Tim Olsen Drawing Prize

I'm one of the thirteen nominated participants in this year's Tim Olsen Drawing Prize.  I've been wanting to be in this show for roughly three years now, so please come and support me tommorow night: Tuesday the 13th of September. 

Stuff I'm working on

I apologise for not writing in a while. 

Life has been busy

I've moved into a new place 

and after living a whole month on take away and dining out

I have bought a fridge! 

Here's just a little something I've been working on in the meantime.

Half Way House

I think I've already mentioned it, but this year I'm in my Honour's Year at CoFA working away at my art.  Every year, halfway through the degree, there is a show of our studio based projects to give a little taste of what we've been working on.  This show opened on


24th of May 
and is on till the 
3rd of June


at COFASPACE 
closest to Napier Road, 
Ground Floor E Block

10am - 5pm

The Finnisage (fancy word for closing party) & The Presentation of the 2011 GBK Awards are on Friday 3rd June at 6pm

Works displayed for the Jenny Birt

Thank you to everyone who came and supported me at the Jenny Birt, it was a lovely show with music, food, wine and little boxes of chocolate! (will photograph the chocolate if there's any left)  Also a special thanks to Chris Ross, who was in the show with me and who took some great photos of my work.  

These are some of the first drawings I've completed for my Honours Year.  Though it should be safe to say I finished them for the Jenny Birt Show (I was up at 4am in the morning still working on them to meet the 10am installation deadline).  I'll be putting up a couple process shots, get a better photograph of the tiny work on metal, describe the problems of drawing on zinc sheets and try keep up to date with my work in the studio in the following weeks.  

Voiceworks Magazine

Voiceworks is a national quarterly magazine that features young Australian writers and artists. Full of poetry, fiction, illustration and comics it is one of the very few literary magazine that pays its contributers! I'm part of issue 81, themed Birthmark and I'm paired with the literary styles of Lauren Lovett's Hidden Tiger.

Evolution of an image

Long time no post, but I have a lot of news and images so this week will be chock full of entries! I wanted to break pace a little bit with my sketches so here are some process shots of the charcoal portrait I had in the show at Monstrosity Gallery! (It also made its way into a magazine! but I will write more about that later)

Hopefully you can still pick out details and follow the evolution of this image despite the bad quality of the photos. Dodgy as they may be they still show crucial moments in the rendering of the face as well as some of the drastic changes I made between stages.

I had been working on this image for a while and had some interesting marks happening, but it wasn't moving anywhere and at the end of the day it was just a slushy indistinct collection of facial features. So I clarified where I wanted the head and the shoulders to be with some strong lines. After solidifying my guideline I was able to push the image because I was confident on the placement of the face.

Most of the fun happens in the beginning when I am just throwing water and smearing charcoal around trying to find patterns I like from the resulting mess. I draw a face and then water it, let it dissolve for a while and then re draw and then let it partially melt again. Then I slowly piece the image together from these leftovers like a fortune teller with tea leaves.

Towards the end I make smaller and smaller adjustments, slowly becoming more afraid of my image and a little too precious with it. Some images die this way. I get too hesitant to change certain areas and I get into a stalemate, where I can't move the picture forward without somehow damaging my favourite part.

Thankfully this one went quietly, though before when I had been pushing it to be a young female with four eyes it had rightly argued. You can still see traces of this in the earliest image's luscious lips and the thinness in the face.

This work is titled The Swimmer and as I said before was on display at Monstrosity Gallery's Portrait exhibition. During the show there was an artist talk and small get together over some munchies. A video was made of some of the artists (me included). Hopefully this video will eventually see the light of day and you'll be able to hear me describe some of the thoughts that go into my drawings.

Group Show on Friday!

Hello all,

I've been included into a group show! The Opening (incase you can't read the small print on the post)

Is on:

Friday the 28th of May at 6-9pm

at Monstrosity Gallery

93 Bourke Street Woollomooloo

(You can access it from the stairs near the AGNSW

or just by going down Bourke street)

You can find more information about the gallery here

I'll be showing a new never been seen charcoal work in this exhibition!

and after the opening I'll put up some process images!

I look forward to seeing you this friday!

Cheers

Jess

i draw naked people

This is a small collection of the naked people I have drawn and or painted. They come from different projects based on fluidity or tone or abstraction but one magical thing ties them all together. Nakedness. Sadly enough it isn't as the posters say. Nude models do not need to be attractive. All that is required of them is the willingness to shed clothes and be directed into various awkward and revealing positions.

