A sketch of eternal elegance

I have been really into Hepburn recently. She is an inspiration to me in many ways. Of course no woman on earth doesn't want to look exactly like her. But chances are even if you do, you can't get her grace. It's beyond the clothes you wear, the handbag you carry, the make-ups you put on. 

So much has been said about how inner beauty is eternal, I am not repeating the trivial facts. Everybody knows what is the right thing to do but why there is only one Hepburn?

Because it's all too easy to forgive oneself for making the mistakes everyone else is making. It's comfortable to be average, and it takes way too much energy to be different. 

(Er well...this is a getting a little embarrassing but really, ** never say never ** :p )

Portrait of a real model

This is by far the drawing that I am most satisfied with. He's a friend of my teacher and he was very kind to come to the studio last Sunday and let us draw him.

This drawing didn't take me very long but when I was done I just couldn't take my eyes off it. I know it's not perfect but I, for the first time, feel a hint of the presence of the person that I drew. 

Yes I know, presence is a very abstract word. But this is how the drawing of a photo and a real person is different. If properly done, you feel life, you feel the personality, you feel the warmth and texture. Time is frozen and the soul is kept.

Not that I am suggesting I did it. But at least I know where should I go, and it's all that matters :)

The epic fail of a numbers game....LOL

One of my great friends sent me this video the other day for me to appreciate the beauty of the divine symmetry of a circle. I am certainly grateful to his thoughtfulness, especially when I found it infinitely amusing to watch and I almost fell off my chair laughing...because...

* It was so outrageously wrong *

And the mistakes were so trivial that I have to write about it... haha..

Now watch it first..

For the sake of whoever reading this I am skipping all the mathematics. Let's not miss the fun part. But in case you want a full mathematical proof, tell me. This video claimed that the theory was from Nikola Tesla [Read Here]. But I really doubt it. If to my total ignorance, that any of the things I mentioned below is wrong, please let me know.

#1 God may have created the beauty of a circle but he did not make it 360 degrees. Human did. There is nothing divine about it and there is no code.

As to the first question why there are 360 degrees, you can take a historical approach [Read here]. I believe we keep using it because it is a handy number (i.e. it has a lot of factors). If say, we have 100 degrees in a circle instead, how many degrees are there in an internal angel of an equilateral triangle? 16.66666666666666... degrees (instead of the elegant 60). 

#2 When we bisect a circle and sum up the digits of an angle. It doesn't always 'reduce' to 9. 

First of all, why do we have to sum all the digits of an angle by the way. This is making no mathematical sense. But since it's the rule of the game, let's follow.

If a circle is a cake, we cut it once, each slice has 180 degrees. True.
We cut it twice, each slice has 90 degrees. Still True.
We cut it 3 times, each slice has 60 degrees. *FAIL*

His theory only works if we cut the cake in a power of 2 number of times. i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16....

#3 The sum of the internal angles of a polygon doesn't always 'reduce' to 9, too

Well...there is actually an easier way to do so. The sum of all interior angles of a polygon equals to:

(no. of sides - 2) X 180

So what about a polygon with 13 sides? 1980. *FAIL*
(Of course if you sum 1 and 8 it gives 9 too. But there is nothing magical about it. It's just a characteristic of all multiples of 9....)

#4 No. We don't call this a "singularity"...

If we divide 1 by 0, this is a singularity. It appears when a mathematical function is indifferentiable or discontinuous. [Read here]

#5 Nor a "vacuum", unless he's referring to quantum mechanics... 

*shake head* [Read here]

#6 These are not vectors "communicate" an "outward divergence", unless he's referring to fluid mechanics...

*sigh* [Read here]  

#7 This is not linear duality either. It's a programming technique for optimization...

*cross arms*  [Read here] 

#8 Yes this is meaningless. But no this is not even numerology. This is just a (failed) numbers game.

*face palm* [Read here]

# 9 And above all, his explanation of all these "reduce to 9" thingy left me speechless....

"9 models everything and nothing simultaneously"... I wonder if I should understand this sentence as science or literature, because neither way seems to make any sense....

My infinite astonishment converges elegantly into a single exclamation of

W.T.H.

Fail again. Fail better

Let me explain why I haven't been posting my art recently. It was because...I failed. Again and again,  I failed.

I failed so many times I think I am allowed to feel defeated. Then my friend said to me:

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

-Samuel Beckett

I wonder why he can never run out of good quotes.


I failed not because I couldn't draw accurately. Instead I was non-selectively accurate, making my drawing extremely trivial and vulgar. I knew something was wrong but I couldn't find the missing link.

