Monthly Archive for April, 2009

Sketch: Giraffes, mudcake, the colour of magic and how I met your mother.

Published on April 29, 2009 in Plain Paper, Sketch and Sketch-Book. 0 Comments Tags: , .
Kat Johnston Sketch - it's a giraffe. It's a tall giraffe. With, uhhh, a long neck. Yay!

Quite a title today – consider it somewhat of a stream of consciousness. It has little meaning beyond what was flowing through my head in that particular instant. Giraffes, because that is what the picture is today, mudcake, because that is what Emma had earlier today to fight off horrid back pain, The Colour of Magic because that is the dvd I have beside me right now, and How I Met Your Mother because… well… it sounded like a good way to round it off. Oh, and it’s also a good series.

I’m going to write a little about an opening I went to the other night soon, but I’m going to save that for another day. I’m feeling a bit flagged right now, and quite well know that my writing can tend to suffer a little when that is the case. Therefore I’m just going to write like this – one word after the other until I am done.

My spam-catcher has now caught over 1000 spam messages for me here on the blog – over a thousand! That really just boggles my mind just the tiniest bit. The more annoying thing, I think, is that the spam messages coming through at the moment are really rather boring. I don’t mind spam, so long as it is somewhat interesting, and these ones are not.

‘Great blog, I really like how you write’ doesn’t quite stand up to some of the fantastic ones out there which flow like some sort of odd surrealist automatic-writing exercise with a few links thrown in for good measure. I absolutely love that spam! I know that might seem like an odd thing to say, but it’s true. Screw the ‘here’s a nice default message with a link to my site’, I want spam with guts to it, where one line says ‘piano walnut lessons in viagra playgrounds give johnnie liked tennis with a side of peanut butter’ and the next says something entirely different – where one word doesn’t necessarily have any actual relation to the next.

So anyhow, yes. That’s all. This is an entirely pointless post with no real reasoning behind it, written so that there is something on the site, in order that I don’t lapse in posting something on this particular day. Because I’ve not been the greatest about posting every day recently – every other day seems to be little problem, but every actual day sometimes gets to be somewhat of a chore. And it feels as if I’m writing to myself. Am I? Hello? Is anybody out there? Maybe I’m going mad… oh no…

Sketch: Lincraft responds.

Published on April 27, 2009 in Plain Paper, Portraits, Sketch and Sketch-Book. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .
Kat Johnston Sketch - look... I'm running out of witty lines. Or even smart ones. You're just going to have to deal with... this!Kat Johnston Sketch - look... I'm running out of witty lines. Or even smart ones. You're just going to have to deal with... this!

None of this has anything to do with the sketch – we’re ignoring it today and moving onto the other stuff.

The other day I wrote a bit of a rant about Lincraft regarding the state of canvasses they sold me a few weeks ago – an annoyingly sticky, gummy residue was left along with cardboard when I pulled away the packaging, leaving the rather unpleasant job of having to do more work to prep the front of the canvas for painting. Although I did pick them up on sale, it still left me feeling rather grumpy over it all. After all, you buy a pre-prepared canvas, you expect to be able to use it straight out of the plastic without having to worry about doing more work or worrying if it is going to work at all. I may have been a little harsh, but I do tend to get that way when it comes to being overly annoyed over things that are as they should not be.

So this morning I awake and undergo my regular daily schedule: reluctantly open eyes, crawl from under the covers, go downstairs, check e-mail and so on – my rant already quite forgotten. I have a fairly short memory at times and there were more concerning things to worry about… like who was going to make me a peppermint tea for breakfast. With barely contained surprise, between the spam and Facebook notices I noticed a contact form result in my inbox… from Lincraft.

I have a new-found respect for Lincraft now. There are a lot of businesses not yet utilizing the plethora of opportunities currently available to monitor the buzz about their company online, let alone respond to it – Lincraft has. With a sincerely worded apology for the faults of the product and an assurance that it was an old line, the whole experience feels a lot… better. As if going back to get a canvas from Lincraft again tomorrow maybe wouldn’t be as bad an idea as it would have been yesterday, and as if they do take the whole customer satisfaction and product quality thing seriously (at least on a corporate level).

So I guess my post today is about giving credit where credit is due. Thanks Lincraft, for harnessing the power of ‘teh internets’ (and probably Google Alerts) to respond so quickly and personably to the problem I had with that product. It is appreciated.

