Gathering a View

I have spent so much time gathering, gathering, gathering...

House with a View, 2013

Ink on Vellum, 8x5"

Krystal Booth

I've been painting and drawing on vellum lately.  The semi-transparent quality of vellum makes it seem like it's lit from within.  The soft white sheets allow light to radiate through.  A gentle glow.  If heaven were a sheet of paper, it would be semi-transparent vellum.

There have been washes of color born on the surface, followed by charcoal, graphite, ink and more paint as I try to hone in on what works.  Instead, sometimes I find what looks horrid.  Sometimes I can turn a huge expensive property into a tie-dyed pleasure land sketch that beckons for a Grateful Dead sticker (see above).

But enough farting around.  I've been gathering visual sources for about a month or so.  Lots of photographs.  A ton of them.  My parents visited last week and so site-seeing ensued...though I believe site seeing for my parents could more accurately be described as being dragged around by their daughter and her fiance while being instructed to look at this and look at that.  I hope they enjoyed it.  Matthew and I did!

So tons of photos and a lot of writing.  Writing through ideas helps me understand my direction for the "Big Idea".  Now I can finally report to you that it is time to go for it.  I've hit the "Eureka!" state of how to use the materials for the approach, or at least enough to get going on it.  Time to raise that bar again and really push myself like I did while I was in college and then while creating the Huddleston Series.

I long for meaning and ambiguity my work.  The right amount of content and gray area.  Today I'm going to begin finding that by DOING.