"Milking the Rhino"



This is a drawing I made while watching a documentary called "Milking the Rhino" which discussed the ways in which conservation of wildlife has intersected and butted up against industry for local people.

Going to Africa to reportage is at the very top of my "bucket list", so this was a really fascinating thing for me to watch. The idea of "marketing" the wilderness, such as in National Parks, has always felt like somewhat of a double-edged sword. Obviously it's better to have them protected than open to poaching and complete destruction. But turning nature (and the people of rural Africa) into a commodity is unsettling as well, and often has the result of making it feel like a theme park. I can't pretend to know where the happy medium is, but it was interesting to see many different sides of the issue presented. I highly recommend it! (Plus it's on NetFlix instant watch!)

Kitties!

So after last post, I feel like I need to re-establish myself as a cat person. These are some drawings I did of my two kitties back in Colorado...and since I won't see them for a few months, this is my ode to them!

This is Stormy:



She's the older of the two, I think she's about 18 now, and is surprisingly hard to draw because she's just a tiny wisp of fluff. She's very quiet, has a tiny head, and weighs about a much as a kleenex.

And this is Athena:




She's only about....6? I can't remember. She's a lot more substantial (although still pretty tiny), but at the time I drew these around Christmas, she had recently been shaved into a fashionable and not-at-all-ridiculous lion haircut.

UPDATE!!!!: The cats' PR Rep (my mom) has released the following statement: "I am writing this response on behalf of the two afformentioned kitties. Stormy wanted to assure you that she weighs as much as two wet tissues (she has been working out). Athena is highly insulted and wants everyone to know that most of her hair has grown back and now she looks like the ferocious tiger that she is."

City Hall Park



I went drawing today with my friend Jackie in City Hall Park in lower Manhattan. It was so pretty with all of the magnolia trees blooming.



There was this sweet little miniature schnauzer there who came over and sniffed my art supplies for a while. What a hilarious little animal! I'm still a cat person, but dogs are slowly winning me over...

Is it spring yet?



Much to my dismay after last week's post about the 70 degree weather, New York has revisited winter again for this week. It's very confusing. I sat in on my teacher Ronnie's location drawing class today and got to draw in Union Square for a couple hours. I decided to make one drawing to show the bleak depressing winter....and one to show the hopeful (and hopefully soon-to-come) spring! Hopefully you can tell which is which...


Sunny Day in Washington Square



Last Friday, we had a wonderful, 70 degree day. I was on Spring Break, so I took the day to go drawing in Washington Square Park. I wanted to just play around and try to draw the park in as many ways as I could while still enjoying the sunshine and fresh air!



The magnolia buds have already started blooming on my street corner, so I'm hoping we can all begin to emerge from our caves and go outside again soon.

Disney Trip #3!



Last week I got back from another class in Disneyworld, and it was wonderful as always! It was great to get into the mode of studying and playing around again. Speaking of playing around, here is a drawing from the nighttime light parade at the Magic Kingdom, full of psychedelic retro-wackiness!

I Return! (With some animation!)


Wow, it has been such a long time since I last posted. I've been working on an animation for my last year at Parsons, so I've been busy with that for most of this semester. Here's a few drawings and collages from that, as well as a trailer for the final animation (Coming Spring 2011!)

"Clouds" Teaser Trailer from Evan Turk on Vimeo.

Here are a couple shots of the set-up for presenting my thesis to the judges (taken by my fellow classmate, Deniz!):

(me, looking a little delirious)

And some of the storyboard collages and drawings:

















Paris: Monmartre



Now that school's started again, I can start reliving my summer! Still working backwards...the last day of my trip to Paris, was the neighborhood of Monmartre.



Monmartre feels like a storybook version of Paris, with old cobblestone streets intersecting at impossible angles, wacky characters, and soaring views of the entire city. And stairs. Lots and lots of hills and stairs.



The center of Monmartre is the beautiful Sacre Coeur basilica. It's a very unusual cathedral, that looks almost Middle Eastern, with tall domed towers and the pure white stone. It always looks to me like it's been plucked out of the desert and put onto a Parisian hillside.






Back behind the cathedral is a beautiful (although closed) vineyard. I did my best to fumble through the placard with information about it, but then I overheard people talking about how the wine is awful, because of the lack of sunlight, but sells for a very high price because they donate the proceeds to charity.



My last stop in Monmartre was to the artist square, where dozens of artists and patrons cram into a small square to paint, sell, and buy art. It's great to see all of the artists out there working in such a picturesque place. It makes you feel like you're sitting in the residual energy of Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and all the other artists who worked there, trying to soak up anything they left behind.

Colorado!


