Catching up

I notice I failed to post a few images, so I'm playing catch-up here. Haven't been drawing or painting much at all obviously, and it's mainly because of all the reading I've been doing. I've also sort of lost my art mojo and I think it's because my work has been too tight and careful (especially the last batch of paintings). That's something I've been wanting to move away from (ala Kent Williams).

And speaking of the Jungian books, I sort of switched from posting about it here to creating a thread on Dreamviews: Carl Gustav Jung - Videos, Books, Ruminations. Goes into  lot more detail than I did here and covers all the recent book acquisitions as well as a lot of videos and toward the end some posts I wrote up to help explain the whole thing at a basic level. So that covers what I've been up to until just recently.

The last image above is something new for me, and my approach now is informed by the Jungian studies. The most important conclusion I've drawn so far from Jung is that in order to individuate - which means simply to increase psychological health or to raise your level of consciousness - what you must do is create an ongoing dialogue between the conscious and unconscious minds  - which breaks down essentially to the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

So that's what I'm doing now in my sketches. Trying to balance out accuracy and the loose intuitive approach at the same time. I think this is exactly the way to do it. In the past when I drew loose and intuitive I tended to go too far in that direction, and accuracy just went out the window. Or alternately I tended to be too tight and meticulous - too left brain/logical. But now I'm making the effort to keep them dynamically balanced.

Also, I went through a period of materials testing with pens, brushes and inks. What I've settled on for now are some Japanese Fude calligraphy pens which give incredibly variable line width plus you can go black or lighter grey depending on how hard you press. These combined with the Tombow water soluble markers and a water brush to get wash effects make for some really excellent sketching!

As for my drawing now being looser while still trying to retain accuracy - since I've been drawing and painting again starting in 2012 (when I started this blog) I've moved toward carefully constructed and properly shaded/lit etc. I suspect if I would have tried to delve into the intuitive before now it would have been too soon - I needed a good long time of traditional /classical/ Academic training, but it was really getting tedious. I knew at some point - and soon - I needed to break away from that. I'll probably move back and forth to some extent, because I don't think I'm well enough versed in the classical/correct methods yet. Though who knows, maybe just by pursuing accuracy while drawing intuitively, I can continue to develop my ability to see (and to draw what I see).