river & memory

Botanical Illustration - Kale

I took a Botanical Illustration class with Elizabeth Mancini, and made this decorative kale drawing. (It is partly dried out, but in a kind of neat way.)

I finally updated my website (it is www.joellesept.com) and the newest things I have created are these:

They are both part of the story I'm inventing to give structure to my illustrative urges.

There is this: being an attempt to make a colour-by-numbers mountain painting, without having outlines first, or with being a mountain, or with having specific colours. It was looking rather ugly for a while, but I think I managed to pull it together, and I'm rather happy with it now!

Campfires

Work In Progress - shiny things

This looks kinda neat...

Cumulus Discord - How Did We Get To This?

I made these drawings as a CD booklet for my friend Alexander's forthcoming album.

It was a really fun project to work on. His album is basically about his own life, but a little dramatized and fictionalized and exaggerated. The songs start in the present and then reach back into the past, going further back each time, to try to answer the question of how he ended up where he is now. I felt like he gave me a whole lot of license to interpret the story, like I could make a mini-comic that goes with his album, but doesn't have to follow the facts exactly.

Deciding that I couldn't handle working in backwards-order like the songs go, I told a story of a young man who goes through different life phases, starting long ago, and living in a sped-up history. It's as though each year in this guy's life is 20 years apart in history. Or maybe each panel shows a different person living at a different time. Really, I just wanted to be able to draw different time periods. Because that's fun. And in a way, the time periods I chose kind of go with the spirit of each drawing.

So, the story as I saw it, with influences in parentheses:

A young peasant rejects his parents and leaves home (Hogarth); he and a friend become outlaw cowboys;

he is betrayed and thrown from a ship and gnawed by vicious sea monsters, or goes through drug withdrawal (scary-Romanticism like Goya); he washes ashore and faces life with new hope/recovers from addiction (Rationalism, World Fair architecture, Paris);

he falls in love (Romanticism, pastoral scenes with shepherds and shepherdesses, although I tried to make the lovers' posture less dominant/submissive than most of the historical examples); but the relationship starts to end/become distant (1920s phones and hairstyles and hookahs);

he has fun with friends but starts to see omens of change in his life (1950s, creepy amusement park mechanical fortuneteller); he realises the freedom to make mistakes and take risks and that things end but don't really (1970s spacewhales cosmic trippy journey);

he acts recklessly and doesn't realise the damage he's causing (1980s Ferris-Bueller style parade/marching band mayhem); he looks out his window and contemplates his life (modern-day Vancouver in winter).

campfires number one

Plastics

This is a followup to the last piece. It depicts jellyfish and plastic in the ocean. I am happy with it, except for the fact that I intended to have a more interesting shape in the end, rather than just filling up the whole page with one rectangle!

My works seem to be seen best from a short distance, and have little contrast to attract anyone from 30 feet away. I heard in a lecture once that a work of art should be interesting from all different distances. I must try to overcome this need to fill up the whole page!

loose leaf

My latest watercolour drawing. I am glad it's different from the usual stuff I do, and I think the colours are very successful. In terms of being significant or having meaning, it doesn't really. It just looks pretty in an interesting way. I feel like it should be on a t-shirt, or a curtain, or the packaging for looseleaf tea. The composition is definitely a bit too rectangular overall.

Recently I laid out all my recent drawings, and realised that they don't look good from afar. The shapes aren't interesting and there isn't enough significant blocks of dark or white - contrast from afar. I guess my drawings are meant to be seen at the distance of reading a book, for example.

fitting together

The first version of this drawing was freehand, without much forethought. Basically a doodle. I liked it, so I remade it about three more times, trying to make it better planned-out, and fitting together more. I'm pretty happy with it in the end.

I see it as an illustration for a non-specific fairytale in which adults and animals are the enemies of children, and adolescents are unsure what to do about it.

Seed Stealer

A human being discovers the mystical plant which bears the fruits, seeds and leaves of many useful plants. And she cuts it down in order to take it away!

It might be obvious that I used a photo reference for this drawing. And it ended up looking too similar to me, in my opinion. Her face really bugs me because I tried to make it different from my face, but it only ended up being "bizarro-Joelle."

But I'm pretty happy with the drawing! We'll see... Sometimes the art projects I put the most effort into end up being the least admired by other people. Think I might do some goofy black-and-white cartoons next.

Toenail Tree

Magically fertile soil - anything planted here will grow.

This image may be too small to tell what's going on, in digital version. It's weird that I thought of that before I even uploaded it. It's almost as if I'm intending for my drawings to be seen only on a screen... : \

Back to black and white!

After a long time with watercolour paper, I got myself some nice smooth Bristol paper, because I missed making black and white drawings! I love the feeling of a steel nib skating across the surface of this paper. And brush drawing is silkier when the paper is not so absorbant.

