GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Artifacts

  • Swiss 1JJ, Page of Wands

    I copied the drawing while waiting for files to upload to the server

    I used the classic upside down technique…but ran out of room at the bottom of the notepad for the top of the head.

    A blue ink outline drawing of a mail figure standing with a long baton, wearing a skirt.

  • Separate Heaven and Earth

    Monday was crazy so first thing Tuesday is to catch up on yesterday’s figure. Maybe I’ll get a second round in this afternoon.

    (I threw in some architectural scalies for fun.)

    I’m reusing my notepad with sketches for the 6 of Swords….and this is now my desk pad so the rest of the white space will eventually get filled in (and green highlighted when completed).

    A messy page including black in outlines of swords, messy red architecural scalies, and a red ink outline of a man exercising.

  • Bad Figures

    At the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego I contemplated my recent decision to draw more (than nothing everyday). One gallery had paintings with several highly stylized figures. I committed the classic response to modern art.

    I could do that!

    Spoiler alert: I can’t.

    This idea pushed me to finally attack the white whale of drawing figures. I’m so bad, even my architectural scalies look awful. This is way out of my comfort zone but it’s time to attack the issue in a concentrated fashion.

    I’m calling this Figure 8’s . The series is to draw a human figure for +/- 8 minutes, for x8 days.

    At least for 08 days to go with the 8 brocades, maybe up to 78 (tarot deck) or 18, 28, 68, or 88 (for good luck).

    Yesterday, I started with image of a guy stretching upward. I didn’t use a reference and …. umm yeah … this makes my scalies look like palatable.

    Red outline drawing of a dude raising his arms over his head. No model, just out of the noggin.

    The drawing today was from the cover of my exercise book, the second callisthenic shooting an arrow. I’ll do exercises 3-8 from the book before I venture back out into my imagination.

    Red outline drawing of a man pointing his fingers out towards the left, shown with the photograph.

    The girl got a good laugh when she saw these drawings, she even got her brother upstairs to join in the fun. It may be good for them to see dad fail miserably…and hopefully get better by the end. Given how quickly she picks things up in school, I worry she has developed a fear of failure. So hopefully this will encourage her to take some risks and fail graciously a few times before the stakes get too high in life.

  • Coat, Desk, Chair

    I took my first studio in the spring of 1998. More than architecture, ED11A was about drawing and seeing.

    This was the big midterm assignment.

    It also coincided with the clock change, and we bemoaned the loss of an hour to complete this drawing.

    It turned out that I didn’t need that extra hour. I finally got an “A” on this drawing. It was a brutal studio (architecture studios are half hazing), but something clicked on this drawing.

    I expended an intense amount of effort on this piece, but one must also credit Fortuna, since nothing is guaranteed with art.

    It’s been a quarter century since that long week in concrete caverns of Wurster Hall. Things that seemed cataclysmic are mere whispers in our memory.

    Maybe I’ll return to this level artistry one day. More importantly, I hope my kids will push themselves to discover their art — my daughter is less than a decade away from her freshman year in college.

    18″x24″ Pencil Drawing of a Coat, Desk, and Chair. I spent the week on my stomach drawing the green army trench coat at my studio chair and desk. A classmate drew this same scene from a different perspective. Everyone else took this opportunity draw in the comfort of their dormitories.

    The graduate assistant for our section was Noga Wizansky who still makes great art. During my time at Berkeley, I developed close relationships with the professors Chip Sullivan and Joe Slusky in future studios. I loved their omnivorous approach to everything. It’s a shame that the Architecture program has become focused on architecture. There’s plenty of time for that silliness after college.

    Ink for determining the perspective
    Detail of the selected view

  • Drawing Hands

    Late last year, I started drawing a little. I had joined Post.news and wanted to see more art in my feed. I decided that I had to make some of my own in order to manifest this desire into reality.

    The drawings are nothing special, but it was good to start moving my hand again.

    Hands are a rich subject. They are very hard to perfectly, but they are quite forgiving to make decent. It’s just a matter of breathing slowly and taking your time.

    This exercise is highly recommended for anyone that wants to get out of the digital vortex of the 21st century.

    Index Finger pointing towards the Right.
    An open palm with my Pelikan Fountain Pen cap resting on my fingers.
    Two attempts at a twisted wrist. I wish I could say it was a nice stretch, but it was just tiring.

  • ERP fun (or life as a User)

    A few years ago, I was roped into assisting with the state’s transition to a new Enterprise Resource Platform (ERP), updating our ancient web-software backbone to link all our HR and financial information.

    Anyone who has helped implement an ERP can attest, it’s a complicated effort — enough that this initiative has been put on hold for a year.

    I’m an architect, not an accountant. But as a project manager, I’m now accountant-adjacent. A big part of my job is preparing and moving documents around. As the division’s representative, my goal was to make sure that they didn’t set up the system in a way that make our lives as Project Manager 2’s harder after implementation.