Hello! It's been a long time since I've posted here, since I've been out of town for the past month. I took a wonderful reportage class in Paris for 10 days, and then I went home to Colorado for a week. I'll start with Colorado since Paris will take longer. What a great month it's been! Colorado was so fantastic for a break. My boyfriend Chris and I went back to visit my family and take a little break from city life. The thing we could not get over was how INCREDIBLE everything smells in Colorado! There are flowers, trees, thunderstorms, rain, and just clean pure air. I can't believe I barely noticed how great it smells when I lived there.



Anyway, moving along, Chris and I went downtown into Denver one day and happened upon the Denver Botanic Gardens. They were having a show of Henry Moore's sculpture throughout the gardens, which was beautiful. Just drawing the flowers after having seen the sculptures made the gardens, shapes, and colors feel completely different.







The gardens cleared out once it got cloudy, and looked like rain, but we stuck around and stayed outside in the cool, fresh air. Rain doesn't seem so threatening in Colorado, because it just feels, smells and sounds wonderful.




Towards the end of the trip, we headed up into Rocky Mountain National Park to hike. Another thing I couldn't get over were the clouds! There is SO much sky in Colorado, and the clouds stretch around in a 360 degree panoramic wherever you are. The only time you can't see clouds in every direction is when you're up in the mountains surrounded by jagged cliffs and pine trees (don't even get me started on how good it smells up in the mountains...it's like what Pine-Sol wishes it could be...).





We ended up going on a 7 mile hike that looped around various lakes, through the forest.



Every once in a while, through the tangled pine trees, we could see through to beautiful soaring peaks and turquoise lakes.



Near the end of the trail, we came to the roaring Alberta Falls.



Finally we made it down to the base and began to drive home. The rains had finally come, after booming all day long, and we had given up on seeing any big wildlife for the rest of the day. But wait! Over in a marshy valley was a surprisingly orange animal wading through the grass. We all hopped out of the car and I ran down into the grass to get a closer look. A single, beautiful female elk was grazing near the side of a creek. It's always amazing to see such exotic animals, like something you'd see in Africa, grazing in a field only a couple hours from downtown Denver.



It was a wonderful, peaceful, and relaxing trip, and I can't wait to get back to clear the city air out of my lungs again.

The Cloisters



Chris and I spent a beautiful and relaxing day at the Cloisters in upper Manhattan yesterday. The museum itself is so amazing, and the gardens outside the grounds seem like they're bursting with too much vegetation to be real. It was so wonderful to "get out of the city" for a little while and sit around underneath the trees.

Shakespeare in the Park



Last week I went with a few friends to draw a performance of Richard III in Central Park. Now, I'm embarrassed to admit that I have never read Richard III, so I didn't really always know exactly what was happening, but I tried to keep up! It was easier to get caught up in the beauty of the performance, with the actors moving from one picturesque spot to the next. The whole thing looked like a fairy tale, and the audience was spellbound like little kids hearing a storybook, leaning in towards the actors as they delivered their lines.


I did manage to catch one line I knew at the end of the play, though!



"A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!"

You can view my friends' beautiful drawings from the same event below:

Audrey
Alex
Julia

The Sea Music Festival



A couple weekends ago I got the chance to return to Mystic Seaport, Connecticut while The Sea Music Festival was going on. It was great getting to see the performers and the audience interacting because they were both equally excited to be singing the songs they all knew by heart.





The seaport was full of characters, who looked and sounded like they had stepped out of the 19th century. It was amazing to see how a place can be transformed by the people occupying it, and how the whole place came to life when they sang the shanties.

(They each signed by their portraits!)

The highlight of the weekend for me was seeing The Barrouallie Whalers. They are a group of men from St. Vincent and the Grenadines who, in the recent past, hunted the pilot whales off the coasts of the islands as their profession. Today they sing the unique whaling shanties they sang on the whale boats, many of which share similarities to the shanties sung by "Yankee" whalers in the 19th Century.


It was amazing to see these men sing with such intensity and passion, ,and you could see their whaling days come alive in their voices as they sang.


The even had a short demonstration where they reenacted the sighting and hunting of a whale in a whaleboat out in the Mystic harbor.


Towards the end of the day, there was a concert featuring a group of women from the Mystic area called The Johnson Sisters, the Barrouallie Whalers, and a group of French shanty-men from Brittany, called Nordet. The began by singing songs individually, but as the concert went on, they all began to sing together. Whether they knew the words to begin with or not, they began to show the real power behind songs like sea shanties. The songs were developed aboard ships where people from all over the world sailed, and often didn't speak the same language. The songs have simple, chant-like lyrics, so that, no matter the language the sailor spoke, he could join in and keep pace with the work.



