MONSTER PLANTS AND MORE
Photographic sundry from teaching the children at LITTLE ART BUG. Nothing begs to be photographed like bubble-faced children creating art in glorious colours and i daresay i take more shots of these kids than myself, the time i spend outside of classes. Like an over-proud parent i shall proceed to show off their creations.
1. Origami paper printed with foaming paint
2. One can always trust the boys to think up legit monster plants
3. While the girls decorate theirs like charms
In the studio, it is always a pressing challenge to strike a balance between imparting skills, and nurturing their imaginations. On one hand i need to teach them to paint a perfect leaf, draw perfect circles. On the other, their mottled purple leaves and wonky circles can turn out to be just fabulous. There are many ways to hold a brush, to subvert drawing techniques to suit your purposes. I encourage good techniques whenever i can while they make me understand that art is more encompassing and expressive than the carefully structured lists in my manual.
ART IMPROV I // FOODNOTES
Imagine easy conversation, brushstrokes and the tincture of paint, understanding subtleties like the exact amount of water to cut the paints with, knowing a myriad ways to start but lingering, never too willing to stop.
Art Improv is a bespoke creative event that, after a lot of niggling, we summed up into an equation : free flow paints, space and inspiration + YOU = Art Improv, a painting experience which is social, accessible and addictive. It is a social situation catalysed by the meditative and bonding nature of creating art. Art Improv is an idea slowly achieving fruition that i am doing with JOANNE and TIFF for ARTBUG. Our maiden session was fun and by raucous consent, extended for an hour longer than it should have.
It was ironic that in making this “art” event happen i needed to be speedy and chatty and concise, a sharp contrast to my self-indulgence in artist mode where movements are slow, tactile and rhythmic, languidly folding brown pigment into pink to make salmon. On busy days like these i would like a big picture brain, i want to be in perpetual motion, an adult.
TWENTY SIX
For a tropical island, this country faces a shameful dearth of palatable seasides. Even the sand is imported sniffed Joanne derisively. As much as Coastes is a consolation for my beach-deprived soul, along Singapore’s shores is no water i wish to touch. Longing to be in Positano so much right now, i do not think this compulsion will ever leave me.
Quarter life brings an ennui of sorts. Hazel urges me to get contracted, find employment. AM tempts me with a life in publishing, J insists i only need work on marketing while much of my energy is taken up by ARTBUG. Like a boat tugged in opposite directions, i am restless yet stagnant. Tiff told me in passing that love inspires. The topmost picture incidentally, contains the things i hold most dear – the sea, drawing, french fries, the sun-drawn flush of youth. I am armed with pencils, paints and a steady hand. So.. onward then?
MATERNAL MEMOIRS
I make a habit of napping in the master bedroom because the terrible state of my own bed in the afternoon occludes any possibility of slumber. It was thus quite unwittingly that i discovered upon mum’s diaries, with a twist – they were the size of jujubes!
Mum is stauchly unliterary ; she doesn’t particularly like reading and fiddles more with microsoft excel than she writes. She doesn’t even text on the phone if she can help it. Of the rare times she puts pen to paper/mind to books she makes grandoise pet projects – she’s read the tomes that are Lee Kuan Yew’s and Chinese Communistic memoirs, founded our family newsletter and written a posthumous biography for her father. Yup, probably shouldn’t be surprised that her diaries are so elaborate in construction (i write on scraps of recycled paper!) yet extremely economical in prose.
She actually had the majority printed, probably feeling that writing was stretching her editorial contribution haha.
Upon confrontation, she sheepishly called these her trove of “happy thoughts”. It was quite hilarious, in a nice and unexpected way, to reconcile girly hobbies with that stately bastion of motherhood I have grown up with and hopefully this trend continues as the brother and I take more responsibilities (and with that, hopefully age) off her shoulders.
THE IGNORABLE GNOBI
Meet Gnobi, the utterly functionless clay slug whose fate it is to play unwitting canvas to candied globs of paint in the studio.
It hits me that these passages read like captions and I wonder if a blog’s template somehow sways its content (and not the other way round as it should be). Amongst the inky blackness of my previous website I am oft melancholy, prone to maudling and abstraction while within the current crisp Swiss-ish layout, words are becoming descriptive and systematic. It feels like filing memories away into a super-catalogued album of sorts. Years behind, I’ve even actually kept a blog swathed in shades of grey, which I slowly began to fill with poems about winter and a tale set in Soviet Russia.
My mind seems to be dictated by context, a visual art direction. Which begs the question: might there be rigours to which I can subject my environment thus magically (exorcising my languid spirit) inducing me to be more productive, more creative?
