Hydrogorgon, out of reach

[radiantfracture]

yhlee has been writing poignantly about the gap between mind and hand in making art. I am working on a drawing that involves peering into that lurid chasm, so I thought I'd post about it.

I want to be creating some images that hybridize human and more freeform biologies. I've started (just to start somewhere) with a fairly commonplace idea -- the head in profile with Unusual Hair.

Anyway, this project (a head that actually looks like a head) is simultaneously very ambitious for me and a project that, in the sense of ever becoming a satisfactory completed work, is doomed to fail.

I work on it in little bits and pieces to allow myself time to consider and to stop me spoiling it with impatience.


This is all freehand, and would certainly have benefited from more models and references.

The animal the hair is (very loosely) based on is called (in Haeckel) Gorgonida:



...so I thought, well - Gorgon.



As I worked on the image I thought -- this being takes power from the endlessly resprouting generativity figured in the 'hair'. I've been reading about dragons, of course, and so -- Hydra. Also green people being beheaded. A fusion of the myths, or something.

"Hydromedusa" is taken, of course, by both a jellyfish phase and a long-necked turtle, so "hydrogorgon," with appropriate slogan of resistance.



I think it's fairly easy to see that this drawing is properly beyond my current abilities. There's a sort of thrilling despair in this.

My best attitude to these matters (art, the essaying of it) is cheerful hopelessness, but the cheer part takes practice and a certain trust that you can do a thing again (and might even do it better hereafter).

The first time I drew something that looked sort of like the thing I meant it to look like, I was exhausted, had no idea how I'd done it, and possessed no concept of how I might do it again.



I still clearly don't know how to control colour and shading. The strategy in the face (dramatic contrast between shadow and highlight) is completely different from the strategy in the hair (gradual shading in the same tone).

This sort of picture tends to have a flattened, hieratic quality -- art nouveau etc -- so maybe it's not as bad here as it would be in an image that tried to be fully three-dimensional?

The blank expression is a problem.

Materials

Finally, this will never really work because these are the wrong materials.

I can't work out what this paper is for at all -- maybe charcoal? What sort of medium requires soft, toothy, absorbent paper? Watercolours would just buckle it; markers would spread. The pencil crayon wafts up in bright chromatic dust, and ink bleeds violently into its fibres. I used a finer pen for the outline than I usually do, so that part's not so bad, but the colour is constantly threatening to smudge.



It made me remember I had some watercolours I should dig out (since the reorganization of the shed, they've been neatly put away in one of several plastic tubs in the corner cupboard).

{rf}