The Blog
Blog Post #3 ::: 2/23/2022
Third Times's the Charm
By Jodi Arias:
Tears, featured above, is actually my third iteration of this image. The first time I drew an eye with a teardrop spilling from it, I called it Catharsis.
I mailed it from the county jail to a woman helping to market my art at that time. She sold it for me, and the buyer loved it. I learned only afterward that she didn’t get a high-resolution scan of it before mailing it out into the world. Without one, I couldn’t reproduce it for prints, display it here on my website, publish it in a book, or use the digital file for any kind of retrospective. Ever.
I asked her to ask the buyer if he would be willing to scan it and email the file back to her. He said yes so, I waited, but he didn’t send it. She inquired again. He said yes. I waited. He still didn’t send it. He never sent it.
We stopped asking once it was clear the guy had no intention of sending us a file of his brand-new acquisition. I don’t really blame him. That wasn’t the deal and besides, what kind of customer service is that? “Hey, thanks for giving money to support me, my cause and my struggle! Enjoy your awesome art — oh, but real quick, can you rescan it first? Use a high DPI and get a really nice high-resolution. And then, can you please email that over to my art admin right away? Cool.”
Not everyone who buys my art does so to support me. Sometimes, the purchase is speculative, an investment. Sometimes, it is bought as a gift for someone else. Other times, the buyer just wants something I made, touched, and quietly obsessed over for many hours.
After it was clear the guy wasn’t playing the okey-doke, I drew the drawing all over again. Occasionally, I will recreate one of my own works and give it a slightly different name to distinguish it from the first — unless I consider the first production a complete loss. In cases of the latter, the replacement is usually christened with the same name.
I mailed my second rendition — also titled Catharsis — to my art admin, eager to get it scanned and digitally preserved. The new drawing never arrived. Strike two. At is point, there was a subtle shift. You probably know the kind. I’ll just call it one of those moments when it feels like the universe was telling me something — maybe that Catharsis wasn’t meant to be included in my ever-expanding portfolio.
My first two iterations of Catharsis were not particularly difficult or advanced — which is not to say they weren’t good. They were intense and emotive. But they were also a tad cartoonish and I tended to lean towards realism with a touch of the surreal. I knew I might produce something more skillful if I pushed myself. I could envision it, but I didn’t know if I had the artistic aptitude to render what I saw. I wanted to draw something I thought only my future self would be able to do. But I went for it.
That old cliché, “Third time’s the charm,” applies. I couldn’t call this third iteration the same thing yet again, so I named it Tears. I focused on a macro-photo-real rendition of the iris and its pattern of pigmentation, as well as how the eyelashes reflect in the shiny cornea. Tears pool at the lower eyelid, rising over the tiny precipice. This image depicts the moment just after this surface tension gives, spilling a teardrop over the bottom lashes in a race down the face.
This time, a good scan was made and saved, and I’m able to offer prints of it here. Without question, Tears is one of my favorite works. Had I not lost the first two drawings, I never would have pushed myself to make it.
Blog Post #2 ::: 12/2/2021
My Cousin's Impact
By Jodi Arias:
I’ve been drawing since preschool, but it wasn’t until age twelve that my parents noticed my fixation with making art had grown into something more than just a passing childhood interest. They enrolled me in an after-school art class. With its rows of desks and fluorescent lighting, the classroom looked similar to many others I had sat through bored and a little hungry, but this one was different. The teacher gave us art supplies instead of textbooks, my mind didn’t wander, and I didn’t feel dumb and inadequate. I was excited to be there. I “belonged” in this class.
The teacher led us through various projects, one of which was painting a toucan. When the course concluded, she hosted an art show to display our work to our families. My parents and I entered the class, now transformed into an exhibition, and everyone’s toucans were hanging in a ring around the room.
My dad said to me, “I know which one is yours.” Surprised, I looked around, unable to spot it. “Right there,” he pointed across the room. We made our way over to it and he was right. A brief sense of wonder went through me, the kind that comes to a kid who has not completely relinquished her belief in magic. I asked him how he knew, and he said, “Because it’s the best one.”
I really doubt my painting was the best one there and I don’t know how he knew which was mine. Maybe he stopped by earlier, maybe he made a lucky guess. But at that time, I believed him, and I began to think about art in new ways. What else could I make?
