The Missing Shade of Blue
Page from an art journal. Collage on Moleskine sketchbook paper.
…[David] Hume’s idea that although all our knowledge of the world comes through our senses, a man shown a series of graduating blues with a missing shade could intuit its colour from somewhere within himself…
(From a book review in The Guardian.)
Another female head study, pencil on Moleskine sketchbook paper.
As For Violating a Privacy… – page from Moleskine sketchbook. Pencil, collage, etc.
There’s a quote here from a Leo Steinberg essay (“Objectivity and the Shrinking Self”), where he’s taking another art historian to task for choosing to glide over the issue of Michelangelo’s homosexuality as if it had no bearing on his life or art. The historian’s argument was that some things should be kept private. But societal taboos change and people are private about different things anyway. For some people, sexuality isn’t a big deal but they are reluctant to talk about death or spirituality or money or the teaming of socks with sandals. Example: I feel sleazy about watching people write or sign things, because to me there is something intensely personal about the way someone holds a pen. But I’m fairly ok with other people’s nudity. (Not my own. I shower in the dark.)
In case it’s not legible, the quote reads:
As for violating a privacy, who can say where an ultimate privacy lurks? Centres of privacy shift.
Darling I Am Trying – page from Moleskine sketchbook. Collage, pencil, etc.
I have conflicting obsessions. I like to buy new things, but I don’t like things to be *new*. I greedily stockpile new pencils, but I use old ones that are knobbly and chewed. I buy new notebooks, but I write and draw on scraps.
Lately I’ve been buying journals and customising them so they feel like “mine”. Then I can scribble to my heart’s content. These are blank Moleskine journals, with animal drawings on the cover in ink, graphite and white pencil.
