a new grid

beginning another one...

My goals for this grid: to have the intensity of the last piece, the creation of an environment and fantastic landscape... but not make the thing so bright and crazy as to cause the viewer to have a stroke when he looks at it. I want to focus more on intertwining lines and less on color. These are details only.

Again, more intertwining arms in this piece. I think, although I am certainly not sure, that the hands symbolize loss and disconnect. They are, after all, disembodied. But still interacting with one another... hmm. Anyway, living randomly in Taiwan, no matter who you are, probably means that you feel disconnected, and that is where the hands theme comes from. Again, it is a approx. 5 foot tall piece, 15 pieces of watercolor paper.

Taipei Landscape/Origami Landscape I

Details from the most recent grid.

finished painting

The piece is about 5 feet by 3 feet, filled with little details as always. I'm really happy about this one. I'm going to try to make it a series... a bunch of similarly sized grids, and then its off to the galleries or cafes to beg.

if sprout

I added this detail to my larger piece, which I will try to post tomorrow... I finally finished it tonight to the detriment of my Chinese homework... but it was so worth it! click for larger

DDR in Taiwan

I named the blog thoughts and doodles, but recently at least, I have been filling up the pages with images and very few thoughts. This is partially because I have nothing interesting to say. After all, all I ever do is memorize Chinese characters. Once something exciting happens with modeling I will be sure to analyze, but that is yet to come. But Taiwan is an interesting place, with a rich culture, and good food, and I know people and do things (occasionally....) so I ought to write something. Recently, for example, my life has been filled with DDR, which I have traveled far to play and spent much money on in the last month or so. And brings back wonderful memories from college, oh...

Dance Dance Revolution... is not popular in Taiwan. I must find a machine that is not 30 minutes away on the MRT. This fact explodes my previously held stereotype, that all people from Asia must love and be fantastic at DDR. (But it is confusing, because in Japan I found DDR everywhere... and Taiwan is so highly influenced by Japan, except, I gather, for the dancing video machine way) Rather, they seem to be too cool for DDR, and if they do play, I beat them, which is pathetic because I'm not even very good. Instead, it has been replaced by a drumming game, which is exactly the same as DDR, but with drums, and therefore not fun and doesn't make you sweat. I am in favor of an arcade made solely from DDR machines. A friend suggested a gym... I think this is genius.

IF Superhero

I added this guy to my giant painting on my wall... which is beginning to look more and more like 我發瘋了. But I love it, it is making me really happy. I was thinking of writing Super-Mann on his cape (because my last name is Mann)... that might be corny but I would like it. I guess right now he is Camoflauge Mann.

work in progress

Last year, artistically, was defined by creating great big grids on my walls filled with hands. And this year, at Tai Da, I just haven't had the artistic gumption to do anything of that level, which was depressing, but now I find this second semester I suddenly have so much more energy that I've started on another huge grid. No more little quirky doodles... or yes quirky doodles, but alongside the larger, more difficult piece. This is not done and hopefully won't be done for a long time. I want it to grow, I want to fill the entire thing in with color, I want it to be an explosion of weirdness, a real landscape finally. This piece is taking the themes that I became interested in last year (disembodied hands, quirky blob like Taiwanese things) and trying to be a little more mature with them than I was last year. The piece still has a lot of problems but I'm excited. Whole piece and detail.

IF 80s

2 more for I.Friday. These are part of a larger grid of small paintings that all add together.. Hopefully at some point I will post the other ones, too. Thoughts? Oh, and click for larger.

if phoenix

For I. Friday...not a phoenix, but the idea of the phoenix is the idea of change and renewal, and this is trying to capture that. Also the dragon is the masculine partner to the phoenix in Taiwan... yin and yang, dragon and phoenix, masculine and feminine.

children in fiji

Children in Fiji. I visited my family in Fiji for 2 weeks but now I'm back in Taiwan. Away from the sun and the clear blue sky and back to rainy, grey weather, people in screaming fights over my head, and, tomorrow, more characters to memorize....

Christmas in Taipei

Christmas in Taipei. These are all photos of Christmas decorations around Taipei 101 and the shopping district in that area, last night, in the mild drizzle that marks a Taiwanese winter. I walked around the area and took these sort of crummy photos with Julianna last night. Oh, Christmas in a rainy Buddhist/Daoist country. Tomorrow, though, I'm catching a flight to Fiji and parents and brother so we will see what Christmas looks like there, in the 90 degree weather.

siberian windows

more memories from this summer... windows in siberia.

parliament dissolved

Fiji; Parliament dissolved, road blocks up all around the capital. The thing is, some of the policies the general was against really were wrong, and really did need to be changed, like being very soft on the leaders of the last coup, but all of this, performing a coup, not accepting the slightest compromise, the repercussions for the tourism industry and the way Fiji is perceived by the rest of the world, the illegality of it all... well.

beginning?

Its not a coup... yet. But the military has begun disarming the police force. Its amazing how power hungry one person can be; the police force has so few guns anyway, and they are even confiscating decorative guns used in ceremonies! Watching the news for more...

Siberia and Lake Baikal

No, I didn't forget about my continuing belated presentation of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. These are from Lake Baikal, and are mostly taken by Adam. We ate much blini and borsht, we jumped into the lake for two seconds and jumped out because of the pain from the cold, we sat in little old lady's sauna in her backyard.

moscow and st petersberg

This summer I did the trans-siberian, and I never did it justice in this blog. So many beautiful things... even though its three months later I'm going to return to some of the photos Adam and I took in the next few posts. Architecture of Moscow and St. Petersberg.

IF: Trouble

When I think of trouble, I think of, of course, 3rd graders... This is a portrait of one of the worst ones, named Tiger. He never stopped singing, pushed tables and chairs over, got in fights, tried to hide under my skirt... but yet I really do miss him.

IF: Quiet