Crit 2: Crit's Revenge

Meh. Blog.

I've been on a series of art benders, where I sequester myself to the studio for sixteen and twenty hour blocks alternately sketching, conceptualizing and curled into a tight ball.

Put simply, my current project is kicking my ass.

I expected this. When you set out to confront years of emotional clutter, you open yourself up to reliving moments once thought forgotten and as it turns out, there are an awful lot of moments in my life worth forgetting.

I find that tragic. Our moments are finite and therefore precious. I am comforted, however, that in recent years I have amassed a disproportionately large amount of memories worth remembering. 

There is value in obsessive persistence. 

Anyway... Triptych. Yeah.

I was looking at this as one big piece - which it is, to a point - and getting overwhelmed by the complexity and sheer size of the thing. I find that working on three separate, stand-alone images that each tell the story of the other and somehow pull together as one, is much like assembling a thousand piece puzzle of a solid color with no edge pieces. Even as I type this, I can feel myself breaking out into a cold sweat. 

Fun times.

So, early last week - in mid panic, I eeny, meeny, miney, moe'd a panel and got to work. Inevitably, I began with the portrait of my father. To me, he is the most abstract element of this project, as he was not present for the majority of my life. Only until the last decade, have I ever thought of him as anything more than a symbol. A concept. 

I was surprised at how easy the drawing of him came.

It's as I envisioned however, while I worked, I began recalling some of the most early memories of life with him - memories I had all but forgotten, and these spawned some alternate ideas... Since he is not a person to me, only and idea, why do a true portrait when I have the freedom to do something more interpretive? 

That's when I drew the angry dog.

To me, that's more close to how I remember him... more than any photo could ever show: an angry, violent, unpredictable, snarling junkyard dog.

Yet, I like the irony of the portrait I drew. He seems so benign, almost like a sitcom dad from the seventies.

I stepped away to let that soak in a bit and went home to get some sleep and dreamed of a giant rabid dog tearing into me.

Dad, Sketch one

Snarling Dog

Daddog

Dad final drawing, maybe