Pages

Drawing 50


I woke up, thinking - what to do today? What does one do when one turns 50? My paints were in my studio, but the only thing that made any sense was to sit myself down right away, and take a good honest look at myself before I had any time to think. I found a watercolor block, and my drawing box and thus began a project of drawing myself every day for my 50th year. To live 50 as a painter, taking a good look each day, whether I have 2 minutes or an hour, and whether I want to or not. And in the way that iterations are not just repetitions but change due to the very fact of being repeated, I will live the year of 50.

Karen Kaapcke, September 2012

The Continuation: I have noticed in this, my 51st year, that I am more my body than ever. Yet I was suddenly barely recognizing it. The need to look at it and 'lean in' with it, to work with it, has become central. As a result, my body is becoming more my own. And more universally representative of the need to be present physically in a way that most women find only happens in the younger, sexy years. 51 = drawing the body.

Karen Kaapcke 3.30.13

A few years later, and I looked into the mirror - and was struck by how foreign my belly was to me. I still don't recognize myself.

Karen Kaapcke 9.20.16
When I began to draw this morning, I put in a whole lattice of bookshelves that were behind me, and watched as I became gradually interwoven or patterened in with them.  Then I thought, no - although they are there behind me, this does not represent at all my sense of being a little hinged or swung out away from things right now.  I began to erase them out, going so far as to begin to erase my own boundaries - but then as I began to vanish around the edges stopped just short of that.  But that hinging - or displacement - when I started with blue chalk for my slate colored pants, I carried it up spontaneously to the drawing pad perhaps for rhythm, and thought - yes, blue hair.  Finishing off the repetition but also completing the sense of being slightly cast off today.  I noticed however a small reflection of myself back to myself on my glasses, within the larger reflection in the mirror - or is it a reflection of you?


1.3.13, self portrait with blue pants, blue drawing pad and blue hair.  Graphite, charcoal and chalk
6x8", ©Karen Kaapcke 2013

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)