John Roome

Today my students and I walked into the city to go and watch animated movies at the CFAD. The movies ranged from interesting to boring, but it was well worth going and I am sure we all got something out of it. What impressed me more than the movies was the walk itself. The busy vibe of Durban central is always something special. But one thing really bothered me. Everytime I go downtown it seems to get more run down and more dirty. Why don't Durban people take pride in their city? I dont know about other cities, but certainly Cape Town is not so filthy. MMMM...What does it say about us?

So finally I have finished my hand-made computer drawing. It was a long, but satisfying process. The question is , where do I go from here?

When you do a drawing like this you might begin to question your own sanity. It's a slow process. Satisfies the masochist in me.

This drawing is growing slowly. Pixel by hand drawn pixel!

I am still working on this Lung project. This pencil drawing is taking a long time but it has an interesting quality. I liked Don Fitzpatrick's comments on how I "slow down the digital". This is such a good descritpion of this drawing. A slowed down digital hand made drawing which is somewhere inbetween the two.

No blog posts for far too long. Means I have been busy, so it is not a bad thing. This week was mainly taken up by our Faculty of Arts and Design Conference. Conferences are always time consuming and also something of a mixed bag. this one had its ups and downs, but considering it was the first one of its kind, it was pretty good. Meeting Donal Fitspatrick the keynote speaker from Curtin U. in Australia was inspiring and he also gave us lots of valuable feed-back. Sharing ideas with colleagues, listening to their research ideas and presenting my own was all really good. So lets hope this is not the last, but the first of many .

This has been another busy week. No time for blogging! Teaching drawing to a somewhat resistant bunch of students is not easy. But wow! Something happened this week. I introduced them to animation and they just took off! Like a different group! The work they did was phenomenal! Whew!

If you missed Vaughn Sadie's exhibition at Bank Gallery, you can still see it. But if you missed Dean Henning,s sound piece last Thursday, then I feel sorry for you. It was a sublime experience. he is a master at using found sound to create music that touched me profoundly. Sitting in amongst Vaughn's light installation, listening, just listening....

We live with violence all around us and I know so many people who have been victims of all types of violence. Today I almost became one more. It is not the same as when it happens to some one else. You just can never know what it really feels like till you experience it. I manged to get away unhurt by the drunken thugs who tried to mug me, but it left me shaken. What worries me most it that it brought out the violent side in me. Which I am sure everyone has. Buy a gun, get a pepperspray etc etc I started thinking. Strike back!! ....What am I thinking? Why do we have to live like this?

I am really struggling with this drawing. It is hard to control the charcoal on this scale. Difficult to maintain the digital quality. Probably have to try a different medium. But it is still interesting, because it has turned into a "black lung' which is what smokers get. It also begins to remind me of early Mondrian drawings. That was long before pixelization!

These are the two drawings juxtaposed. I am still not sure if they work together. I will keep trying other combinations.

This is the drawing I decided to juxtapose with the lung. It is also based on a digital print of an illustration of a pine seedling. The idea comes from a true story concerning a Russian man who breathed in a pine bud which sprouted in his lung, causing him severe pain.

This is my quote for the week Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Arts : Once you reach perfection the world comes to a standstill. there is nothing else to do, and nothing will change. But we are all liquid modern; and so perfection, in which everything will be evermore the same, is not an ideal, it is a nightmare.

This is a new drawing I am busy with. It is based on a diagram of the human lung. I like the way that despite the relative crudeness of the medium (charcoal) the digital quality of the image still comes through

This is a drawing I did recently in response to a project that I set for my students. I have not worked in the medium of charcoal for ages. I like its richness and i am going to do more. have already started on the next one.

Well , I clearly have not been very active on this blogg. So lets see if I can change that. Today my colleague Chris tried to motivate our students to get their own bloggs. So now I am newly inspired to blogg. The other interesting thing that happened today was that I discovered Bauman's "Liquid Modernity". I need to read this guy ...he is really interesting.