"Swell" Illustration Friday Challenge Aug. 12/2011

Inspired by the quote:
"Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up and touch everything. If you never let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you." ~ E.L. Konigsburg

Song came to mind first, as something that truly swells up inside of us and touches everything in earshot, but I kept mulling over ideas until I arrived at the expression that a bud swells - flowers do a wonderful job of reaching out and touching everything, with their rich beauty and aroma. I spent part of my summer studying Dutch painting so their masterful reminders of time passing, the still lives with flowers, bugs and various other symbols of the brevity of life suggested what flowers would reach out from the mind of someone taking a day to allow what is already inside to swell up and spill over.

See what's happening on Facebook

Just to round things out, I've created a Facebook page for Aino Anto Illustrations - for all the doodles, paintings, past illustrations and general creative overflow that doesn't belong here or on my website.

Check out what's new on Facebook today, tomorrow, next week ... there will always be something. Facebook: Aino Anto Illustration Thanks for visiting!

Imperfect - Illustration Friday August 5/2011

Inspired by the Illustration Friday quote:
"Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it is better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring". - Marilyn Monroe

I read the quote over and over, an idea tickling the back of my mind like a sneeze that hasn't quite arrived - until today, when it occurred to me that jesters embodied the entire quote.

Often different physically, they dressed to stand out even more; the butt of jokes and the confidants of the powerful; japesters, jokesters, philosophers, mountebanks and scapegoats, they made an art of the ridiculous, found beauty in imperfection and split madness until within they found wisdom. I wonder if Marilyn ever saw herself this way...

Obsession - Illustration Friday July 28/2011

From the Illustration Friday quote:
"Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment." - Claude Monet.

Looking at Monet's paintings side-by-side with countless copies, the originals stand out - the subtleties of colour which swallowed Monet whole, that he revelled in, chased, and tried endlessly to commit to canvas, those subtleties are lost in copies.

Instead of copying his paintings, to lose oneself in observation as he did, let us imitate that. Perhaps not to the point of obsession and torment - but how else to grasp at the joy he found in it?

sending

sent.

"Perennial" - Illustration Friday July 22/2011

Inspired by the Illustration Friday quote:
"A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions". - Frederick Seitz

Childhood curiosity leads us with a string of questions into unexplored territory. Finding one answer, the mind is already wondering about the next question. And the next. And the next. Observations shed in the quest for a particular answer surface later for further exploration.

I.F. July 15 "Gesture"

From the Illustration Friday Quote: "Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence" - Henri Matisse

Pondering the word and the quote, I wandered off into thinking about gestures in general, and those with more or less permanent effects.

Gestures on the highway are generally held to have little permanence, though they tend to cheapen the maker and leave an unpleasant taste for those on the receiving end. I wonder if this effect, observed in themselves, led so many cultures to ascribe magical powers to gestures - and to spend energy either in warding against them or learning to use them to advantage?

Here is one person, making a gesture in a very impermanent surface, previous gestures swirling around her, clinging to her every surface, changing her form, her appearance and filtering the world in which she moves.