100 Faces in 300 days, part 6: one person (Dan Keller)

These are all drawings of Dan Keller at various ages. And I don't think I'm done yet.

I've moved from random strangers seen on holiday to people I know or have communicated with -- newer friends and those from way back. This happened after I'd drawn 59 faces and was feeling a bit more confident about my skills. I started with self-portraits and then did the picture of Dan that you see above, taken in 2011 in Hawaii and found on his website: www.dan-keller.com.

Work in progress. From a 1970 photo on his website.

Dan is the Daniel Keller of Hornet's Nest (Il Vespaio), so that could be what is at the root of my fascination with him, the fantasy boy of my sixth/seventh-grade self. But it is more nuanced than that. I will ponder. I will articulate the results of said pondering. Soon.

 Above: As Tekko in Hornet's Nest, 1970 (Il Vespaio). 

Filmed in 1969.

1972

100 Faces in 300 days, part 5: family resemblance

I thought a bit of families and family resemblance in the Easter week. These  drawings are of my sister Leilani (1966-2007), her daughters Sofia and Bea, and my stunning cousin Carolyn. The men are my husband Vagn's sons. (Faces 80, 79, 70, 82, 68 and 2 of the 100 Faces project.)

Getting a likeness is incredibly exciting (and also quite demanding). Building up someone's face through pencil strokes (tentative and experimental ones) is also an extremely intimate and personal process. It is as if one were touching a person's mouth, their teeth, their eyes -- what human beings use to see, eat, plead, stare each other down, etc.  It was actually on account of this (the feeling that I was intruding on a person's space) that I started drawing strangers: an effort to desensitize myself, not get excited, keep a cool distance from their humanity. But then it became time to find out whether I could still maintain that objectivity while drawing someone that I knew.

With the shift to subjects I knew -- or more correctly, subjects who would know that I had painted them -- the notion of accountability was there. I would have to work harder than I already did.

In drawing freehand, so to speak, without guidelines or grids, a dialogue begins between me, the artist (the viewer and capturer) and the image -- though not necessarily with the person himself. A commitment is forged in the hour or two that it takes: a pledge to be as faithful as possible to what I see, out of respect for the subject. A promise to put my ego aside (the part of me that says, "I am the artist and this is you -- deal with it!"

Sometimes the end product merely reflects the moment that I stopped erasing and redrawing, thus letting myself off the hook and declaring the picture finished.

100 Faces in 300 days, part 4: People who encouraged me

100 Faces in 300 days: People who've been supportive of both my writing and my art over the years. My former boss and the closest I had to a work mentor, journalist Inday Espina-Varona; Filipino-Canadian poet Albert B. Casuga and Danish-Filipino journalist and NGO organizer Filomenita Mongaya Hoegsholm. Faces 78, 75, 81 and 67 of the project.

100 Faces in 300 days, part 3: Self-portraits

 

Self-portraits. At least the first five. There will be more.

I used to do a lot of these — in a mirror — as a young girl, particularly after I discovered the joys of 6B pencils. One of these days, I'll find those early sketches (out of proportion, but at least drawn from life) and post them. For the moment, these: taken from photographs of me from my childhood (lots of those) and early teens (very few — why was that?). The last one, of adult me, is from a photo taken in December 2022. I dislike my adult face so much I couldn't bear to give it the same realism as the others, so, eschewing graphite, I decided on colored pencil: red and violet. Whatever happened to the big brown eyes (hidden behind glasses most of my life, but nonetheless part of my self-image)? Is it possible to ever love one's aging face?

It would be great to start painting again, with big bold strokes, but the 100 Faces project must be finished first, and it really isn't a good idea to crack out the oil paints while we have the heating on and the house remains sealed against the (late) winter. I would like to do more dramatic, more critical, more subjective self-portraits, bordering on the un-pretty if need be.

#OneWeek100People drawing challenge, 6-10 March 2023

March 6 to 10 was when artists around the world buckled down to the #OneWeek100People drawing challenge, introduced by Marc Holmes and Liz Steel on Facebook in 2016, and still going strong. I did my own, beginning on Tuesday, March 7 and finishing all 100 by the morning of Saturday, March 11.