Sketch: Note to self, don’t buy canvasses from Lincraft, even when desperate.

Published on April 25, 2009 in Plain Paper, Portraits, Sketch and Sketch-Book. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .
Kat Johnston Sketch: a boy, with quite a haircut... or lack of it. That is all, move along, Sir.

I’ve come to a few conclusions today. They are as follows:

1. I just cannot paint with the tv going. Or with a dvd playing. Or anything else that requires more concentration than good ole fashioned music of a variety that makes me smile. There are many things I can do with the background noise of a good cop tv drama. Painting is just not one of them.

2. I find it devilishly hard to work on a painting while my husband is home. It just doesn’t work. He wants to ‘watch’ or ‘be in the room’ or… well… something. Something loving and kind and adorable, but nonetheless frustrating (even if he’s doing absolutely nothing at all). Love you sweetie, but somehow, it just doesn’t work.

3. Even when desperate, despite the fact that they’re on special for half off and they are just the size I need, I should not purchase canvasses from Lincraft. What in the hell was I thinking anyway?

Lets continue the rant about the third item there, shall we? Yes, I admit it – I often buy my canvasses because due to a combination of laziness and lack of an electric saw capable of perfect mitre cuts, I don’t make my own. That said, I don’t generally make the mistake of buying them from Lincraft of all places – and for good reason. A couple of weeks ago, I was walking through the city, headed to Lincraft to pick up paint. I was out of a couple of colours, and lets face it, paintings are generally pretty hard to do without black and white. Mine are, anyway.

I decided to have a look throughout the whole store – lo and behold, the canvasses were on special. Funnily enough, I needed some, so thought ‘what they hey? They’re half off, surely that is a deal I can’t pass up!’ How stupid am I? And more importantly, how stupid are they? Who in their right mind uses a stupidly gummy adhesive (for its purpose) to affix a piece of glossy paper to the actual front of the canvas? Uh huh folks, you heard me right. You can’t pull away the stupid piece of paper without leaving a sticky, gummy, obstinate bit of residue behind on the canvas itself.

Now I realize that the people who generally buy their canvasses from Lincraft are more than likely not in the game of producing fine art (no offence to those who do, mind you), but come on! From the very second that someone tries to tear away at your piece of useless self-promotion, they’re having to rub away at the canvas to get rid of adhesive that shouldn’t have been on that part of the canvas in the first place. Even the people producing dollar store canvasses have worked out that you can affix a piece of paper with the relevant details by folding a few corners, and if necessary, affixing to the edges which aren’t generally used as a display portion of the paintable surface.

So I post this now – as a warning (and as a general rant. I like to rant now and then). For god’s sake, go to a cheapie store and buy your canvasses there over getting them at Lincraft. At least you might start off with a fully paintable surface when you do.

Sketch: I should have had this up yesterday… but I had a looooong day.

Published on April 23, 2009 in Plain Paper, Portraits, Sketch and Sketch-Book. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .
Kat Johnston Art: I'm not sure what to call her... a prima ballerina perhaps?

My apologies again for the late posting of an image for yesterday! I’m slipping. You see, I had a late-ish night attending a lecture over at QUT before having dinner at a certain food establishment. By the time I got home, I was ready to just tumble into bed and call it quits for the night. The rest of this post actually has nothing to do with the sketch, or with art, or anything of that nature at all. It is almost entirely consistent of my grumbling about our dining experience last night, so please feel free to ignore everything I say from here on in. I’m not going to name the place we got dinner at, so that I can tear into them just as much as I please. Let’s call it ‘Foodles’ just so that we have a name to play with, yes?

Emma and I arrive at Foodles, quite expectant of a delicious meal to call our dinner after passing it quite a number of times during our travels around the city before this day. Always it sat there, unassuming yet alluring, a place we’d desired to go but had not yet entered. Having completed out evening mind-expansion, we just wanted something tasty to fill our stomachs before venturing back home to our respective beds. Tonight, we would go inside.