This drawing was inspired by some imagery in Les Chants de Maldoror, a proto-surrealist book by Compte de Lautreamont from the mid 19th century. It's about an evil anti-heroic, satanic figure who does these strange little battles with angels and God, sometimes defending prostitutes and sinners, sometimes victimizing the innocent. To me it's kind of metal, and kind of disgusting, and super HILARIOUS. There are surprisingly beautiful descriptions that show a fascination and respect for natural history. There's a passage where Maldoror has not moved for hundreds of years, and as a result, various fungi have grown on him, while little creatures and amphibians have started living in his body and taking it over.

But this drawing is not about Maldoror as a character. It's another ambiguous myth, an origin story about humanity. I like the idea of the human race, in all its banality, being the offspring of gods, of the personification of a swamp (with the mushrooms and reeds and toads) and of the night sky (perching on the earth and with constellation hair). I will probably always return to the theme of two abnormal parents creating a normal child, in some way.

For a long time I've intentionally avoided specific cultural references in my myth-illustrations (or tried as best I can), and I realised this is kind of pathetic and arrogant in a way. Who is the intended audience for my artwork? An audience that has never heard any story, does not have its own mythology. I'm pretending that the story I tell is the first story ever told, as if the audience is a newborn baby, a tribe of innocents. That's kind of funny to me.

And this is just supposed to be a sweet little cartoon drawing. I really like the way the faces are angled, and the way the man's legs bend around, although it bugs the hell out of me that I forgot to draw the woman's other leg and foot!

I really enjoy the challenge of using a sable brush with ink. As well as mentally preparing for every long stroke before I make it, I have to really be conscious of how the bristles are twisting around when I turn it around a corner. If I had the inclination, I would probably wax on about how spiritual and special this process is :p

two new things

There seems to be a cerain type of around-1900s way to make cartoon faces, which inspired me to make this. I see it in Little Nemo comics (Winsor McCay) and on some retro lithographic posters in european-esque cafes. And I tried out some fancy shading on the woman's body, which is from a life-drawing sketch. Overall, I'm not sure thrilled with the colours.

The second picture is inspired by men who tell stories about their horribly bitchy ex-girlfriends. It's not really from my own personal experience. It's one of those drawings I made without pencilling or planning beforehand - I like to imagine that the awkwardness lends it the right type of charm. It's a tricky line to straddle, though, between "meaningfully naieve" and "shitty."

Another creepy drawing

I think I could do a few of these. They creep me out a little, but they express something. I think.

Gruesome Drawings

I was in a really emotional mood, and decided to just go with it, and comically exaggerate the way I felt.And then there are some minerals, and other things:

A rare, special, non-ass-containing drawing

The upper half of the picture is memories of the past, and the bottom represents a potential journey into death and rebirth - the animals gathered around are made of a malleable, claylike substance, half-formed denizens of the world beyond.

Atlin Lake art vacation

I went on a self-paid artist residency to Atlin Centre for the Arts. Basically, an art teacher bought and developed a lovely property halfway up a mountain near a tiny little gold-rush town in British Columbia, way up north, almost in the Yukon, and built cabins and tent platforms and ran a summer art school program.

I just wanted a bit of a getaway, in an artist-friendly place, where I could be alone and able to work on my drawings, pretending it's my full-time activity for a week. I wanted to be surrounded by nature, because nature is beautiful, and it's nice to see a tree right in front of you when you want to draw a tree.

Another artist couple from Australia was interested in the teaching aspect of the place, so Gernot ran a few workshop sessions that I attended. The general aim was for people to break down and re-invent their artistic processes, to let go of thinking and rationality (but still maintain your knowledge of what makes a good composition) and be more spontaneous, making art from within.

However, since I didn't come to this place with the aim of re-making my process, but rather just having time and space and the intention to make all the art that I haven't been making for the past six months, I wasn't ready to benefit from ideas like that. I don't respond well to religious or artistic evangelism. I'm not easily infected with a spirit of amazement and reinvention, and I feel like I don't get it. I'm too cynical, I don't believe that I contain within myself everything I need to just make spontaneous, emotional gestures on the page that would be interesting to anyone. I may be a bit deficient in this respect, but I think that since I know this about myself, and I know what kind of art I'm interested in making, I am better off continuing and striving in this vein, and leaving abstract spiritual art to others.

All of these drawings looked better before colour was added. When I compose an image, I'm constantly making decisions as to what density or interval of line is appropriate to convey the right information. I decide all of this with the lines, leaving no information for the colours to convey. I don't think ahead to the colour when I make the lines; if I did, I would need to hold back on some of the lines, and let the colours speak. The way I make pictures now, the colours are just confusing, and actually take clarity away from the image.

I am still continuing in the vein of self-invented mythology, using tropes and themes and symbols that are commonly found in many, many stories. I am making fairytale illustrations of psychological conditions, or fanciful ideas of people's place in the world. It's a formula, in a way. It's a bit dispassionate, because I am not a believer of myths (though I don't know if myths are traditionally "believed" literally anyway).


Every image i make is a little bit mocking, a bit self-aware. But at some point it crosses into naieve, goofy, sincerity. I also seem to include a lot of vulgarity in my drawings. I'm not sure if this is beneficial to any idea I might have, or if it's just a way to get attention.

watercolours in sketchbook