drawing

i’m inspired by the ugly patterns on the textiles for baby clothes at the fabric store. happy clowns and baseball patterns and weird pastel-coloured bears with eyes too close together.  they are so ugly i’m having nightmares.

it’s been super cold here in saskatoon.  it’s already the end of april!  it was snowing the other day…  i like prairie winter - so cold and painful, but not this long.

i should start spreading cherry blossom heads.  they will keep me warm.

jean snow, a canadian writer based in tokyo, invited me to contribute a drawing for a website called neojaponisme. he suggested i try to use the same colour scheme as neojaponisme — red, black and grey. but he was kind to say that i could use my usual style if those colours didn’t suit my work.

i was happy for the suggestion, because i’ve been wanting to do something new. when i started drawing, i did a lot of line drawings using ballpoint pens. these days i do most of my work with colour pencils, gradually adding details and shading and only using my line drawing technique to vaguely outline figure before i start colouring.

so it was a nice brainstorming project to put my usual colour pencil technique away for awhile. i enjoyed working with a pencil again. i quite like the grey colours of graphite and the nuances that can be added by that smudging.

to add a little red to the black and white of my pencil drawing, i gave one balloon head a nosebleed. truth is, it’s a carrot stain from elijah’s lunch. he likes to feed himself these days — he gets annoyed if i try to do it all for him. when he uses his fingers, he’s very accurate and doesn’t miss much. but when he uses a spoon, food ends up all over the place — on the floor, and on his clothes, and in my hair and in this case, on my drawing. carrots flew through the air from elijah’s spoon and magically landed right on the balloon head. i like it — i think it’s very natural. so i didn’t erase it.

the colour of the carrots/nosebleed was more like orange than red. so i used photoshop to color that part, to fit with the style at neojaponisme.

(title :: simple minded)

elijah’s separation anxiety began when he was eight months old. in japanese, we call this period ‘ato-oi’, which literally means ‘after-follow’. he began to follow me around wherever i would go. even when i was in his sight and someone else was holding him, he immediately would start crying and reach out to me. it is/was really, really touching and awfully adorable.

i try to stay close to him so he won’t feel insecure. he wants to be picked up and held all the time, so i do that. when i need to go to the next room, i let him know that i’m going. i try not to disappear without saying anything. he always stops what he’s doing and crawls after me. for some reason, if i get down on the floor and crawl out of the room, he doesn’t react anxiously. maybe he thinks i’m off to catch some salmon. it’s all part of the bear game, my friend.

recently, he started to follow after paul, too. he chased after paul when he entered the bathroom. so i thought it might be a time to teach him that papa and mama are around even when you can’t see them.

it’s kind of embarrassing to tell you this, but i’ve been leaving the bathroom door open when i take a shower in the morning. i put elijah in the playpen and move it down the hall in front of the bathroom so that he can see me. as soon as i would get in the shower, he would start crying, and he’d keep crying his head off the whole time. from time to time, i would stick my head (covered in shampoo) outside the shower curtain and say “daijyo-bu! mama kokoni iruyo!” (it’s okay, mama’s here!). he would cry even harder. :D after a couple of try, i stopped hearing his crying. he started to play with toys.

this is one of the drawings for ‘100 stories’ at hosfelt gallery in NYC.

100 stories

photographs by crystal liu
& drawings by crystal liu, ruth marten, rachell sumpter, yuka yamaguchi

11 april - 31 may 2008

hosfelt gallery
531 w 36th street,
new york