Gessner

Long time no post. I got a little burned out on art, so the lack of updates is because I haven't really been drawing much of anything lately. It's mainly because I wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing art-wise (which is silly since the whole point of taking this art course was so I could explore an area of interest - nature + illustration). So I've really just started getting into it again. It's funny in a way, when I do a lot of artwork I feel like I would just like to create stuff forever. Then before I know it I'm going on about how I don't have time and yadda yadda.

The latest project we're doing in class is the 'like Gessner' project, where we study illustration techniques and the (natural) history of depiction in both old & recent texts. It refers to Conrad Gessner (wiki) who was an avid, insatiable reader - he read everything he could get his hands on and then some. He then wrote and compiled all existing information (on many different subjects) in voluminous tomes. (Apparently he was so adamant on using every moment of his time that he had servants read to him from books as he was bathing and getting dressed. A classmate commented that they would medicate people like Gessner today - perhaps an exaggeration but he would certainly be seen as an eccentric). Anyway, we could choose any animal/plant we wanted, and were supposed to recreate, freehand or sketch existing artwork and then make it into a book or report. The text portion of my project is viewable on google docs. The artwork is still in the process of being scanned, which will have to wait until our professor is done grading them.

It's ironic that I started this blog to show other people my art and then I got shy and haven't really given the link out to anyone. That's my life there in a nutshell.