Presenting the Thousand Sketches – a work in progress

I wrote in the last post that Thousand Sketches was a completed project. Sort of. The 1000 are done. However they are not all printed! Printing is a form of presentation, and…

presentation is the art

 

I am thinking about the warm-up to a presentation. Naming. Description. I am really thinking art! Creating the aura is art. How to be fully present with these sketches, how to honour them, help them be seen for what they are, no more or less.

I want Henry to come along and make a link! Links are a form of art. Curating is an art. Criticism is art.

I was thinking when I looked at this one

how easy is for one sketch in a 1000 to get lost. But I like it! How to present it?

There is plenty to work on:

    this blog

  • thumbnails don’t work properly
  • selections
  • folios

The categories are fine, but I’d like to do more of what I have done with Earth Crosses, (see Gallery Category) select the best in a series and build on them.

Michael Leunig Wisdom

The Michael Leunig Website

His confession is a great little essay. I link to it here because it resonates so well with my experience doing the Thousand Sketches. I don’t have characters, but I do have stuff that appears off the end of the pen.

I have developed a deep affection for my abiding characters and symbols, they nourish me greatly. Many times since the duck and teapot revelation their strange antics and adventures have anticipated the course my life would take. I respect their integrity and eccentric ways to an absurd degree. They appear off the end of the pen, at that wondrous point of connection and delight, and place themselves freely in my drawings. They ask for things and do what they will. They surprise, disturb and inspire me. I observe them with bemusement and respect. I let them be and eventually I hear what they are telling me.

Subway Crows

#0980
Subway Crows

Completing one I began in New York. These are bronzsz just casually placed in the subway. I don’t know the artist, if someone does please let me know. Tiny sculptures are easy to stumble upon in the New York subways, wonderful!

Monday, 11 May 2020

 

I think the top one is slightly better.  Copied and saved BMP as a JPG

The bottom is exported to Tiff

Up


#0972 Up

Back Up. The disk failures have not been in vane. I now have a backup system par none. I am enjoying the word too… up. Up. Better than a back down.

If you are interested in my backup strategy, read on.

I now have a new HDD (the third!) in my M200. I have divided it into two partitions, one for the OS and programs, the other for data. The reason for this is that partitions are much quicker to backup and restore, and I may need to do that with only one or the other. Also problems might be isolated to one or the other partition.

I use Acronis for those backups, onto a huge 500 gig external drive.

That is not enough though as I discovered. Backups can be corrupt. Backup disks can also fail. So I have a smaller external drive where I copy files, just data, no programs. I take this with me. I use Second Copy 7 to do that copying and it does it every 10 min or so, just adds in the new stuff. I like this plain copy thing as I can see the data there. That used to be my only backup, but it left me quite vulnerable, not just to losing the data or having the whole lot stolen, but to having to reinstall from scratch, I have had to do that twice in the last few weeks, and I have a lot of programs.

And the final protection, as it is not always easy to quickly plug in the leads etc, is a 4 gig USB thumb drive, that uses Second Copy 7 to keep the last two days of work. Long enough for me to get back to the other disks.

Whew!

But that is not all. There are some key data files, money, organisational stuff, I have Second Copy 7 regularly put up via FTP, onto the website.

Boring but I almost feel as if I can trust the system. I still dread the moment when I boot up, I have had so many hours of nothing happening when I do, and even with all the backup, a disk failure is traumatic for me.

~

But if you sketch digitally it is like sharpening pencils. We like to go on about the media we use, be it brands of paint, brushes, pencils or paper.

Anyway, I am back up!

Backup

#0964 Backup

I have had more time doing PC backup stuff and fixing crap than sketching. I was thinking of the early novels, Richardson, all made up of letters, which became possible because of the speed-up of the postal system. The speedup led to the conception of letters forming a whole. In those epistolatory novels the letters themselves are part of the plot. OK, self reflective stuff. So this is a bit like that. So is the next one.

“I would like to place my mind inside the bowl.”

#0954 Bowl

This morning I thought I’d have a good shot at moleskine style sketchblogging. There is a tradition here I semi-tap into and is close to what I aspired to at the start. Sketches. I got a bit carried away and that is OK. I think I am finding style in this genre that I may be able to perseverw with for a while, especially once the 1000 are done.

The title “I would like to place my mind inside the bowl.” is not sketchbloggy at all, but a quote from the Thai Buddhist artist Montien Boonma who did bowl sketches as a meditation.

Art talk & artists info follows.

Continue reading ““I would like to place my mind inside the bowl.””