Kat Johnston

Tag: page

  • The Unwise Owl: Escaped once more to grace my page.

    Kat Johnston Art - A book unwritten remains unread. It takes a pen to paper and a risk of failure to make those words take wing. How's that for a bit of philosophical mumbo-jumbo for you? The unwise owl gets a little sense, perhaps?

    Some may remember a previous post I did a little while back: The Unwise Owl, complete with a little story to tell his tale. A friend of mine liked the image rather much and I needed to draw something more substantial than a two minute sketch last night, so I took pen to paper in one of my sketchbooks; an ‘actual’ sketchbook, mind you, not a spiral-bound cheapie. It comes after this page in the same book, in case you were curious. I decided to give the unwise owl a second chance to redeem himself.

    If you click on the picture for today, it should link to a rather larger picture (800px wide rather than 500) because I just wasn’t happy leaving it so small. Generally it links to a 600px wide picture, so slightly larger, but I love the detailing in this one just so much that I had to share it properly. Lins and I have been talking about Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia (a fear or phobia of messing up a perfectly nice piece of paper) a fair amount recently, as you can probably tell from my posting, since it has been mentioning it so often. So this seemed appropriate.

    A book unwritten remains unread. An artwork which stays in the imagination is only ever partially realized. It takes writing it down or roughing it out for things to truly take form. I can start drawing what is in my mind, but it isn’t until it gets to paper, canvas or whatever other medium I am using for it to really come to life. We all have a vision of perfection in our minds when it comes to what we do, but when it gets to the point of actually being realized, I think it is possible to stun even ourselves.

    I am with this image: I was a little concerned that I couldn’t do something to accentuate the owl properly whilst merging into another level of delicacy with the branches there, but to me, it works. The little books are flapping and floating, they’ve taken flight around him; perhaps he sits in awe of them. I don’t know why he isn’t flying with them… perhaps he is scared? Perhaps if he leaps from his branch he won’t float, but will fall? Who is to know. Perhaps I will write another ‘Unwise Owl’ story to accompany this picture later.

    I did slip up majorly once, although it probably doesn’t seem major to anyone else but me. As I drew my pen away from the page, I slipped and accidentally drew a line in the bottom right of the page. I turned it into the pen of the artist – what better way to transform those mistakes than to make them a part of the image? That’s all for today, hope you like it!

  • Another little dandelion day-dream.

    Kat Johnston Sketch - a little pair of dandelions sitting in the grass, a little rough sketching to make the day go past.

    Just a little picture drawn quickly to get something up by early afternoon. I’ve been doing a lot of dandelions recently, for some reason. I think I’m going to make them the little ‘symbol’ for Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia, a fear of imperfect creative activity on paper. When you can’t think of something to draw, you might as well draw dandelions, yes? Ahh, my ‘fear of drawing on an empty page’ phobia is getting a little life of its own here… but I’m going with it.

    I think it would actually be a great name for an exhibition: a showing of sketchbooks, of works on paper, the great and brilliant pieces mixed in with the ones that probably get overlooked even by the artist themselves… in other words, pointing out the fact that each and every thing drawn, painted and roughed out is important in its own right. Each one is a step forward, each failure a step closer to an even better failure; sometimes success.

    How would we polish our skills without trying things and seeing if they work? How are we ever going to advance ourselves and challenge the boundaries of what we do if we don’t give it a go? If you never reach for the stars, then there is no chance that you are ever going to reach them unless you ride on the coattails of someone who can. A song comes to mind, actually – They All Laughed, a great Gershwin song from 1937.

    I can’t count the number of things that I have just stumbled upon by simply giving it a go, trying something new and often stepping back afterwards and going ‘oh my god… that’s horrible’. The fun thing with that though is that we know what not to do next time. That said, I admit I’ll often try it over, because you never know quite when the first time was just a fluke. Find glory in the failures, fail in style and never forget that not ever failure is quite what it seems from the outset. Accidental discoveries such as silly putty would never have happened without it! Yes, there are more significant discoveries than silly putty, but hey, its so funnnnnn!

    Just a little note saying thank you also to QUT’s Artisan newsletter for including a link to the site – I had a whooping 194 visits to the site yesterday, with five more wonderful responses to the survey. Thank you QUT, thanks to those who visited and to those who have yet to visit but probably will.