Locher Scholarship – Lucy Bellwood

Wherefore Show Opening!

Exciting news, dudes! The first 12 pages of Wherefore, the graphic novel I embarked on over the summer, will be in a show opening this Thursday at Reed College!

The shindig goes down at 4:30 pm in the Art Building (for those of you not from the Reed Community, enter in the East Parking Lot (SE 36thish and Woodstock) and head for the blue-roofed building in the NE corner of the lot), and the work will stay up another week or two. The exhibition will include pages from the original script, sketches, studies, penciled pages, and the final inked product, offering a complete overview of my process. I’ll be giving a brief presentation about the creation of the work around 4:45 and it would be excellent to see your smiling faces there. I haven’t yet decided how to go about posting the pages on the web (if at all), so this might be your only chance to see them for a while.

The project was made possible by the Kaspar T. Locher Summer Creative Scholarship, which goes out to four Reed students every Spring. The other three recipients will also be presenting work, so if you make it you can also look forward to awesome paintings, poetry, and a documentary shot in Peru. Cool stuff all around.

That’s all from me for now. Hope to see you all this Thursday!

Main, News

Onward and Upward

While it’s lovely to take pride in one’s work and rest on the old laurels a little after turning in something on a deadline, I really do love the little voice in my head that says “Oh man, fuck that project! This is where it’s at” as soon as I sink my teeth into something new. It gives me a feeling of jet propulsion where each new piece is another step towards that great big magical state of artistic competence in the sky.

I’ve been having a load of dynamite conversations with people in the last few days about art, creation, culture, spirituality, craft, dedication, and other Big Things. It has my brain in a whirl, but I’m also in mega productivity mode to ink 18 pages this week. So far I’ve tackled 3 on one project (a 6-page piece that I’ll start updating on Monday), and 5 on the other:

These are the opening pages of the 12-page prologue to Wherefore, my graphic novel. The finished pages (what you see above plus lettering and inkwashes!) will be on display, along with notes on my process, at Reed College starting November 3rd. There’s a little artist’s talk and an opening that afternoon, which I’ll post details about soon, but mostly I’m just really excited to finish all this inking so I can start sharing with you guys via the magic of the web.

Hang in there. Things are going to get crazy around here in the next couple weeks.

Art, Main

More Wherefore Stuff

(Because I love you.)

Essentially, these are preliminary images from the project I’ll be doing over the summer with this here (not really very) hefty (but still insanely and awesomely useful) scholarship. I tried to take climactic or iconic moments from throughout the storyline and give them a bit of illustrative weight. Numbers 4 and 5 appeared in a previous post, but I’ve added them again here for the sake of continuity.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

Art

Secrets Revealed

So, apropos of my previous post, here’s the skinny on what I’ve been working on for the past week.

All students at Reed need to complete a Junior qualifying exam (commonly known as a “qual”) to prove that they’ve got the chops to complete a Senior thesis and haven’t just been, well, dicking about for the last three years. For Art majors, this means a 10 day process involving the creation of 10 preliminary studies, one finished piece, two papers discussing one’s artistic practice and previous works, a showing of the qual work and previous pieces, and a 45 minute oral examination. It’s hefty, but also a whole lot of fun. We’re given an essay to respond to at the start of the week, which can (loosely or otherwise) inform the final piece. Susan Stewart’s On the Art of the Future proved dense and somewhat infuriating in its unnecessary intellectualism, but was ultimately fruitful and thought provoking (and surprisingly relevant to comics).

Anyway, no time to discuss that here. ON WITH THE PRETTY PICTURES!

[slideshow]

(Things the photos don’t quite do justice to: the incredible, deep sea sheen of the book cloth, the veins of shimmery gold in the marbled paper, and the delicious, physical sensation of playing with this thing. Bookmaking is so satisfying to me because you get to handle and interact with the product in a way that’s totally different from our standard approach to artworks. Mm, tactility.)

The OTHER exciting news is that I was recently selected as a recipient of the Kaspar T. Locher Summer Creative Scholarship, a $1750 prize designed to fund independent art/dance/music/theater/writing projects over the summer. I’ll be using the money to back a longer comic (tentatively titled “Wherefore”) based around my youthful days and the strange sense of misplaced identity that comes from being raised between cultures and continents. Terrifying, but thrilling. There will, of course, be copious documentation for you all to enjoy throughout the process SO HOORAY FOR THAT.

(Part two of this post appears separately because WordPress image display options are icky.)