You might say that this is easy, hell you might be the god-blessed sort of person who likes to shimmy down to the buff every friday night after a few stubbies at the local bar. You're probably thinking 'Hey, being paid to be naked and stand still sounds good to me!' But I hope you've been taking your advanced yoga lessons, your mind-over-matter courses, and have a lot of self esteem.

Showing up to work to be butt naked (while sober) in winter (with no heating) while a bunch of people stare at your member (do not think sexy thoughts) and draw horribly ugly pictures of you (for hours...yes you need to be able to stand still for 15-30 minutes) is much harder than you think.

But if you do finally come to the conclusion that being a life model is the job for you,
I'll be seeing you.

Solo Show!

I'm having an exhibition from the 9th to the 21rst of October at galleryeight!
This is my first solo and I am very excited and nervous
so please join me for drinks on Opening night:

the 9th of October,
from 6-9pm
at galleryeight
8 Argyle Place

galleryeight is open Thursdays to Sundays 12-6pm
but you might get lucky on some of the other days.

This show will be a collection of my charcoal works,
for more hints head over to my website,
but come meet them and me in person,
we're much more interesting in the 3D world.

Process pictures

More process images!

I am trying to simultaneously experiment and build a new body of work with my charcoal portraits.  This is the most recent and I have to say my easy favourite.  He's gotten straight onto my website and I also entered him into Blanket Magazine's Portrait challenge.  (They are amazing go take a look) I heard of the challenge before making him and I wanted to do more charcoal works so I decided to do some double duty.  Hopefully he'll get accepted.  

He is also working for me in my attempt in gaining a student grant, and will probably be pushed into the Mosman or the Waverly Art Prize in the near-distant future. 

A very busy picture.   

Quite a few people ask me: how do you get it to look like water is dripping down it?

Answer: I drip water on it.

I hope that didn't spoil the image for anyone, some people like to not know how something is made, ruins the magic.

I feel the same about most technological and scientific events, inventions or general know-how.  If you ask me how the internet works I can safely tell you: by magic.  And that is all I have to know.  Frankly I feel like knowing too much background info sometimes kills of the mystique of life.  Apart from quantum physics, evolution and the big bang. That shit is awesome.

But I love knowing how people make images, hence the process pictures.  And I get all miffed when artists try to hide how they made something so someone can't copy them.  I swear I just want to know how they make it!  I'm not going to copy! (maybe a little bit...stingy artists...)  

But Folks get ready to try this at home,

if you draw on canvas you can use the special charcoal eraser,

but you can also you water!  

I use water and a sponge.

If I need to clean up a lot of charcoal I use a scouring sponge.

That's just cleaning up though, 

you can also use water as a mark making device.

Throwing water, swirling it around, etc.

The water picks up the charcoal, 

and dry pigment + water = "paint"

so there are marks of the water's path, kind of like weak gritty ink. 

I've used water in some my other charcoal drawings,

so try take a look and spot them.

Alright,

hope that was useful to some of you, 

or will encourage someone to be more adventurous with their charcoal or drawing.

Cheers,

jess b

Process

Final

First of all, I am sorry for such a long post, but I think it is so much easier to see a progression in an art work when you can just scroll up and down. Rather than having to add all these different images together in your head.  Second of all I am sorry for some of the quality, focusing (or lack of), and the position of the image.  I took them with my camera phone.  

Nevertheless I wanted to share.  I get a bit annoyed when I see beautiful polished work on blogs, its nice.  But I also want to see the crap and hard work and how it looked before it turned out great.  I think its important to see stages of a work, and also learn how different people solve different visual issues.   

This is a personal piece that I started and finished recently.  I was really inspired by Melanie's work, you can't see the crazy things she thinks up and creates so much on her blog, which is a shame.  But in real life she is crazy about hair.  Human hair.  She makes giant skipping ropes out of it and braids balloons together with it.  She has a scary work place at COFA filled with hair sculptures and hair objects which happen to be horrible and beautiful at the same time. 

Very strange.

From her I got a strong image of a guy with this giant beard simply extending down off his face and consuming his neck and chest, as you can see that never manifested itself.  I tried: and it looked shit.  Also a while after I started I went to the MCA drawing show and saw Laith McGregor.  My internal image wasn't exactly the same as his bearded men, but they were very similar so I was a bit disheartened to follow through with my hairy man.

In the end however he turned out being devoid of hair, which I found quite amusing. 

This was done in charcoal on canvas.  And if the last one looks a bit funny it's because I didn't grayscale it and I was trying to be quite delicate with the levels tool, it is amazingly hard to get the tonal values right.

Hope you enjoy, I will be putting up more phone camera process images later.