For the Quasi family

You may have seen this piece before. I believe it was in the “Semester 2018-2019 #3” post where it first showed its face and I felt it necessary to give it the spotlight, you know? Give it its own post, so here we go.

Modo Quasi’s existence came to be after the professor gave us an assignment to further work on developing our spacial awareness on paper by doing self-portrait with a sinlge continuous line made with sharpie and without looking at the paper, at all. It was an exercise named “contorno ciego” (literal translation being ‘blind contour’).

Not really owning much or any art materials, I took three cut papers of a specific material (“cubierta de hilo blanco”), two normal black Sharpies (no takesies-backsies with it), and sat on the floor, in front of the body-long mirror, so that I could follow the contours of my face. Now I normally have pretty strong will but I had never wanted to look at something so much in my entire life. I wanted to have the most control over what I was doing, be precise and exact but I knew that as soon as I looked at it once, it would ruin the exercise. So I buckled up my pants… and I taped the paper’s reflection on the mirror and I put tape under my eyes so as to make it difficult to “accidentally” sneak a peek. THEN, I set out to work.

Having limited resources, I decided to use one paper to warm up, get used to everything, the floor, the materials, my surroundings; and use the other two papers as my final work, as in make two versions and pick the one I liked the most. You know what that means, riiiiight? Modo’s got siblings!!! Two of them, to be precise.

You can see that from the last picture on the post to the first one, I worked the head then by the second attempt I did the head until the clavicle and lastly I was confident and comfortable enough to work the head along with my torso.