    It was an enlightening experience. I’ve always been the Architect-Consultant who is hired to fix a problem. Things shifted a little when I joined the state and became the Owner.

    This was the first time that I was just a User.

    It’s hard! These consultants swoop in with minimal knowledge of how I do my job. They shove my needs into a their workflow for their brand new, opaque system. They don’t know what I do, and I barely know what they do. In this case, I was doubly ignorant — of both software and accountant-speak. Amidst the confusion, I was keenly aware of the high stakes because we were gonna be stuck with this program for the rest of my career.

    I’d like to think I was a reasonably humble architect, but being a User is humbling at a whole other level! I was powerless, just praying that the experts listened to my pleas and followed through on their promises. I appreciate that a new software platform presents opportunities for positive change, but it felt like they were following their own standard playbook without addressing our specific concerns. It didn’t help that as a project manager, I was extra-sensitive to how they were mismanaging the process. It was so frustrating that I lost my temper a few times, once in a large meeting!

    Aside from that shameful embarrassment, this effort gave me a chance to build great relationships with our accountants (nothing builds comradery as an uncaring outside force).

    And in a moment of inspiration I threw together this diagram showing how the new system will allow to analyze our project finances along multiple dimensions.

    I’m inordinately fond of this diagram, maybe because it melds my current work with my old life. I doubt a non-architect would have realized that an axonometric drawing could sell the potential of the new ERP!

    Alt Text: Axonometric diagram of the ERP tracking project funds on multiple dimensions. The different funding sources are shown as different layers on the vertical axis, with cost categories on the X axis and project phasing on Y axis of each spreadsheet. I suspect my early experience as a hand draftsman is why I love axon’s.

  • Over dinner, we surfed the film of Negatives and Positives.

    One minus One is Zero!
    One minus One is Zero!
    One minus One is Zero!
    He’s been watching Numberblocks

    The next day, he exclaimed
    One minus Two is Zero!
    Momma sat him down to explain negative numbers.

    He spent dinner enthralled in this new realm of arithmetic.
    Three minus Five is Negative Two!
    One minus a Hundred is Negative Ninety-Nine!

    His sister chimed in
    Negative Two minus Negative Five is Three!

  • 小宝宝去睡觉!

    The girl was an awful sleeper as a baby.
    This lullaby emerged over hours of trying to walk her to sleep.

    小宝宝去睡觉
    (little precious, go to sleep)

    It never worked.

    Not for her.
    Not for him.

    It just riles them up.
    So I sing it at every opportunity.

    Last year, I transcribed it into Flat.io so you can now hear it as a round, because I doubt I’ll ever convince anyone in the family to sing along with me.

  • He found gender and status on faces of metal, plastic, and glass.

    We walked by a Chevrolet.
    He pointed at the golden skewed cross.
    医生车! (doctor car!)

    He said our Odyssey is a 女的车 (girl car).
    Headlights with long curved eyelashes,
    Like his sister’s cartoons.

    ䷆䷜

    chase the pheasant
    grab the illusion

  • Another encouragement to make your website.

    I’m part of a small group on Post.news who posts old work under the hashtag #SundayShare. This was going to be my suggestion for a “lunar new years resolution”…until the tragedy at Monterey park. I still think it’s worth sharing, so I posted it today.

    ~

    In 2008, I planted a flag on the interwebs with www.grizzlypear.com. (We came up with the name as a twist on our bunnies Badger and Peppercorn.)

    I quickly lost interest in the webcomic, but now I had a domain to build upon. It morphed into the repository of my random contributions scattered across various forums.

    Even though #PostCreative / #CreativeCollective is going strong right now, who knows how things will go?

    Let this new-new year will be the one when you start your own site. Build a library that stands apart from these social media bazaars that come and go.

    Your place might have few visitors, but you’re the only one that counts. Maybe you be digging into for next week’s #SundayShare in 2033.

    If you don’t know where to start, I recommend getting the domain name on Hover.com which I’ve really enjoyed using. I don’t know which web-host is best, but I’ve been using the cheapest plan on Hostgator for a decade with WordPress for my blog engine.

    Alt Text: A black and white ink drawing of two rabbits in a rectangular vaguely urban landscape with two rabbits hopping down the street towards the vanishing point. The dot pattern for the sunset was added on the computer and I still can’t decide which is better.

    This is what I shared last week in the face of that tragedy.

    A simple #SundayShare diptych of Badger and Peppercorn ferociously consuming Bok Choy in our old apartment in Houston.

    Alt text: two photos, showing a pair of rabbits eating veggies on the floor. The black and white harlequin steps away after she yanked a luscious green leaf out of her albino partner’s mouth.

    Taken with a Nikon D40 with the 18-35mm kit lens. Fifteen years later, the gear doesn’t matter all that much. Glass and metal tubes sit in the a box while the heart is warmed by the glow of bygone days, occasionally rekindled by pixels on a screen.

    Here’s to the New Year!

    Let’s make many great memories and maybe some photos too.