I’m directing my thesis this semester in a direction inspired by Keith Haring. My plan is to come up with a bunch of designs and ultimately print those on to products I’d eventually sell. The only problem I’m having is coming up with a theme or focus for the designs. I’m finding it difficult to not just be a knock off of Keith Haring, but the simplicity and almost universal accessibility of his designs is extremely tempting. His work was heavily influenced by studying semiotics and art of early peoples. I should have this figured out by now but I’m still searching out ideas for an idea to inspire my work, the things I create, so that I can take influence from Keith Haring rather than just trying to copy him. The whole mess has gotten me back into actually reading about Art.

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I finished reading William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished yesterday. I read it once before in my 11th grade English class. I didn’t care for it then, liked it much better a second time around. Drusilla may be my favorite character of all the Faulkner novels I’ve read.
She’s this widowed woman in the Confederate South who wears pants, cuts her hair with a bayonet, learns to ride a horse, and convinces her cousin to let her join his troop because she wants to kill Yankees. After the war, her mother doesn’t believe she fought as soldier and accuses her of cavorting with her cousin, then demands she put on a dress and get married. On the day she was supposed to get married, she instead comes back home in her wedding dress holding a ballot box she took after a pair of carpet baggers tried to fix the election for sheriff and were shot by her cousin (who admittedly was one of the candidates).
She’s like a southern Mulan, if Mulan delved more deeply into the psychological and social issues of jumping between gender-norms and then ended much more tragically. (She kinda goes insane)
I just wanted to do a quick drawing of her.

life:

Happy birthday, Henri Matisse. On this day in 1869 the modernist master was born. See rare and unpublished portraits of the artist here.

Hey Noelle, you share your brithday with Matisse!

Einstein’s phrase “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” defines much of my experience at MICA. Every year it’s gotten increasingly harder to find the motivation to pick up a pen again and it’s shown no signs of getting any better. Here I am right now skipping class because I didn’t do any work yesterday and now I’m struggling to get myself to sit down and do the work I need to do for tomorrow (instead I’m writing this). It’s not that any of the work is particularly difficult and I don’t find them to be bad assignments. There’s no serious difference between what I’m doing now and what I’ve been doing for the past couple of years, but that is exactly where my problem lies.

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The South Will Rise Again (2012)

New piece I finished earlier today. Made it for this weeks prompt on DTSB. I based it off Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin: 

In my personal work I find myself continuously drawn back to The South. I was raised in a small town that was very conservative. As time has passed I’ve become increasingly critical of the place. I’m sure many that know me have heard me at least once rant about the horrible political air of South Carolina. My go-to joke is that South Carolina is a beautiful state as long as you don’t speak to anyone. It wouldn’t be hard for anyone to get the impression that I hate The South. The odd thing is that I don’t. For all my problems with it, I still regard it as my home and that’s the reason I continually find myself drawn back to it.

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this is my post for last weeks DTSB prompt, the ideal meal. I was all over the place this week so that’s why its so late.

I’ve been wanting to draw a comic about…something. Been in a bit of rutt trying to figure it out. So I drew this today and decided fuck it, I’m going to make it a comic some how.

Hopefully posting this now we’ll keep me a bit more dedicated to it. I’m thinking I’ll create some strip comics first to get familiar with the character and his world.

May be a little while still before you see those comics, I got to work double shifts saturday and sunday and my girlfriend is in town after that. So give me a little while, but if it seems like I’m avoiding it send me mean messages in my ask box.

Just finished this self-portrait for a summer blog a bunch of my illustration friends have put together: Down-to-Sketch Blog 2012. Go check it out. We’ll be posting new stuff each week.

I really just want to be a nudist