Dream Spaces, Creative Places
It's up to us to create them. But first we have to imagine them.
Helloooooo my wonderful GUT family.
I’m taking down the paywall for this one because I think it’s important.
But first! A P.S.A.
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Alright, here’s a little good news.
New creative space coming soon.
Toni Morrison said, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” The same is true of space. If there is a space you want to be in, but it doesn’t exist, then you must build it.
Time alone is a necessity for most artists. And while I am a super social extrovert, I also need a lot of solo time and space. But these days not only do I work alone, I live alone, too. For over three years I’ve been doing both - which is to say everything - in my little bungalow home. My kitchen table became my whole world. While I love my live/work cave, I desperatly need more IRL social/creative time.
For a while, I’ve been dreaming about a place where I can work in solitude, and also invite people to come over and just make stuff. Especially when things get tough. A beautful space for my talented friends to teach their own creative workshops, in person. A place where we can all hang out and create.
Thanks in no small part to a cheering section of supportive friends, I made the leap. I leased a big studio. I’ll share deets in the next couple weeks, but it’s coming together in a most awesome way.
All this is to say: this space did not exist before. And now it does.
Like Toni Morrison said, If there is something that we want to exist in the world, and it does not, we must create it.
But first, we have to imagine it.
Which brings us to today’s lesson and drawing assignment. It’s all about using drawing and art to think beyond what IS — all the obstacles and hardships we are facing now — and imagine what COULD BE.
What WILL BE.
Ready? Let’s do this.
Ecstatic Architecture: The Art of Edie Fake
Edie Fake’s “ecstatic architecture” triggers us into thinking beyond what IS and helps us start to imagine what COULD BE.
Edie Fake is an artist living and working in 29 Palms, near the Joshua Tree desert in southern California. His graphic, colorful, decorative paintings and murals imagine queer, fantastical, hopeful architectural spaces he calls “ecstatic architecture.” His hope is these “ecstatic architecture” paintings will trigger the viewers into thinking beyond what is and start to imagine what could be.
Edie is transgender, and the mural above in the Berkeley Museum of Art is a space Edie imagined for transgender seniors (a generally under-resourced group without much structural support.) In Edie’s imagined space, trans seniors could live in community in the Bay Area, which while it’s a place with a large queer community, there’s not a lot of housing. The space it not literal, it’s more “about” creating a space: how it would feel, what it would represent and offer, what it would reference and the story it would tell.
For the colors of the mural, Edie took inspiration from the LGBTQ flag 🏳️🌈and Trans flag 🏳️⚧️, then went to the hardware store and chose colors out of the “oops paint” pile (those are the wall paint colors that have been returned by customers.) The result is a far stretch from the rainbow and blue and pink flags, but you can kind of see the influence. He calls this an “aesthetic of resourcefulness.” We work with what we’ve got. Constraints are gifts.
His series of paintings called Memory Palaces has a great origin story: Edie was living in Chicago and working in a bookstore when he found ads in an old magazine advertising queer gathering spaces in Chicago. He began wondering what these since-closed spaces could’ve looked like on the outside. What would drawings of queer architecture that fully embraced its colorful culture and community look like?
The architectural facades he imagines in his small, intimate paintings are celebratory, attractive, and inviting, and reference the long history of a very present community. While trans people are not always visible (many people “pass” or do not live as trans), they have always existed everywhere throughout the world. Edie Fake’s paintings of buildings are also the body, relationships, and change; gender self-actualization, and free expression.
These buildings are a celebration.
Edie invites viewers to imagine the joyful things that could happen inside these buildings: conversations, parties, creative work, sex… He leaves people out of the spaces so the viewer can imagine themselves inside these imaginary structures.
Edie also plays with the titles of his work, combining text with the image of the artwork to form a kind of riddle, provoking the viewer to come up with a story around the subject, the place, its history, who and what has been there.
Edie Fake’s paintings invite us to expand our ideas of how we can fully express ourselves in our buildings, and in our bodies.
What I love about Edie’s work is the meditative attention to detail, the looping and overlapping lines. His shapes wind around each other, creating new and unexpected relationships and compositions. Edie’s architectural drawings invite us to imagine beyond the expected and concrete. He offers us the possibility of a playful, fun, relational, colorful future. Edie Fake’s paintings invite us to expand our ideas of how we can fully express ourselves in our buildings, and in our bodies.
One last project: Edie created a room at Meow Wolf, an interactive art museum meets amusement park in Santa Fe. Wow. The combination of 360-degree painting, sharp angles and mirrors creates a surreal space that makes me both want to run into and escape from. The video of Edie talking about the creation of the installation below gives you a little peek into his process creating the piece at his home in the desert.
