John Roome

This has been another busy week. No time for blogging! Teaching drawing to a somewhat resistant bunch of students is not easy. But wow! Something happened this week. I introduced them to animation and they just took off! Like a different group! The work they did was phenomenal! Whew!

If you missed Vaughn Sadie's exhibition at Bank Gallery, you can still see it. But if you missed Dean Henning,s sound piece last Thursday, then I feel sorry for you. It was a sublime experience. he is a master at using found sound to create music that touched me profoundly. Sitting in amongst Vaughn's light installation, listening, just listening....

We live with violence all around us and I know so many people who have been victims of all types of violence. Today I almost became one more. It is not the same as when it happens to some one else. You just can never know what it really feels like till you experience it. I manged to get away unhurt by the drunken thugs who tried to mug me, but it left me shaken. What worries me most it that it brought out the violent side in me. Which I am sure everyone has. Buy a gun, get a pepperspray etc etc I started thinking. Strike back!! ....What am I thinking? Why do we have to live like this?

I am really struggling with this drawing. It is hard to control the charcoal on this scale. Difficult to maintain the digital quality. Probably have to try a different medium. But it is still interesting, because it has turned into a "black lung' which is what smokers get. It also begins to remind me of early Mondrian drawings. That was long before pixelization!

These are the two drawings juxtaposed. I am still not sure if they work together. I will keep trying other combinations.

This is the drawing I decided to juxtapose with the lung. It is also based on a digital print of an illustration of a pine seedling. The idea comes from a true story concerning a Russian man who breathed in a pine bud which sprouted in his lung, causing him severe pain.

This is my quote for the week Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Arts : Once you reach perfection the world comes to a standstill. there is nothing else to do, and nothing will change. But we are all liquid modern; and so perfection, in which everything will be evermore the same, is not an ideal, it is a nightmare.

This is a new drawing I am busy with. It is based on a diagram of the human lung. I like the way that despite the relative crudeness of the medium (charcoal) the digital quality of the image still comes through

This is a drawing I did recently in response to a project that I set for my students. I have not worked in the medium of charcoal for ages. I like its richness and i am going to do more. have already started on the next one.

Well , I clearly have not been very active on this blogg. So lets see if I can change that. Today my colleague Chris tried to motivate our students to get their own bloggs. So now I am newly inspired to blogg. The other interesting thing that happened today was that I discovered Bauman's "Liquid Modernity". I need to read this guy ...he is really interesting.