We waited at the front counter, tucked just behind the ‘Please wait to be seated sign’ with polite little smiles on our expectant faces. After a good 10 minutes or so, someone finally deemed us worthy of their attention and wandered over, a bored look dulling their features as they uttered ‘Just the two of you?’ We nodded to them, and followed to our table, still yet undeterred despite the early warning signs. Sliding into our seats, a couple of menus were shoved under our noses and the server wandered away, seemingly fascinated by whatever it was that ticked away (or didn’t, rather) behind their blank expression.

We sat for a few minutes, flicking through, deciding on our meals for the evening – Emma opted for a dish of nachos, I for the caesar salad, with a side order of chips to share between the both of us to finish it off. For dessert, we would get a couple of tasty things just to spoil ourselves.

After a good 15 minutes or so in which we sat there twiddling our thumbs, someone finally wandered over to take our order. The server stood there with a slouch, not bothering to hide the fact that they certainly didn’t want to be there as a pen dangled limply from one hand, the other holding a little notepad away from them as if somehow writing on it would be quite undesirable. We made our orders, including dessert, still believing at this point that the place might stand up on the merit of its food. After all, we’d walked past this place numerous times, always wanted to try them, even heard good things about it – surely it couldn’t be that bad?

It was. Our meal took long enough to prepare that I completed several napkin sketches and went over the details of my sister’s entire trip home (with all the juicy details, high-school ‘she said, he said’s and ‘oh my god, you won’t believe what so-and-so did’s) with time to spare by the time it arrived. One look was enough to urge us to smile politely and cancel any possibility that any more food might arrive on our table with a suitably decent bill to match it. Skipping dessert seemed like a mighty fine idea by that point.

A look of annoyance crossed Emma’s face as she took her first bite into a soggy corn chip – wet towards the centre where the pile of dismal half-warmed meat had made contact, stale and chewy where it had not touched. I, meanwhile, nudged aside a piece of ‘parmesan’ which certainly didn’t seem like parmesan (or properly taste like it, once I’d taken a bite) to reveal bacon startlingly pink on one side yet charred on the other. It doesn’t take much to make a decent caesar salad – it takes someone special to do a brilliant one… it takes real damn effort to screw one up. Even the side order of chips came out half-cold. Oi!

We left, handing over our cash and hurrying from the place just as quickly as we could, with a promise not to subject ourselves to that again. It was more than that though – a dream had been broken, shattered, kaput. Our ‘we really must go there’ restaurant had proved to be an absolute dud, leaving an almost palpable sense of disappointment to follow us home like an oft-kicked puppy wanting to find a family to love it, huggle it and call it Fido. It just wasn’t right.

We had our dessert. Two icy-poles from the 7/11. Our evening was somewhat redeemed, though little could be done to save the sadness that befell our hearts. Tonight we’re eating at home.

Sketch: She is not headless… she is bodiless.

Published on April 21, 2009 in Plain Paper, Portraits, Sketch and Sketch-Book. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .
Kat Johnston Sketch: One might think that she is headless, yet her head exists right there. She is bodiless.

I was without a post yesterday, since the day simply swept me by from start to close. Thus, I provide to you now an image which will hopefully have another added later in the day, to make up for my tardiness with regards to yesterday’s sketch.

I said I might present another of the ‘head’ pictures I happened to be sketching the other night – so here is the first that I drew… the other posted was the third. To begin with, like most of my images of faces, the eyes were drawn. The rest really went from there. The cut at the throat to sever the head from its unseen body was the last thing to be added, and a surprise even to myself.

I find it an odd sensation when an image tells you the way it is to be treated. I am not sure that other people who draw or paint get the same feeling, but when I look at an image I can tell if it is ‘not quite right’, or ‘not quite there’. Sometimes then it is a move of instinct more than calculated rational thought that leads me to where the picture itself wishes me to go, to complete it.

I still find it funny that I speak of my pictures, drawings and paintings as if they were people, who can speak back. I personify most anything, from toasters to toadstools, so I suppose it is little wonder that I do so with the creations I put forth myself.

Cue the odd tangent now… I just had a thought. I am a creator of those sketches, those pictures and art pieces. Does that mean that I am a god to them? A divine being, to breathe life into something from paper and dust, canvas and ink? If, by some odd chance, each of the pictures were to go to a land where all the pictures and images I have drawn and painted go, would they worship me as their savour? Would they blame me for the nightmares which exist beside the dreams, while I sit entirely unknowing of the universe I have created through the stray wanderings of my fickle imagination?