I thought it was my very naive lines. I tried to copy my teacher's drawings it didn't work. I tried to copy the Italian masters it didn't work. I hit a dead end. So today, I decided to have a little chat with my model - a plaster cast.

I looked at her closely, noticing she was strikingly beautiful. Slightly plump by modern standard, but nonetheless extremely elegant and feminine. I asked her why was she so elegant. She looked down, and ever so slightly she smiled. It was a very dreamy smile, as if my question had just woke her up from a beautiful dream.

Was she sleepy? No. Sleepy was not the right word. She was calm. Very relaxed. Very comfortable. She was surrounded by a magical aura.

So then I got back to my seat and started to draw as she continued to give me that dreamy look. Eventually, my teacher signalled a bare pass.

I believe I failed because I didn't understand what I was drawing. I drew the correct shape but the soul slipped right through my hands.

And it seems my effort on the lines was not completely wasted. Out of nowhere I started to create my very own dancing lines... Ok may be they are not dancing yet. They are more like just tapping the feet (off the beat).



But at least, I fail better.

Hey! Buddies!!

Proust and the Proust questionnaire

Even my dearest friend who studied literature thinks Proust's text can be quite painful to swallow, it might be hard to imagine someone who was trained to be an engineer loves Proust. Yes I do. But his work is not meant to be swallowed. It has to be chewed, carefully, thoughtfully, until it resonates with your mind, perfectly aligns with your feelings, and you will understand why he is one of the most sophisticated writers in human history.

Still in his teens, his friend asked him to answer a series of questions about life, feelings and aspirations. These questions were very difficult to answer even for adults. But our dear Proust, not surprisingly, nailed it. If you are interested to know Proust's answers, read here. Since he was so famous, the questionnaire was then named after him.

Here is my take. I had fun thinking through each of these questions. I strongly recommend you to try them too! Enjoy! :)


1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?

I don't think perfect happiness really exists. But the illusion of perfect happiness can exist retrospectively in a form of consciously or unconsciously manipulated memory. And people are happy only when they have the desire to be happy.

2. What is your most marked characteristic?

Contradiction: Simple and complicated. Artsy and scientific. Passionate and cold. Timid and adventurous. Everything comes in pairs.

3. What is your greatest fear?

Not being loved.

4. Which historical figure do you most identify with?

I can only think of Yves Saint Laurent.

5. Which living person do you most admire?

I thought there would be many. But in the end I can only think of my mom.

6. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

I can't force myself to do the things I don't like or stop doing the things I like.

7. What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Dishonesty.

8. What is your greatest extravagance?

To have an unlimited amount of time to do only the things I love.

9. What is your current state of mind?

Slightly upset because Q8 seems to be unachievable.

10. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Courage. I consider it a necessity instead of a virtue.

11. On what occasion do you lie?

Either to someone so important that I can't afford to upset, but not important enough to sacrifice my happiness. Or to others who are too unimportant to feel guilty.

12. What do you most dislike about your appearance?

It depends. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes everything.

13.  Which living person do you most despise?

Those who pretend they like you more than they really do, to get the attention more than they really deserve.

14. What is the quality you most like in a man?

Elegance.

15. What is the quality you most like in a woman?

Elegance, too.

16. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

"I don't care!"

17. What or who is your greatest love of your life?

Myself and this is very sad.

18. Which talent would you most like to have?

To love everything I think I love truly, deeply, madly.

19. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

To live my childhood again with my current mentality.

20. What do you consider as your greatest achievement?

I make a few people happy simply because I exist.

21. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

Myself as a man but with the memory of being a woman.

22. Where would you like to live?

Paris. Anywhere with someone loves me I love.

23. What is your most treasured possession?

My boundless curiosity.

24. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Living under the fear of a miserable future.
Wake up from a dream where you see the one you love who is lost forever in real life.

25. What is your favourite occupation?

To lose track of time in art of all forms. Writings, paintings, music, nature, love.

26. What do you most value in your friends?

Communication through the brain to share the thoughts and feelings. Not through non-sense or emoji.

27. Who are your favourite writers?

Oscar Wilde. Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera. And the painters who put their creative mind into words, most notably Vincent Van Gogh.

28. Who is your hero of fiction.

If life is considered a work of fiction, then Yves Saint Laurent.

29. Who is your favourite artist?

Renaissance artists: Michelangelo, Raphael. Portrait painters: Velasquez, Rembrandt. Tortured masters: Goya, Van Gogh

30. Who is your favourite musician?

Chopin.

31. Who are your heroes in real life?

My future husband.

32. What is it that you most dislike?

Losing control of my time for someone/something that doesn't worth my time.