DAY ONE:

There was a snowstorm in Denmark, making it impossible to go out and find people to sketch. I've found it practical to do my drawings surreptitiously on the train on the way to and from work, but it was late and I was certain a trip solely for the purpose of sketching would culminate in being stuck in subzero temperatures at some station halfway between Copenhagen and our suburban town. The husband was travelling, so no hope of rescue in the car. The upshot of this was I stayed home and used a travel photo as reference, this one taken at an intersection in Bucharest in 2012. It's the image at the top of the post. I used a pen and my go-to 24-pan White Nights watercolor set -- cheap but with vibrant colors. 

DAY TWO: I'd started a second drawing right after the first, using people from the other half of the photo, applying the same procedure: draw the lines, then color in with watercolor washes. I finished it to my satisfaction the following day, using a different brand of watercolor (Daniel Smith). The result has quite a different look from the first day's.

DAY THREE: 

Did nothing but draw the whole day, starting off with another of my travel photos, this one taken at the My Son ruins in Vietnam. Then I headed off to the town library, where I found a seat on the second floor, overlooking the parking lot of a grocery store. It was 4:30 pm, just when people were doing their shopping or getting off the train from Copenhagen (or heading back) so there was plenty of activity.  Finally, actual urban sketching of real people in motion. When I got home after an hour, I added some watercolor, and even managed to come up with three more watercolor sketches, no prelim pencil work. Hit 70 on the third day.

DAY FOUR: Did a lot of teaching on Friday the 10th, so I barely had the energy to pick up my pen. I'm an English teacher at a private language school in the heart of Copenhagen, with about half of my students being Danish and the other half foreigners, generally from Europe, Latin America and East Asia. They're adults, all of them, and most need the English for work or to stay afloat in a graduate or postgraduate program.

The school conducts English-language exams, and I serve as a speaking exam supervisor from time to time. One of my duties is taking digital photos of the candidates, who very often are in their mid to late teens. I decided to draw a bunch of Danish young people from the imagination. I started with the girls, and was too tired to do the boy equivalents afterwards.

Some of the character of those hundreds of exam candidates, over several years, has seeped into these faces. I started with tiny pencil marks to designate the placement of the features and head, then did soft watercolor strokes to indicate their bone structure and hair color, and finished by defining their features with brush pens. The names of the girls, incidentally, are typical of Gen Z’ers in the Copenhagen area. They are entirely fictional.

DAY FIVE: It was Saturday, March 11, in Denmark, which is six to nine hours ahead of North America, and I had planned to go to the Statens Museum for Kunst (the National Gallery) to sketch the museumgoers, then meet some friends for lunch.  But once again I had no energy to make the 45-minute journey by train, metro and bus. I was scrolling in some desperation through my Facebook feed when I came upon some photographs taken by high school friend Nancy Ugsad just a few hours or so before: of Silliman University early on Saturday morning (the Philippines being seven hours ahead of Denmark), with the varsity athletes practicing their pitches on a playing field, and members of the marching band sitting on the apron of concrete in front of the Luce Auditorium, each in their own world as they practiced on their instruments. I got Nancy's permission to use her photos, took up a Pitt brush pen, and with quick strokes fulfilled the rest of the challenge, filling in the outlines with a neutral tint (well, Daniel Smith's Jane's Gray, which is a mix of Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue). I photographed the pages of my sketchbook, posted it to the #OneWeek100People Facebook group set up by Marc and Liz ... and was done.

OR so I thought.  I was loathe to put away my watercolors, etc. Having abandoned it in late 2021, I was in love with small-scale painting once again. So after a bit of schoolwork, I closed the day with this little (A5) portrait of my email friend Dan Keller, from a black and white reference photo taken in the summer of '69.  #OneWeek100People plus One.

                                                                                                            

I consider the portrait of Daniel as the first in a new self-imposed challenge called "1000 People, 1000 moments", and which will be done in watercolor, alone or in combination with drawing media, no deadline, so as not to compete with all the other stuff I long to do.

    

                                                                                                                --- Bing <3

https://www.instagram.com/bing_sitoy/
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100 Faces in 300 Days project, part 2

The faces are getting less and less precise. Not so much sloppy as reckless. Or free. One of these days, I will make a video of all 100 of them -- if I ever do reach the magic number, never mind that I probably won't hit the deadline in the end. Have been writing. Have been teaching. Have been working in the garden. Have been visiting with my elderly folks. Have been mentally agitated. Have been longing for far too much.

 

Bing vs. Bianca, 1981-82

THIS is how I, Bing, looked, circa late 1981/early 1982. Sitting against the piano and wearing a pink eyelet blouse. Twelve years old. This photo was taken at the faculty home on the Silliman campus where our family lived until I was 13. 

