Tea Bag Sketches I

I have no new work to share online. I have been working but I am in the process of resharpening my drawing skills (I hate drawing, I hold pencils like paint brushes). My dear friend Casey gave me a few ideas and one of them was to draw myself. So I have been sketching my face. I decided that by the time I die I want to be able to draw my own face without a mirror. That could be tricky because as much as I don't want to admit it, I may get some wrinkles on the way. Oh, well more of a challenge.


So, tea bags. These sketches are from December 15, 2008. I was sitting at my desk at school and digesting the fact that the teachers were drinking mushroom tea. It smelled horrible. The taste is just earthy. This whole tea thing sent my mind on a tea bag craze.

The first picture above is an idea to design tea bags that describe characteristics that I think are Korean. I then started thinking about North Korea and the differences and similarities, how little time has gone since they became separate. The sketch bellow is what I came up with for that. You can guess which is which.


Other words for South Korea: homogeneous, backwards, naive, beautiful, untouched, unaffected, tradition, whole, value, calm, secret, ritual

I kind of stopped with this project because the last idea is what interests me the most (SK vs. NK) and i feel that I am in no position to make art about the situation. I can't make judgments because I just don't know. What happened here is deeply seeded and silent. I have occasionally tried to ask questions but most people have family who are in North Korea, it is a sensitive subject.

So, this is where the tea bag from the last post got it origin. Maybe I will continue with this idea but in a less blatant way. I loved the cropped photos of the improv tea bag, maybe I'll use those methods to communicate these ideas.

Well, time to stare at myself with a pencil in hand.

One more thing, two good friends of mine have just started new blogs. Zane Davis, a photographer in Chicago is now writing Plane of Focus. Another good friend, Marty Sorge , a wino/foodie, just started a catch-all blog with a food and wine twist, Blue Bottle. Zane and Marty are both very close friends and incredibly talented in their respective fields.