Bubbles

Artist: Gaven

This is a great picture! Okay, maybe for you in doesn’t mean anything or even look like very much, but for me it puts a feeling of inspiration into a concrete form.

As the title indicates, the picture is just a bunch of bubbles. Before drawing this pastel I had sketched out a few pictures of bubbles, but none of them were terribly great. It wasn’t until I had breakfast with Laura that I finally had the picture in my head that I wanted to draw.

So maybe I should start there.

I was lucky enough to have breakfast one morning with Laura. I actually didn’t know her that well, but my good friend Chantal was close to her, so I figured I should get to know her a little better if the opportunity arose.

The breakfast was a short one because Laura had to run off to a meeting, but while she was getting ready, she made me a peanut butter bagel and entertained me with a slide show of pictures from some of the trips she’d been on around the world (here is where I found out that Laura is an incredibly thoughtful host). While looking through the picture, I came across a picture of Laura blowing some bubbles. It was beautiful! The bubbles were emitting such a diverse set of vibrant colours.

Later that night I headed off to Shy’s for a painting party (yes, shy is that cool!), and drew what I had remembered from the picture. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I had fun with it. Actually, I drew the Nature Machine picture at the same party.

So who cares? Just a bunch of freakin’ bubbles! Well to understand why this means something to me, you have to understand a little more about me. I like to symbolize a lot of things in my life. I think of myself as a boat, I think of couples as ducks (cause you always see ducks in pairs), and to me, bubbles mean something specific, but it’s hard to explain, so bare with me here.

I think of bubbles as representing my scope of attention or concentration. Specifically, for any goal in my life, there exists an associated bubble which encompasses all the routes to that goal.

That sounds confusing. Here’s an example:

Imagine that your goal is that you want to meet some new interesting people. Well to do so, you usually go around and meet as many people as you can. Here your bubble would be expanding and encapsulating the new people that you are meeting. At a certain point you’ll realize that you’ve met 4 very interesting people. You then decide to devote your main attention on these 4 people, or another way you could look at it is that you are collapsing your bubble around the 4 people.

Well maybe it will be just me that finds bubbles interesting in this way. I’ll leave you now with the groovy picture that inspired me.

...you are special...

Artist: Trish

If you ever come to my house (or have come before) and draw a pastel drawing, it will usually join the other drawings on my pastel wall. But if you really like what you’ve done and want to keep it for yourself, of course you can just as easily take it home. Thus, I think of each pastel drawing on my wall and on this site as gifts, even though they weren’t formally given to me as gifts. Having said that, I have been given a lot of gifts over the years, but to my surprise, some people have drawn pictures on their own and then given them to me, quite formally, as a gift! I can think of few birthday or Christmas presents that would beat a pastel drawing with some real effort put into it. This picture here was a gift from Trish.

For those of you who aren’t in the lucky position of knowing who Trish is, I’ll tell you a little about her and how I know her.

I first met her the summer before 5th year when I was donning in V1. I actually don’t remember that so that doesn’t really count. I first honestly met her at Bomber (UW’s on campus bar) during the Winter term of 5th year, where she quickly caught my attention. Why? Well she told me that my pastel wall was really cool, but as far as I could remember, she had never seen it (she had been told about it by her cousin).

Guessing that she might be a very awesome person, I actively tried to get to know her better. Now I mean something specific when I use the word actively. There are some people that you meet in life that you realize you won’t be friends with unless you put a lot of extra effort in. This is usually the case with any friend who is not in close proximity to you (Trish lived in a different city). So clearly, if I wanted a chance at being Trish’s friend, I would have to put some effort in.

Anyway, I spent more time with Trish when chances arose, and I found out that my belief that she was an awesome person was a rather large understatement. She’s probably the most caring person I know. She wants to be a teacher (huge thumbs up for that), specifically for deaf children. Trish’s excitement and genuine love for sign language and the deaf community has been what has sparked my interest in the subject (unfortunately, I have not been able to encourage her to study any physics, so it seems that she is doing a better job at being a teacher than I am).

With regards to the picture, the image in the center is the sign for physics. This is cool for three reasons.

1) I love physics!
2) Though I know very little, I love sign language!
3) It would have been so easy to just draw the outline instead of drawing everything but the outline. Obviously Trish has put some heart into her work.

With respect to the border, I’ll type out exactly what she wrote about the drawing (yeah, it came with a letter explaining it!):

“I chose to do puzzle pieces as the border because there are many sides/dimensions etc. of you that make you who you are. I left some pieces blank, which represents the things I am yet to learn about you. I chose to do the rest of the pieces different colours because I think you are a very colourful person”

It’s hard to tell but the pieces have also been cut at the edge of the paper (the brown background is the carpet in my basement).

Well there you have, definitely one of the best pastel drawings in the collection!

Friends on a Large Foot

Artist: Gaven

I drew this picture way back when I was in 3rd year, and looking back on it now, I find it rather silly. At the time though, I was quite upset, be reasonably or not, and used the picture to vent my emotions. Many of my early pastel pictures were rather “venty,” but now I’m rarely pissed off, so these days I mostly just draw things I find interesting.

Sometimes I’m pretty vague about explaining the story behind my pictures, but since I don’t think anyone who reads this was actually part of the whole fiasco, I’ll be a little more specific.