33. What is your greatest regret?

I have lost the feeling of being a child as I grow up.

34. How would you like to die?

Right after my own funeral. So that I know how I would be remembered.

35. What is your motto?

"Life is too important to be taken seriously"  - Oscar Wilde

Why I stopped drawing photo

Read carefully haha. I am not saying I stopped drawing. I stopped drawing photos.

I think I mentioned my teachers hate people drawing photos, or drawings that look like photos. I can finally understand why.

You can never develop yourself into an artist if all you want is to make drawings that look like photos. Ever.

There are masters who can draw based on photos too, I know. But like I said, they are masters, and masters already have the personality that can shine through their work. So they can work on the images skillfully without losing themselves. For beginners, it's a nightmare to do so. Let me tell you why.

Type "realistic drawing" on Google and search for images.

Right. These are all drawings. Amazing?

Can you tell whether they are photos or drawings? No. Can you tell they were all made by different artists? No. Do you find anything special about these drawings? No. So what's the point of making them? No, not at all.

You can totally understand art differently. But to me art is something that communicates directly to my heart, not my brain. Just like listening to a great piece of classical music you let it guide your emotions until it hits a certain note, so perfectly, you cry. That's the tear of joy. This is something one cannot explain. But at that brief moment, you understand the composer, you know his feelings, so distinctively that it can't be mistaken to be someone else's. 

To learn art, you learn to express yourself through your lines. Consciously or unconsciously you're giving a piece of yourself in whatever thing you produce. Drawings that look like photos in other words hide all the uniqueness of the artist. Yes it impresses the general public but the work is empty. And the emptiness kills art.   

So what makes a great drawing? It can never be wrong to go back to the Italian masters. 

Leonardo Da Vinci

Michelangelo 

Raphael

These are all very simple sketches. But they are more than enough to show you the sophistication of Leonardo, the power of Michelangelo, and the sensibility of Raphael.

I also happened to find a great resource from the British Museum, showing 60 years of drawings by Michelangelo. Enjoy! :) [ Click here ] 

I hope I can buy the catalog of this exhibition but it seems it's all sold out :-<

Letter from an unknown wo(man)

No I am not in love. Not yet. But a pleasant surprise allowed me to gain a glimpse of it, through the keyhole of the door of love, which is, however, still firmly shut.

I don't know how this dear friend of mine can always find the right thing for me at the right time. He recommended me to read a book called "Letter from an unknown woman" by Stefan Zweig written in 1922 (!) [ This is the book I got ]. It was about a desperate woman who finally found the courage to write a letter to a man whom she loved obsessively right before she took her last breath. She spent her entire life spinning around the man who couldn't even recognize her. A very sad story. You can feel her flaming love through the words, so powerful that it can almost burn you.

I see a little bit of myself in the man, a little bit of myself in the woman. I am spoiled. Spoiled rotten by my parents and a special friend who will be eager to read this post the moment I press "Publish". They are the people who are willing to hear what I am going to say, who care to know what I think of them, but will nevertheless love me all the same.

I feel blessed to be spoiled. But it's a happy sad thing. I am so eager to know what does it feel like to love someone unconditionally. I need a burning passion, not only towards art, towards adventures, but also towards other people, till then my life is complete.

May be I still haven't met the right person, or I still haven't learned how to let my emotions flow. But no I am not cold-hearted. I am sensitive. I am delicate. I know it's all inside me. All I need is a key, or someone who's kind enough to answer the door.

Knock, Knock. Please, let me in.

Awesomeness: look at my teacher's sketch!

My friends often ask me since when I started to draw, and where. Well it was around Oct last year, after my trip to Paris. As I am celebrating my fourth month into the magical world of art, I am telling you something about my awesome art teachers.

They are a lovely artist couple. I met them via a friend of mine who is teaching fine arts in a local university. Last week I told them I am going to Paris again during Easter. I am planning to stay in the museums and draw the beautiful sculptures. My teachers hence decided to give me a crash course on drawing sculptures.

Here is my teacher's sketch showing me the techniques. And it took her only 15 mins.

Look at the lines. THE LINES!! They are dancing on the paper, floating in the air. This is so beautiful I am still admiring it as I am writing this entry.

If it feels familiar to you too, now look at this sketch by Raphael 500 years ago. 

The lines...THE LINES!!

\(*0*)/

A small twist - the very nerdy Woody Allen

So here is my latest sketch of Woody Allen. Also started with a photo (of course XD ), but I was trying not to make the sketch look too realistic. I was trying to add a little bit of my own interpretation of Woody Allen. What was it? hmmm....I always think...

