I'll be in the air

A grand adventure...new sweet-tweet drawings, fresh from the studio today.  Listening to lots of the Microphones and Neil Sedaka (a bizarre but lovely combination...sad and sticky-sweet songs) while drawing today.  Last summer while at my residency in Italy at La Macina di San Cresci, I took the bus to Florence to buy a fountain pen for ink drawings at the cartoleria.  I never used it during that month abroad, and when I came home it found a place in my studio with the acrylic inks I'd bought a few years ago because of the saturated colors.  Today I pulled out the pen and pleasantly surprised by the line quality, found myself wondering why I hadn't used it before.  In the spirit of rekindling my love affair with unused studio supplies, I pulled out my Prismacolor markers and india ink brush pens, last touched during undergrad circa 2004 in Prof. Peppers's drawing course.  I am now on a mission to deplete all old/forgotten supplies.  You'd be amazed in a studio as compressed as mine that media can go unseen and unused...there is something to be said for having any & all possible supplies at your fingertips as an artist.  When I was packing for La Macina di San Cresci last year, I brought a little of everything along (with the exception of my typewriter due to weight restrictions).   In my packing, I became concerned that if I didn't have the proper supplies, great art would go unmade and so I brought a miniature 'hobby lobby' with me. Included in the art stash were two containers of prismacolor colored pencils with 20 sheets of Stonehenge paper, not because I was planning a series of drawings, but because I thought perhaps on a whim I may decide to sketch the rolling Tuscan hills.  I never made a landscape, but I surely put those colored pencils to good use (again, something I'd had forever but rarely used) and began a body of work that changed my creative process, technically & conceptually.   Lately I've been making small versions of the drawings I began in Italy, a series I like to call 'sweet-tweets,' mixed media drawings combining colored pencil with graphite, watercolor and ink.