony in Italy, the time I went to X manor house and X gardens… Obviously the sketchbook tour is a compressed highlights reel, but even so, I think she goes more places in one summer than I do in several years.

It helps that she’s very mindful of her surroundings as a springboard for art. She can be out walking her dog and see something that strikes her fancy, and she’ll pull out her sketchbook and paint on the spot. The dog just has to deal.

It was a neat tour, but not my vibe. To me, the fun of art is being able to create things that don’t exist in real life. I do enjoy art-as-journaling, but it’s rarely realism. Instead it’s chibi Hephaistos announcing a half-room cleave, or meisnewbie the pyukumuku vs. six sharpedos. Or more obscure connections: Here’s fanart I did of [work project]. (One midrise building is missing, which fits the facts.) Here’s a piece I did for dragontober when our air conditioning was out and it was hellishly hot. I wanted a cool fall misty scene, but the piece looks like I slathered it in tabasco sauce, mainly due to inexperience with color mixing but I am retconning it as thematic.

tbh I could spend so much time leafing through my art and getting lost in memories…HGR’s first Valheim house. newbie at the daybloom farm. Kia looking longingly at a plate of The Good Wet Food placed in the bathtub, but unwilling to go get it because there was a half-inch of water in the bathtub. Now that one is actual realism from a reference photo. tbh I feel as much of a connection to this pic as anything drawn from my own photos. Spont told us about the incident and that counts for me.

“I remember this fondly,” says Spont.