The men from Barrouallie and the people from Connecticut and Brittany could not look any more different if they tried, but these people could come together, from all over the world, to sing songs and fight to keep their world history alive.

100th Post!: St. Patrick's Cathedral



Hurray, this is my 100th post!

Today my plans got thwarted so I ended up going and drawing St. Patrick's Cathedral instead. Not a bad Plan B!

Isadora Duncan in Central Park



Today while wandering in Central Park, I happened to come upon a performance by "Dances By Isadora" in honor of Isadora Duncan's birthday (she would have been 132!). Duncan is considered by many to be the creator of modern dance.









The dancers were beautiful, dressed in flowing tunics with a rainbow of colors. I have always been in love with fabric flowing in the wind, so needless to say I was happy. It was like walking into a fairytale when I came around the corner at the Bethesda Terrace. One of the reasons I love New York so much, is that you can find wonderful things to see without even trying.



The performances featured little girls, teenagers, and women who all danced in honor of the last generation of women that had danced until they passed away in their nineties.



Summer Day



Yesterday I had a beautiful day of drawing in the West Village. I started out a French cafe on 6th avenue and had a delicious waffle, while sitting next to the most awful woman I have ever seen.

  • Within seconds of sitting down, our waiter had come to get her drink order and she proceeded to yell at him about some silly thing with the chair.
  • Once he brought her coffee, she went to yell at one of the busboys that the waiter hadn't brought her a new spoon quickly enough.
  • When the waiter came back to take her order, she ordered eggs on the side. When the waiter asked if she wanted eggs on the side of something or just a side of eggs, she yelled again and asked for a new waiter.
  • She then called over the hostess and yelled at her because a new waiter hadn't been assigned to her yet (it had been about one minute). She asked to speak to the manager. The hostess calmed her down, and she then ordered a side of eggs and toast.
  • When the hostess sweetly named all of the breads they carried, the woman then yelled at her for not having "plain" toast, and grumpily allowed them to bring her sourdough. The poor girl looked so terrified, like she was trying to put out a fire that had started for absolutely no reason.
  • All of this occurred within about 5 minutes.



It was completely baffling to me that people treat waiters like that, but I guess people are so inside their own heads sometimes that they don't realize the people around them are people too! *sigh* Anyhoo at least it made for an entertaining meal!



I then went to sit in the park across from Magnolia Bakery, where the pigeons are quite brazen, and where droves of tourists stand in line all day to get movie-star cupcakes. Personally, I've never really liked the cupcakes that much...but I can't really talk, since I went there my first week of being in New York too.



Magnolia also draws crowds of tour groups, especially from the "Sex and the City Tour" variety. While there, several bachelorette parties came by to stop and sample the famous cupcakes. Everyone was always dressed to the nines, like they were out for a night of clubbing, wearing cropped black jackets (all of them) and five inch stilettos (for a walking tour...gluttons for punishment!).



Other than the cupcake aficionados, there was a sweet, beautiful woman who seemed to be falling more in love with the man she was sitting across from every minute. Her smile kept beaming from across the park.



There was also a woman who was quite the multitasker.



Then I left the park and walked towards the Hudson to watch the sunset.


When the sun started to set across the river, there was a sweet gay couple enjoying the moment under the trees. Then a big wind came and blew my ink bottle all over the table. Ink-tastrophe! Still, a great day!

A Picture For A Thousand Voices: Relaunch!



Here is an illustration to celebrate the re-launch of my site, "A Picture For A Thousand Voices"! This project is a collection of illustrations, by myself and others, about the individual stories involved in the gay rights movement. The illustrations and stories will hopefully be able to extend the dialogue between the gay and straight communities about why equal rights is important to everyone.

The project now features a gallery page:

http://picturefor1000voices.com/

As well as a new blog for news/thoughts/illustrations related to the gay rights movement:

http://blog.picturefor1000voices.com/

If you haven't yet, become a follower of the blog to receive updates and show your support!

To read more about this illustration, visit: American Dream

Happy Birthday, Me!



In honor of my own birthday (hurray!), here are a few drawings of one of my favorite things: cherry blossoms! I didn't make it to the festival this year (which I think is today, actually) but my boyfriend and I got to go down and watch the early blooming trees a couple weeks ago. The ones that bloom earlier tend to be the white, and light pink ones, which are less showy, but almost more beautiful. There's nothing more relaxing than spending a day underneath the cherry blossoms!



This is a drawing of a father helping his little girl climb one of the cherry trees. I'm not sure that she had decided whether she actually wanted to be climbing the trees, though.