This is what I drew, among others. It's a tiny watercolor painting, a detail of a 5" x 8" inch piece that I had designed to cover an ugly spiral-bound notebook. It's Hornet's Nest fan art -- except that the boys are depicted as girls: five girls to be specific. They recur in my stories and were initially named after people we knew, and came into being around the time I turned 8 and my sister 11. Then the names changed somewhat, as did their appearance and abilities.

My avatar, also called Bing, is the one in blue dressed as Arturo, the tree-climbing boy super-soldier of Hornet's Nest. By then, two years had passed since we had seen the movie and I had forgotten that Arturo was supposed to wear long sleeves. This Bing's hair looks just like mine in the picture, the same grown-out bangs, except that the part is on the wrong side. This was probably because there weren't many photos taken of me at this time, so I knew my face only from what I saw in the mirror. 

What did I, Bing, write at age 12? Hah. A scandal. Fan fiction. Here are the first two pages of a story, out of hundreds if not thousands of pages my sister and I produced throughout our childhood.

Fans of Hornet's Nest (1970) will recognize the names and the situation. For those who have not seen the movie... this story is Bianca's. She is the doctor who three boys lure to a cave to attend to the wounded paratrooper/demolition expert they have rescued from under the noses of the German troops. Here she finds 12 other boys, most in their mid teens, who have been hiding out for weeks or months after their entire village is massacred by Nazis. In the cave, confronted with the prospect of aiding one of the enemy, Bianca at first refuses. Violence results at the hands of 15 boys. Okay, let me put it squarely: they attempt to rape her, and are stopped by the demolition expert (Capt. Turner, played by Rock Hudson) who has just regained consciousness. 

The following morning, one of the boys expresses disgust at their behavior, and another insists they wouldn't have gone through with it. Despite this, I found the savagery of the near-rape sequence upsetting. But it was also intriguing. I had, after all, just turned 11.

Bianca comes to realize that she is a prisoner of the Italian boys and the American captain, but throughout the movie, through dialogue and her actions, she resists.

Bianca was played by Silva Koscina. I didn't know what her character name was at the time (we only saw the film once, in a theater, which was how people saw movies in 1980), so my sister and I gave her a different name. In this story I wrote (I can see myself, nose to the page, utterly focused on the task of translating the story in my mind into words), she goes unnamed. The first two pages, and a third, are scenes from the Hornet's Nest movie as I remembered it, and was my way of keeping loyal to the subject matter. And also of recollecting the film, two years later. There are two completely made-up features here here. First is the interaction with the boy called Paolo, who oddly I describe as being nine years old (more about this, and about him, to come). The second is the woman's attempt to undermine the group by pinching the child Mario so that he cries and attracts the attention of the German patrol -- that was definitely not in the movie! (The actual scene is here, beginning at the 2:55 mark). Resistance indeed.

The third liberty I've taken will be familiar to writers of fan fiction -- telling the story from the point of view of a neglected or objectified character. Now the woman doctor is no longer the dolled-up, bouffant-haired creature to be knocked around and assaulted into submission, but is the subject herself.  But I wasn't aware of that kind of academic language as I wrote. All I knew was that my sister and I disliked Bianca. 

To me Bianca was an object of fun, a parent-figure (or a sexual yet prudish auntie figure) to be pranked and dodged. So for that matter, was the war-weary Capt. Turner, who my sister and I decided, out of guilt over his deeds, had gone quietly and completely insane. But as my sister turned 15 and we continued to write about and draw this universe, blending other movies and even comic books into it, Bianca became something else to her -- a whore-figure to be humiliated, for whom redemption was impossible. 

The frustrated rape in the cave (and the strong suggestion that it would be a gang rape) had a profound impact on us as children. It didn't help that, in the milieu where I had grown up, gang rape was a very real possibility for adventurous girls. At least it was held over us as a threat.

My sister and I spent a lot of time discussing Bianca then, demonizing her for being a pacifist wet blanket (we were kids and we wanted war!) as well as being so sexually attractive. We never once considered that it was the actions of the boys (really just Aldo) that were savage. Or that it was war itself that is savage. The story I wrote runs for several pages as a summary of some events in Hornet's Nest as Bianca would have seen them, then heads into dark terrain. Because on page three she is raped by  Capt. Turner, exactly as it appears (or is strongly suggested) in the movie. And, on page four, she discovers that she prefers to be taken by force. For as my sister and I merged more worlds into the Hornet's Nest one, our fictional Bianca went on to sleep with some -- a lot -- of the main players in each of those worlds, an invention I faithfully chronicled in the story, though not in any sexually explicit fashion -- more in the voice of a romance novel heroine, amazed at the attributes of each of these men, and of her response to them. 