When I was thirteen, we visited family on the other side of the city. I wandered into their backyard and was so struck by what I saw that I couldn’t speak for several moments. My cousin was painting a three-piece mural of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley. These paintings were huge, larger than life, almost as tall as the house against which they leaned. Their faces were perfectly rendered, their proportions were flawless, and he wasn’t even done. He was still brushing on color as I stood there mute, probably with my mouth hanging open. After several moments, I managed to say something ridiculous like, “You painted these?”
My dad had commissioned him to paint these beauties for the 1950s-style diner that he was soon opening in Santa Maria, California. In fact, this unicorn to whom I was related received commissions from far-away lands, my dad later told me. Notably, from Japan.
Weeks later, my cousin came to our house to discuss business with my dad. As he was getting ready to leave, I grabbed my silly toucan painting — which exemplified my best work up to that point — to show him, and I’ll never forget what he said to thirteen-year-old me: “I wasn’t this good when I was your age.”
It took me a slow moment to grasp the profound yet simple truth he had just imparted. The astonishing talent I was privileged to witness — the talent over which I nearly short-circuited right there in that backyard — was not something he was simply endowed with at birth. He was a few decades older than me and had been developing his gifts for at least that long. He had just handed me a treasure map leading to his level: I could become as good as he was, maybe better, if I tried, if I practiced, if I worked hard at it.
He doesn’t know the quiet impact he has had on my creative development because I lost touch with him almost thirty years ago, but I can tell you I am still not as good as he is because someone Googled his work for me recently. Although, “as good as” is not a fair comparison because everyone makes things differently, and what makes for worthy art — or any art — is entirely subjective.
If I had to pick a single moment in my artistic journey and say, “There — that’s my origin story,” I might choose that moment standing with my cousin and my dad in the foyer, interrupting their conversation, and my cousin’s treating me and my art with perhaps more graciousness than I deserved. More than the cutesy, however true, recounting of hours spent coloring when I was preschooler, more than my dad’s well-meaning yet biased comment that my work was “the best;” the confluence of seeing my cousin’s art and his humble admission that he wasn’t as good as I was at my age (which may very well have been just a nice thing he said to a kid seeking validation) sparked the realization that the sky was the limit. Or rather, that there was no limit — but only if I kept going.
My path as a creative does not begin with a single moment or person, however. It begins again and again through a series of moments and people redirecting me since I can remember. I revere my cousin’s work because of the jolt I felt when I saw him in the act of creating it, and his kind words wrought in me a subtle alchemy when I was still as malleable as clay. Others — teachers, friends, relatives — have left their thumbprint on my development as an artist. There are people who haven’t even been born yet who will influence my art in some way — but only if I keep going and keep creating.
Blog Post #1 ::: 8/17/2021
Artistic Improvisation: Why I Used a Manila Envelope for Art
By Jodi Arias:
By 2014, during my sixth consecutive year in county jail, the jail staff had developed an odd fixation with my art. In ways both subtle and overt, they began undermining my ability to create art by restricting my access to art supplies, preventing me from releasing it to my legal team or family, and even disappearing a portrait I drew of the Dalai Lama that I sent to my legal team via legal mail. (I only know of the latter because a Lieutenant came all the way into my cell — another officer was present at the door — and yelled at me about the envelope’s very specific contents. He was so furious, it made him sloppy. He had unwittingly admitted to illegally tampering with my privileged legal mail.)
Any blank paper I had in my possession was confiscated and the commissary stopped selling the RoseArt brand mini colored pencils I then used for my drawings (which probably had nothing to do with me, but still). Other than my diminishing stash of colored pencils mostly used down to stubs, I had lined paper and little golf pencils.
One night, it occurred to me that the back of a manila envelope might be a suitable substitute for drawing paper. I ordered some the next week. They provided a blank 9×12-inch surface on which to work, and thus Renew was created using those little graphite golf pencils. The dark warm color of the manila paper creates the illusion of a soft glow, as though the woman depicted were at a spa or about to enter a warm bath in a room illuminated only by candlelight.
It was a small victory to create something beautiful and soothing amid an environment hostile to my art and antithetical to creative expression. Although I love the way Renew turned out, it ended up being the only piece I made during this time using a manila envelope. The original lives in Pebble Beach, California, and prints are available here on my site.