So here’s the story: Awhile back I was chatting with a friend (call her Agnus) and we got on the topic of going camping. We decided that someday in the summer we should go camping together with the “gang.” The summer was a long way away, so it was just a tentative plan. Later I started going out with this girl (call her Beatrice), but that didn’t work out too well and so it abruptly ended. I was still new to the whole relationship world, so I didn’t take the breakup at all well. Anyway, Beatrice was part of the “gang,” that is, Beatrice was friends with Agnus, so the tentative plan of going camping seemed potentially at risk. But the gang pushed on and everyone went camping, well except for me, I wasn’t invited!

Okay, so I said before that a tentative plan was made, so it’s not really like I got kicked out of something I had planned, more like something I had mentioned, but that’s not how I took it. I saw it as a group that I considered as my friends, leaving me behind because it would have been awkward with Beatrice and all. The truth is it probably would have been, and the “gang” knew Beatrice far better than me, so it made sense that if someone had to go it was me. And further, the people that planed it probably didn’t even know that Agnus and I had discussed going. But these are all thoughts I refused to have at the time.

I still remember exactly how I was feeling; like a giant foot, straight from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, came out of nowhere to stomp on me.

So you probably understand this picture pretty well now. The people on the foot and the background are members of the “gang” (including Agnus and Beatrice). I of course am the one below.

If by some weird chance you are reading this and were a member of the gang, know that this is a historical post – no hard feelings remain, I’m just a baby about things from time to time.

Sunset

Artist: Farrah

On Tuesday of last week, I had the chance to go down to Waterloo for a couple of nights. I originally had planned to only go down for the night, but it soon became obvious to me that I would need to spend another night there running into friends. To go into detail about the few days would take far too long, so instead I’ll mention a few of the highlights.

• going out with Chantal, Kai, Brad, Lisa and Mary to share stories, pitchers, and a massive brown sheet to colour on (instead of crayons we used pastels; it was beautiful!)


• tossing the caber with Brad (which included finding a caber)


• having Jordan introduce me to the World of Warcraft (with me only getting his character killed once)


• drinking cans of beer with Eric at another first bomber Wednesday


• having Jackson host Jordan and me as we talk about only interesting things (including physics classes!)


• running into Abbie at unusually perfect times so that we could plan where we would wander


• phoning dons and enjoying their confusion at not knowing who I was, but then being disappointed when they figured it out


• enjoying Kai’s ultra-soft REV couch for the two nights I was there

There are of course other things, but the single greatest fun was right after Bomber on Wednesday night. I headed back to Kai’s place, where we chatted, and then chatted with a resident. Chatting turned to laughing, laughing turned to pastel drawings, and then other residents came and joined in on the fun. We eventually were so tired (do to it being considerably late), that we had to pull ourselves away from each other so we could go to bed/couch.

The whole experience meant a lot to me. It solidified in my heart that I liked drawing with friends, even people I had just met, more than going to the bomber (maybe that happens to everyone when they’re 24), and that I missed having residents of my own to draw pastel drawings with (and all the rest of the jazz that comes with the job of being a don). But I wasn’t sad, just very aware of how my life is different now from back when I was in Waterloo.

But this is House of Pastels, so I should probably talk about the picture. The following is from Farrah, which she completed in 5 or 10 minutes (probably closer to 5). Seeing such pretty art like this, coming from such a short period of time, reminds me how much I still have to learn about drawing.

Broken Boat

Artist: Gaven

Often, particular pastel drawings will give me the chance to talk about a friend. In this case, I have an excellent opportunity to talk about my good friend Heather T. (not the one from Waterloo, this is another Heather T. who’s from my old high school). Let me give some background information.

I got to know Heather during my last two years of High School. I don’t remember exactly how we met, but I do remember working on English presentations together, hanging out in the Student Council office with her, and sitting on grassy hills with her, only talking about interesting things. After graduation, we went to separate universities and never saw each other again, well, until teacher’s college. It was an unlikely encounter (we both took an extra year to complete undergrad) that instantly made my life in Kingston feel more like home. (As a note, the Heather T. from Waterloo also goes to teacher’s college at Queen’s, making it hard to separate the two in conversation)

The picture itself has nothing to do with Heather. I drew it when I felt that I needed to fix up some parts of my life that I had been neglecting. Thus the derelict boat represents me (if you know me well, I often like to think of myself as a boat), and the pills represent the fixing, specifically the fixing of the boat.

Unfortunately, when most people see this picture, they think that the person holding the pills is suicidal, which was definitely not my intention. When I showed Heather this picture (she has an arts degree), she understood what I was trying to get across, but as it was with everyone else, saw the pills as not being a representation of fixing the boat. After some conversation, I realized that a plank and a hammer would have been better items to hold as pills represent things like dependency, and often a bandage of a solution.

I was a little disappointed as I loved my picture. Of all the pictures I’ve done, it’s the one that I’ve put the most effort into, but it wasn’t right. But Heather further pointed out that the picture wasn’t wrong, it still represented what I wanted, but it also reflected my own views on how I see medication.

Hand

Artist: Gaven

This is the first and so far only picture I’ve drawn that has absolutely no symbolism; it’s just my right hand, but that’s not how it initially started. I originally wanted to draw a picture about procrastination. I was in my last year of undergrad and I was down to the last assignments of the year, but I found it incredibly hard to do boring work. My initial plan for this drawing was to have my hand with a rather gory spear through my wrist. I imagined that such an injury would impair the use of my hand. You can’t work with a damaged hand, and so this was to be my way of showing my inability to work.

After working for awhile on my hand, I realized that my picture wasn’t half bad. Not knowing how to properly draw a spear through my wrist, I decided to finish the picture with it just being my hand. Unfortunately, I tried unsuccessfully to draw my hand with my fingers partially curled. The effect failed and instead left shortish looking fingers.