I can't wrap my head around the fact that, at 12, I was writing this stuff. My husband says, "Maybe you weren't really 12." He means that I was smart, I had read a lot, I was precocious. In retrospect, I was trying to reconcile the adult sexuality I'd seen a lot of in movies and read about in books with what was expected of us as young women. (No one enforced the R ratings in the cinemas, and awful soft-porn paperbacks made the rounds of high school classrooms). We were growing up in the kind of society (provincial Philippines, late 70s-early 80s) where it was still acceptable for people to say that good girls would never have sex before marriage unless they were forced. Therefore much of the rape fascination probably had to do with that. It was a kind of projection as well, and of revulsion  -- "I'll never grow up to be like her. Not if I can help it."

I was fascinated by Silva Koscina, the actress, though. I didn't hate her. There were lots of pictures of her in old magazines lying around the house, and her woman-warrior character Danitza (Danica) in The Battle of Neretva, seen a few months after Hornet's Nest, was one of my favorites too. She was brave and beautiful there, she dies valiantly, and she was no one's possession.   (To be continued)

 

    

Throwback: 25 random things about me, Facebook 2009

Every once in a while, a friend from U.P. law school (she works at Allianz now; I dropped out in good standing when I was 23) reminds me of this Facebook post from 2009, back in the glory days when the social network was text-heavy as an extension of the old emailing list practice, and the meme had yet to be invented.

The post, a glamorized chain letter, was called 25 random things about me

There were rules. Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged... etc. etc.

Amazingly the 25 random things still hold true for the most part in 2023. I have marked in bold-italics those that are of particular resonance as I sit and write this today, in view of the numerous creative projects I am working on or keep dreaming about.

All this is TMI -- too much information -- of course. But what the heck.

1. Drawing pictures is my first love.

2. I can make any dog come to me.

(2023 note: After the heart-wrenching loss of the family dog, we all switched to cats)

3. I find creative writing a painful, embarrassing, emotionally-wrenching, high-pressure and utterly tedious experience, like sawing yourself open with a nail file, or building a house with matchsticks. And at the end you discover this beautiful piece you have built from the ground up has already been said better by someone else. And when it’s published you have to defend it in some academic forum and try to sound clever or profound -- or people will label you “over-rated.” 

(2023: Nope, I rediscovered the muse in 2022. Creative writing still hurts, but it hurts good now.)

4. Though I treasure my privacy,  my profession as a writer demands a certain amount of exhibitionism. It has often been a relief to write erotica under a pen name than to write a simple newspaper column under my own name.

5. I get years-long, rabid crushes on unavailable people. 

(2023: Hah! All writing is crushing).

6. I hurt the ones I love the most. 

(2023: No, not anymore). 

7. I loathed high school. I am very cautious about which batchmates I allow back into my life. 

(2023: Makes good creative writing fodder, though).

8. I passed up the chance to sky-dive.

9. I’ve been in a hot air balloon alone with a Japanese guy I didn’t know. He spoke no English. For some reason, he had problems controlling the burner, and we nearly crashed. When we landed in one piece far, far from the target, he kissed me on the lips!

10. I am still afraid to fly in airplanes. 

(2023: Got used to them). 

11. I have had more literary awards than I’ve had lovers. Tons more. 

(2023: Who cares?)

12. I have a talent for scrounge shopping. I once wore a beautiful outfit that cost three dollars from head to toe, bag to boots, culled from ukay-ukay shops in the Philippines.

13. I photographed my sister give birth, washed her when she was dying, and retouched her makeup twice in her coffin.

14. When I was 17, I had a pin-up of Pål Waaktaar (songwriter/guitarist/vocals for Norwegian band A-ha) on my bedroom door.  

15. I’ve owned and used the same hard plastic light pink Springmaid comb every day for 15 or 20 years. I wash it in shampoo and hot water every now and then, and it’s good as new.  

(2023: Jinxed: Shortly after writing these words, I lost the comb).

16. One of my coolest experiences was sketching a male colleague nude in the privacy of my solo apartment. 

(2023: Rest in peace, my friend. Our relationship was totally platonic btw. We were mutual fans.)

