Happy Zephyrs (version 4)

This is the latest drawing I recently finished. It’s titled Happy Zephyrs. The image you see here is based on the original drawing. The original drawing was done on paper with felt-tip and gel pens. I used different metallic gold gel pens for the tails of the pisciforms you see repeating regularly throughout the picture plane. 

For some reason, I’ve been fascinated with metallic gold pens. I think it’s because in formal art, using things such as gel pens (perhaps even especially metallic gold pens) is considered low value, scrap-book, hobby, not serious type art. In this, I see a challenge. Therefore, I’m drawn (all fun intended). 

I decided that Happy Zephyrs, the original drawing as converted into digital imagery after scanning, was asking me to make a background for it. It was a subtle beckoning, but I heeded. I tweaked a few of the filters and adjustments in my editing program, and thus produced variations of what you see here. I feel particularly satiated with achieving an oxidized copper effect. This gives me the weathered, stressed, aged look that I often seek. 

I know many artists have experimented with and explored techniques of aging, weathering, stressing, ad hoc, and imperfect expressions already, so this really isn’t anything original on my part. I do feel, however, that this approach is something that has immeasurable depth and possibilities to it. In a sense, I feel like I let nature flow through me sometimes when I make art; like I’m letting the forces of nature with a few of its tools work the various terrains and mediums of earth. 

Electronic art is just another dimension to this process for me. The vortex, the force, the warp adjusting, the attenuation, the pattern recognition and hybridization are all within me. I am a doorway through which ideas come tumbling out and find security within the various mediums I record them in for present or future purposes. Even the ideas I supposedly complete in final works still have possibilities for future morphoses into new ideas. 

The word zephyr means a light wind or west wind. It comes from the Greek word Zephyrus, which was identified by the ancient Greeks as a god of the western wind. In my making of this drawing, I hadn’t delved too deeply in researching the myth behind Zephyrus. Perhaps it’s something you may embark upon if you feel so intrigued to do so. I just thought the pisciforms in this particular drawing looked like windsocks with happy faces, so I made the connection: Happy Zephyrs.