Notice the print-outs he uses to guide the painting (that tells me he figures it all out before he paints the full-scale piece, which makes me think he does a lot of sketches beforehand.) Also, notice how he uses make-shift straight edges, sponge paint brushes and paint pens. Nothing fancy. And he works with assistants to complete the large scale project. How would YOU work if you were turning your smaller drawing into a giant 360-degree installation?
I lied, one last project. This is in a different medium altogether. Edie also creates his buildings and ecstatic architecture in collage. Some of you will plotz over this. I did.
Here’s another great interview with Edie, and there are a bunch more videos and interviews online if you google. Thinking about the body as architecture - how we re-imagine our lived space, inside and out, public and private, and how that reflects who we are to ourselves and the world - can open up a new area of imagination and creativity for all of us, no matter what our gender is.
I think we all experience rules and expectations being put on our bodies and on our artwork at one time or another. Some feel true and helpful, and some definitely do not. Trans people show us that we do not have to accept rigid norms if they do not feel right for us. Trans people teach us that if we are brave, we can create a new, more honest way of being in the world for ourselves, and each other. A way that leads with imagination, creativity, celebration, change, and love.
Grateful for the T’s in the LGBTQ+’s, and in the wider world. 🏳️⚧️ ❤️ 🏳️🌈
And with that, let’s DRAW.
Assignment: Imagine a Space for You and Your Peeps.
Your drawing assignment this week is to imagine and draw an ecstatic architectural space that celebrates your community.
Edie wants to create an inclusive, queer, joyful space, and he does it with color, shapes, and lines, and how they all interact with each other and the viewer.
If you were going to create a space for a community you are proud to be a part of, what would it look like? What community would it be? How would you represent that community in a building? Would it look like a “real” building, or totally surreal, or something else? (No rules in art!) What colors, shapes and lines would you use. Size? Shape? Windows? Doors? Would mediums would you use? Paint? Colored Pencils? Pens? Collage? Chalk on the ground??
This drawing can be any size, any medium, but keep in mind Edie’s “aesthetic of resourcefulness” - let’s work with what we have and consider constraints a gift! Less is often more.
If you want to use text and give your building a name or sign, or write a little about the space you create, go for it. No rules in art.
After you’re done, take a photo and share it in the GUT ART SHARE (aka the chat.) I can’t wait to see all the different communities we are a part of and that are important to us.
Alright, thanks everyone for reading and drawing and imagining with me today. It means so much to me to share a little about my own live and learning and love with you. If you have any questions about anything from this week, feel free to share in the comments. Just as a reminder:
PENCILS UP.
xoxo,
w
P.S. I first published this lesson and assignment on Trans Day of Visibility, a day of celebration for folks who are transgender or gender non-conforming. You can read that original lesson here - it offers more of a primer on gender and trans issues. It also includes a reading list.
If you are interested in learning more about trans folks and their experiences, I highly suggest joining the Being Alive Book Club on Substack, run by the GUT’s very own
. The group, open to all, reads books by trans authors, then gathers in a monthly Zoom where Kyle and the author discuss the book with Q’s from readers. It’s really special. This month, they are reading Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches, a memoir told through underwater sea creatures. Learn more and sign up for the Feb 24th gathering with Sabrina here. (And yes, you can still attend if you haven’t read the book. You can just join and listen.)❤️❤️
The GUT Gallery: Drawing in the Round
I loved seeing everyone’s Betty Blayton-Taylor inspired tondo drawings! So much fun to toss out the rectangular restrictions and let the curves inspire us. Many of you made it a daily practice! Love to see it. So glad everyone loved learning about Betty Blayton as much as I did, and enjoyed “drawing in her shoes.” Here’s a tiny handful of the many hundreds of round (tondo) drawings the GUT created this past week. Members can see them all in the chat.
Also, for folks who want to keep drawing and sharing daily, feel free to riff on the assignment and experiment and keep sharing in the thread. It’s inspiring for all of us to see how you explore the week’s themes.
Thank you for elevating the voice of a queer and trans artist❤️ I’m so happy to learn about Edie and his amazing work.
Thank you so much for featuring a trans artist in this terrifying time, and introducing us to Edie in particular! Their work is gorgeous and it was lovely to see them working in their “little hut” and hear their deep and wide thoughts about transness, climate change, and spaces. I was also captivated by the discussion of sand and impermanence in the written interview. So much to dream about!
In reading more about and from Edie, it seems that they use both he/him and they/them pronouns, which in my mind fits with the flowing/ever changing nature of sand (and water). As a fellow gender fluid person I’m smiling. More here: https://newsuns.net/edie-fake-where-the-words-went/.