Jaime Lyerly Art : Gatherings - Oil Pastel drawings by Jaime Lyerly

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Gatherings - Oil Pastel drawings by Jaime Lyerly

Obsession comes in many forms.

I have many obsessions, here are five that are intricately tied to this post.

I am obsessed with psychological color.
I am obsessed with the abstracted figure.
I am obsessed with learning.
I am obsessed with exploring my interior space.
I am obsessed with new experiences.

Rather than show you the encaustic paintings and fiber/wax sculptures that I am in the process of making (those pictures to come soon), I want to share with you an obsession that I had from November 2009 to January 2010 - A series of drawings in oil pastel and pencil that have taken on a life of their own.

I started doing drawing of bulbous figurative forms to describe a Family Constellation (energy healing) workshop that I participated in November 2009. I wanted to find a way to document the experience without the words that seemed so inadequate.

I was fascinated by the abstract and yet recognizable quality of the forms, and started intuitively drawing them. And draw them, and draw them, again and again. They have spilled out onto drawings on board, shapes in fabric, encaustic paintings, and embroideries, but I come back to the Moleskine to continue to work out my obsession with them.

Now that I have been embroidering and knitting forms at night instead of using the oil pastels, I thought it was time to share these creations.

The sketchbook drawings are not "finished" art work, but rather a process that I enjoy exploring. They inspire more finished work in other forms that live outside of the sketchbook.

These are not exactly in chronological order but more of a general order of what came first. Here are the sketchbook pages:

Sometimes the figures are so obscured that they are no longer visible...

Gatherings 17, oil pastel and pencil on 8X5" Moleskine sketchbook © 20Jaime Lyerly

Remember those acrylic paintings I did in a frenzy of painting on claybord in August 2009? I covered some of them with paper a month later and still felt that they were not living up to their potential.

I felt it was time to bring these out of the sketchbook so I used the boards I had on hand. And now they have a new life by being part of this series. These feel more "finished" than the sketchbooks just because they are on something more suitable for public viewing.

Gatherings continued on board...

I have plans for these....
Some of these I have printed out onto cotton fabric and am embroidering on top of them.
Some of them may get covered in encaustic wax.
Some of them may never go anywhere outside of this blog post.
But all of them get to gather here now and have a presence.

I would love to hear your comments, and as always thank you for sharing your artistic journey with me.

~Jaime Lyerly

4 comments:

LeahFebruary 17, 2010
beautiful work, Jamie!! I love what's going on within the figures.
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Cynthia MorrisFebruary 18, 2010
I love these! It's cool to see your inner process at work, and to use art to sort through the work you did in that workshop.
Thanks for sharing these!
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Jaime LyerlyFebruary 22, 2010
Thank you so much Leah and Cynthia! I wish that I could share them while I was making them, but I felt like if I did that, they would start to be limited by what was viewable to the public eye. So by choosing to do them first and then decide if they would be viewed, it changed my process.

Thanks for taking the time to look at these.
Jaime
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AnonymousJune 18, 2010
Awesome Collections. Really a good work. I generally love visiting this type of modern art in the Art Gallery.
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