Woody Allen is the nerdiest of all nerds LOL

The original photo was one that was taken recently (he is now 79), but in my sketch I tried to make him look timeless. No wrinkles, his skin is smooth as a baby, with cute chubby cheeks. As a result you can't really tell how old he is from the drawing. I just want him to look pure intelligent...and nerdy (to me they are synonyms :P)

I am recently obsessed with finding out what represents age. At first I thought it was the texture of the skin. But from this drawing I was proved wrong. This Woody Allen definitely does not look like twenty something. So what makes him look mature with this flawless skin? The emotions? The intelligence? Or something even more subtle?

If you're also wondering, yes thing like this does happen sometimes. The person who draws, is confused by her own drawing haha...O_o

Hmmm a plateau in drawing?

Finished 2 portraits in a row, both of them from a photo by Irving Penn.

Don't get me wrong I still enjoy drawing people a lot. But I am also screaming for something new.

Wish I have the skills I need to visualise the things beyond what I see....

A beautiful book: A beautiful fall

It all started with a Yves Saint Laurent movie that I watched back in early Dec 2014. I wrote about it [Click]. And I drew something like 4-5 Yves Saint Laurent in a row [Click and Click]. Then I bought a book, and it took me nearly 2 months to finally finish reading it....

Well in fact, I think I have spent more time on Google and Wikipedia than on the book itself.

The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris

[Click here to reach amazon page] because you probably can't get it anywhere in Hong Kong

It was not a huge book (around 400 pages). The kindle version is selling for only USD 11.99. Considering the author spent 5.5 years running around the world interviewing some 130 celebrities, this book certainly worth your time and money. As a matter of fact, this is actually the only book that I read EVERY SINGLE WORD from forward to epilogue, even the appendix and thank you notes. I think I don't really need to tell you how much I love this book.

But beware. You need to enjoy the book with an open mind. You need to be completely open about people being gay, about people taking drugs, people acting completely reckless, living in ecstasy and ready to burn themselves alive. It's a brutally honest book about youth, about how the most beautiful people turned into sad, old and lonely souls. How talents turned into sorrow, fantasy turned into depression. The first half of the book takes you to the wonderland of Paris in the 1970s, "the glorious excess". Then the second half of the book kicks you back to the reality, where you can almost see with your eyes how exactly these "beautiful" people "fall".

I'd call it a very sad book despite it is all about the most glamorous people on the planet. Life is cruel and whatever happened to these people will happen to me and you, too. You'd see a little bit of yourself from everyone. You can be a kid who refused to grow up. You can be a successful person who stuck in your past. You can be completely clueless. You can be striving hard. No matter how you're living your life, time flies. The sands in the hourglass will keep slipping through your fingers. And one day, you will wake up and wonder how your hair turned grey.

There are a lot of quotes that I'd love to share from this book. But I have chosen these 2 by Yves Saint Laurent, both in his later years. It perfectly resonates with the emptiness that the beautiful book left me:

****

"People think decadence is debauched. 

Decadence is simply something very beautiful that is dying. 

It's a beautiful flower that is dying 

and sometimes you have to wait a very long time for another flower to come along."

****

"The magnificent and pitiful family of the hypersensitive are the salt of the earth. 

I, without knowing it, was a part of that family. It is my own. 

I did not choose this tragic descent, 

but through it I was able to rise to the heavens of creativity, 

where I come across the fire-makers that Rimbaud spoke of, 

discovering myself and understanding that the most important encounter in one's life 

is that with oneself."

*I don't belong to the hypersensitive family...do I??

Je suis Charlie. Nous sommes Charlie.

Sorry if it's a little too scary. But it was indeed scary.

The victims are now forever separated from their families. What have they done wrong? What harm did they do?

I am Charlie. We all are Charlie. We say what we have to say.

My heart is with Paris, my favourite city in the world.

15 mins sketch of Picasso

This is a very quick sketch. It took me no more than 15 mins.

I drew Picasso on a black piece of paper using a white pencil. Very rough. Very brief. Very messy. But at the same time very interesting. 

I really love the texture of the pencil I was using. It was very soft and dry. It felt like using white chalk on a blackboard. The white was very intense. The problem was I couldn't sharpen it too much and the white powder was all over the place. The process however, was really enjoyable. I really love this speedy sketch. 

LOVE IT! <3

Hope I'd gain better control of the pencil as I progress ;-)

First sketch in 2015!

Happy New Year Everyone!!

Here is my first sketch in 2015. Started yesterday and completed just now. Another one of the Irving Penn series. :-)