All of my work is about New York, New York is so complex and so beautiful /  by Mirena Rhee

New York city is in all my work and most of my thoughts, it is complex and inspiring web of fates, of inanimate and animated objects, it sways and constantly moves. People and things in it almost constantly yell.

I have lived in almost every neighborhood in New York city, and on both sides of Broadway. Like in two totally opposite windows across from each other.

There’s something special about the New York laundromats, about the dollar pizza place, the subway, the Chelsea art gallery district, the New York public library, the public spaces, the hangouts, the loading docks, the Apple store.

I have become recently fascinated with the empty storefronts, with their open eyes.

I often wait until it’s late to roam the city and see its sights, and hear its roars, whispers and complaints, its sighs, and its whooshes.

Hands and Solids, a book of drawings - hands, solids and soft solids /  by Mirena Rhee

The Story of the Hands

The story of the Hands started in a small room with red chair in Harlem. I had moved form the Silicon Valley, where I was working as a video game Star Wars artist, having given up my six figure salary and most of my possessions in order to move to New York city.

Living in a fairly small room with everything I owned and an air shaft window, I turned my attention to my intimate space, science defines it as 1.5 meters in diameter. I started looking at and drawing my hands, paying attention to the “hands theater” and the doings of the hands. A realization that a simple act of peeling apples actually is an extraordinary act on micro-level, where electric storms of electrons introduce ordinary changes in reality. This "hands theater" is in essence a violent act, not in the way of doing harm but an epic battle to make change, to rupture.

Hands became the building blocks of most drawings, and since, most of the installations. The hand is the place where the ideal world of ideas and thoughts could become an object in the material world. My own hands serve as the models and main building elements of my work because they are always present and available, constantly gesturing, traversing and dominating my personal space.

Drawing in pen and ink, and brown washes

I have been drawing since I was four, my grandfather was a painter and a drawer so I used to draw in chalk on my grandparent’s patio and also copied his paintings in pastels. When I moved to America I discovered 3d art and spent a decade drawing digitally for entertainment companies like Lucasfilm. 

Having come from almost entirely digital background, I one day went to the Morgan library and museum in New York and there I saw Albrecht Dürer’s preparatory drawing for his famous engraving Adam and Ave. I found the pen and brown ink drawing so beautiful that I have been drawing in dip pen and ink ever since, and often use brown and sepia washes and inks from Germany. I also use dip pen which makes the drawings appear three dimensional and more like an etching, because the pen scratches the surface of the paper and thus embeds the pigment crystals in tiny grooves. 

It is my secret but unlike Durer who cut up and joined pieces of paper - I plan my drawings digitally in terms of composition but then once I establish the space - I draw off the top of my head and the drawings sometimes become literally maps of my brain synapses.

Geometry

Geometry has always been in my mind as the more pleasant and visual side of mathematics, I want to mathematical high school because of parental pressure and geometry was my most pleasurable subject, something I could relate to visually. 

Geometry is the symbol of Western thought, of philosophy, of the mind, of abstraction and ideas, I call geometry poetry for strings. In geometric bodies are encoded the songs of the universe. Geometric solids also are the symbols of simplicity and elegance. 

This hand drawn excerpt represents a relationship between the material and the ideal world.

The cover and back pages have soft solids drawn on them, these are geometric solids which have been digitally sculpted into softer forms, and then drawn using the very old technique of dip pen and ink. They represent the symbiosis between man and the machine.

Hands and Archimedean solids, a hand drawn book vol2 /  by Mirena Rhee

Hands and Archimedean solids, a hand drawn book vol2

The Archimedean solids represent the ideal world human perfection our thoughts and what philosophers have sought, the hands represent our softness and uncertainty I think they're equally beautiful.

These geometric bodies are poetry for strings, the songs of the universe are encoded in them.

#christmas #ornaments

Download a print at home pdf with Archimedean solids ornaments. Print and cut, and string.

short link:

http://bit.ly/archorbs

Long link:

http://dimmerlight.com/ornaments.pdf

#penandinkdrawing

#pen

#ink #book

#archimedean

#solid

#geometry #hands #handbook #Drawing #artist #art #newyork

#mirenarhee

Me and The Machine /  by Mirena Rhee

I recently completed a drawing which was more of a thought rather than a drawing.

I made a thought experiment to figure exactly what my relationship with the machine is and has been. I list in my head the instances where I have employed the machine, in what capacity, for how long, why, I basically asked myself a series of questions.

Surprisingly I came up with the conclusion that I have enjoyed long and symbiotic relationship with the machine, aka the computer, unlike any other. The machine has been with me the longest of any other relationships. Of course the actual hardware has been changing over the years but I have always had a machine at hand in my work as both a commercial and fine artist, even as a drawer and a painter. Also as a writer and a poet, thinker and tinkerer. I love tinkering with the machine, a less result driven process than the Rapid prototyping we used in the Silicon Valley. Rapid prototyping is the process we employ in commercial work usually to generate multiple results fast, and to gradually improve on the result until a satisfactory or flaw-free result is achieved.

Humpty-Dumpty II, The Man and The Machine /  by Mirena Rhee

30 x 40 in, pen, ink, gold and silver wash on hot press board, 2019

Click on the image or here for a super high-resolution of the image.

TLDR: Darth Vader helmet, the Man and the Machine, Infinity, Mobius, the dark side in each of us, our fathers, our symbiosis with the machine, man and his creation, life and death, eternity and infinity, ideal/idea/intact vs. material/life/decay.

Turned out Humpty-Dumpty II is difficult to photograph because I decided to use shiny ink washes, gold and silver. In the process of photographing it I figured I may give this drawing a few more incarnations, perhaps one in a shiny black ink or paint, as is the Darth Vader helmet, which would be too obvious. The other incarnation was suggested to me by a friend, to do just the stains without the lines. So here is the thing about drawing - I like how it makes me feel. I can’t possibly give up on drawing lines because without the lines this wouldn’t be my drawing, it would be just artwork. I don’t want to make artworks. I want to make drawings. These drawings are maps of my synapses, it is the tubes and the wiring inside my brain. The hallow cavities of the hands are maps of the hallows of the inside of my own skull, and the hollows of the eye sockets. They are not that pictorially but spatially. I do not trust the shapes but I do trust the space between and of the shapes. This is basically a map, the spatial connections between things, between myself, my hand and the machine, between myself and the pictorial representation of the modern myth.

There are a number of hidden maps in this drawing - one is the symbol of infinity, the number 8, or the infinity symbol which is the 8 horizontal. This is also the egg, the Humpty-Dumpty from the nursery rhyme, which is also the primordial and non-divided cell containing all the DNA strands in it, and all the potential for life. The map of the father, the Darth Vader helmet, the modern myth but also the very ancient myth of the creator and his offspring. This is also the map of the man and the machine, the potential of beneficial or malevolent symbiosis between the man and the machine, between man and his own creation. The shiny ink is a little too tongue in cheek machine allusion, maybe unnecessary. I do overthink and overdraw my drawings, at least in this instance.