Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, drawing, gonzo journalism, new journalism, poem, response, review, somatic, Stacy Elaine Dacheux, typewriter, video, visceral
A visceral review by Stacy Elaine Decheux, of a video I made a few months ago. Actually, more of a response to the video, I think – it’s visually poetic and physical, making use of an old typewriter and a pencil – more of a drawing, really – the form conveys almost as much as, maybe more than, the words themselves…
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, drawing, gesture, proprioception, sensory modalities
“The Gestural Approach is a quick, all-encompassing statement of forms that duplicates the movement of the eyes, quickly defining the subject’s general characteristics, such as movement, weight, shape, tension, scale, proportion…“ and presence.
Anecdotally, I can liken presence to the feeling one has that something is out of place upon entering a familiar room.
With regard to this, there is a third, lesser known sensory modality, called proprioception, which describes one’s sense of the relative positions of neighboring parts of the body, adding up to a kind of body-map. This is the sense of self one continues to have when closing one’s eyes, which allows an individual to accurately touch various parts of the body without seeing them. It is also the sense that results in phantom limb pain, after a part of the body is amputated.
Compared with other observational exercises, gesture drawing is unique because it requires more than a sense of sight; it considers the overtone or resonance resulting from all modalities of sensation, all of which are at the root of drawing, but become crucial when trying to perceive presence in gesture.
To me, a gesture drawing is all about sensing presence, and in order to be successful, it is utterly dependent upon the proprioceptive sensations that locate us in space, extend us into the things we do, and accumulate into the notions of connection that allow us to understand a gesture when we see it.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Dream, Hawaii, Mars, moving, Oklahoma, Space
July 17, 2006: the morning before last, I dreamed that I was given a job on Mars, and was ejected out into space, wearing a suit and carrying my suitcase. I tumbled in what I supposed must be the direction of Mars, but i couldn’t be sure – space was very dark and awkward and colorless, and no one had told me anything. it occurred to me that I might need to be very still, as any little movement I might have made could send me far off- course (although I debated as to whether or not this would actually happen in a vacuum), and I wondered if it had happened already. I was really starting to sweat this, when I unexpectedly landed on the dark side of Mars. I started walking, and was impressed that they had managed to get some grass to grow in places. it reminded me of Oklahoma. I posted this to my myspace page back in two thousand six. Today, I feel like it was remarkably prophetic, in that I soon after was offered a job as an assistant professor at the University of Hawai’i Manoa, which I accepted. Not only do I feel like I’m on another planet, isolated here in the middle of the Pacific, but the dirt is red. Like Oklahoma.
