No pictures this time.

Well, the project is coming along agian, as i am starting to find out the best times to find the english speaking buddhists here in memphis. I never thought it would be so hard to find them, but it seems the very best times to go to the temples are those times while I am in web design...or when i want to sleep. Like sunday mornings! But Today i skipped webdesign class and went to a community meeting at Quan Am. this proved to be a successful trip and I got to do some drawings of the locals, all three of them. yes, there were only three in attendance, not including myself. But hey, its better then drawing statues and gardens. Plus i got some good info on other good times to find people, and got invited out to dinner this friday at a local chinese place that should be really good.

But as you may notice there wont be any pictures in this update, but there will be some soon. Latly all my work has been getting to big for my own scanner, so wednesday i will scan much of the work I have been doing. And i think i have been doing a good bit of work recently, most onsight drawings. I also starting doing some very nice naturalistic color ink drawings. Perhaps my senior show pictures may look like that.

So yeah...I promice to udate agian this week with freshly scanned art! and thurday i shall be off to the Meditation hall for more ink drawings!

Until then.....blessing from the Kitty goddess!

This week in memphis...

This was not the ost eventful week for my project. The main reason is that my mom was in town for the weekend and its midterms. And what can I say, My parents never visit me here in memphis, so I thought the visit deserved my attention. And the fact that she visited right at midterms does not help with how busy I shall be this week, but i was able to squeeze in a trip to the Buddhist temple on cleveland, and i did some talking to Debra Halstead about it. It turns out that it is closed to the public, but its in very good condition because the people who live around there keep up its garden and still visit. And it does have a beautiful garden!

I have also started the art for my portfolio presentation idea. You see i'm making something of a map, like an old fashioned treasure map or ship map. And I'm going to use it to display thumbnails of my art, then it will be folded up like a road map. The side without the map will have all my info on it like my artist statement and other projects I have worked on and so fourth. It should be fun!

And not for some art I scanned on my teachers giant scanner!

10am- Quan Am

Today was a very good day for my project. I got myself up in time to attend the english ceremonys at Quan Am monestary today, and got quite a treat! When i arrived a young man names Quartney gave me a tour of the inside of the monestary, and explained to me what everything was and who Quan Am is, it was very insightful. After that there was a 15 min. meditation fallowed by a question and awnser session with A Monk. There were about 5 americans there including myself. We discussed things like the difference between rebirth and reincarnation and the problems that our modern technologies pose upon us. It was all very interesting, and i got a chance to meet some american buddhist here in memphis.

After that there was a delicous vegitarian lunch of bean sprout salad, sticky rice, fried eggplant and pumpkin soup! The soup was very sweet and good. While we ate there was even more talking about how to be a mindful buddhist and about spreading love. I got to do even more sketching and writting.

I will definatly keep going there every sunday morning.

Last wednesday we had our first critique. Here are just a few peices I showed:
I guess i had a posative response for the most part, though Joel did say I needed to do even more, and start using a larger veriety of tools while drawing. Also that i needed to start going bigger. Our quest cratiquer asked alot of questing, and didnt give me a posative or negative resonse really, just sugested to maybe get some sumi ink, and perhaps look into studying some chinese caligraphy. He also said to make sure not to enter out of the realm of anthropology and into the realm of tourism, but i dont think I need to worry about that.

I want to go into the pen drawings i did today with some ink, and then scan them on the schools scanner. So those will be coming soon!

As always, Blessings from the Kitty Goddess!