17. I wept into my palm at Robben Island and Tuol Sleng prisons. I hesitate to visit places where very many people suffered or died, but are drawn to them anyway.  

18. It takes me a long time to forget a grievance. I’m working to change this, I promise you.

19. I once did a 5 x 5 foot painting of the cover of the New Kids On the Block’s first (1986) album – and pasted it on all four panels of my closet door.   

20. When I was 24, I accompanied a military team on a botched raid on an Olongapo brothel. The only person they “caught” (and harassed) was a just-circumcised seven-year old boy in a nightgown.

21. This is by no means a random list. This is a highly considered, self-censored list. I aspire to be the kind of person who can amuse you and engage you with playfulness and spontaneity and make you feel that you know everything about me after half an hour. 

(2023: God, how nasty! To be fair, was going through sh*t at the time.)

22. I once crashed a barrier at a Sting concert unintentionally. The concert was part of his Mercury Falling tour -- Manila, 1996. They played “Roxanne,” and all the stage lights went red, and my friend, who was the real Sting fan at the time, screamed, and she and I started rocking the tube-metal barrier for fun. At the same time some other kids were doing it at the other end of the barrier, which then came down, and these crazed third-class ticket holders spilled all the way into the expensive seats, where all the multinational corporation expats were sitting.  

(2023: Not proud. Should have foreseen.)

23. Although I still feel excluded in some ways, there is plenty to love about Denmark.

24. I can’t dance at parties. I won’t. Filipinos have a culture of dancing for the entertainment of others. You either dance as good as a japayuki, or you sit down. 

25. Please fill in this blank with something you remember we shared...
2023: Or check out my childhood crushie boys at the other blog https://hornetsnest1970.blogspot.com/

I shall revise

I must revise. I shall revise! Though “expand” is the more appropriate term. Expand the novel by some 10,000 words. That's almost a reconceptualization of the whole thing. But fortunately, I’ve gotten very useful feedback, which will light the way. Feeling good.

I had given myself a March 31 deadline for the “Boys of Hornets Nest blog. it looks like I'll either speed up the writing, or begin the expansion while working on the blog. Another novel was in the pipeline, but now it doesn't seem that I can work on it until this current one is out of the way. Won't stop taking notes, however, nor writing emails to the special ones.

Oooh, cryptic.

Bornholm, where I worked on a novel

WE stayed in a cabin on the island of Bornholm for a few days in May, 2022. It had been my idea to visit the place again (it is part of the territory of Denmark, though closer to Sweden). I wanted to swim in the ocean, walk silently through a forest feeling springy moss beneath my feet, return to the fabled cliffs.

As it happened, I remained in the cabin most of that week while my husband and our friends went sightseeing, only going out in the evenings to walk the kilometer or so down to the sea. I'd brought the draft of a novel along, and I had a May 31 deadline. In my computer, the novel existed in bits and pieces, including most of the ending and nearly all of the beginning, but I needed to work on the middle to connect everything. The middle is always hardest to write. 

The day before we left, I sat down and listed all the incidents which I knew the story lacked.  Then I numbered them in the order I wanted them to occur, figuring out how one might lead to the other.

It helped that the novel was outlined in a program called Scrivener, which is very useful for organizing your ideas, although not conducive to organic or intuitive writing. I'd been thinking of this book for years -- years! And now that the project was in motion, I'd been in love with the main characters for six weeks, and they had taken a life of their own and were beginning to flirt with one another in my mind. It was a hot and yellow spring -- if you've been to Denmark in the month of April you will know what I mean -- and as I dreamed them, on those moments of solitude traversing Copenhagen's immaculate sidewalks, I felt I was going crazy. I was giddy with happiness. 

I was in the perfect frame of mind to finish a short book, and nothing -- not even Bornholm, not even the presence of dear friends -- would stop me. And I did complete it. I picked the episodes off one by one, and on our return, took a day's break to attend a birthday party and teach a class, and then charged into the home stretch and finished the book by the 31st of May, just as I had planned.

It was a first draft and not very good, but that is the reason why authors possess revision skills. 

Here are some pictures from that stay in Bornholm. I do not know to what extent the few days on that Scandinavian island influenced the novel. 

Text and photos copyright Lakambini Sitoy, 2022, 2023. 
Check out my Il Vespaio (Hornet's Nest, 1970) blog.