yikes!

an evening jog and a swarm of bees kicked loose from somewhere deep in the vineyard and i ran fast and feared that i'd made the wrong decision, that they could smell my panic and would come get me and i'd die out there on a dirt road, covered in red lumps, my little girl dog without a mama. silly, i'm sure, but bees are nothing to trifle with. they have strength in numbers and all i could see was that horrible scene form 'My Girl" when Macaulay Culkin dies. yeewuu. (shiver) gives me the heebeejeebees!

hee-BEE-jee-BEES! hahahahaha! :)



(pun not intended)

sunday...

...the day of rest. sort of. all my projects are now well in to the realm of painstakingly slow detail work and my goal of getting them all wrapped up by the new year is starting to seem a bit unrealistic. :) that's what i get for starting too many things at once, i suppose... a tendency that runs through my entire family. it's alright. they'll all be completed about the same time and i'll have tons of pictures to post. until then, i'll post pictures of other people's work! check out this work by artist Candice Lin:







totally creepy, totally gorgeous, work after my own heart! i love it! sadly, the gallery i found her through has closed it's doors but i was still so overjoyed to see this work. technically stunning, conceptually and emotionally engaging, amazing all the way around. Lin's work makes me what to get back to my days of pencil drawing and see what beautiful spookiness i can come up with.

old loves and new thanks...

hi everybody! first off, i just want to send out a big ol' THANK YOU to everyone who's been reading the blog lately and commenting on the work. i really, really appreciate the fact that you've taken time out of your day to let me know what your thoughts are. it's extremely helpful to know what people respond to, what turns them off, and what might just make them smile. i am grateful and smiling and totally giddy. thank you so much!

so today i've been working on some small pieces, just sorta playing around and seeing what happens. sometimes it's a wonderful thing to just work as fast as you can and without a lot of thought - it short-circuits the self-censoring mechanism and you end up doing things you normally wouldn't, acting upon ideas you'd talk yourself out of, and the resulting images are evidence of learning in action. it's great! here's some small pieces from my art adventure:




Blackland #4
7" x 7"
mixed media collage on paper
2008



untitled personal indictment
6 3/4" x 5 1/4"
mixed media collage on paper
2008


obviously, my default aesthetics kicked in on these (my beloved black and white!), but i also picked up my old love of texture and disparate materials and just rolled with it: black masking tape, film negative (that's what makes them shiny), scraps of paper and a love of abstraction. it was fun and i really enjoy seeing that, though i was working quickly and not really concerned with what the results were, the primary ideas i've been dealing with are in this work as well. pretty ingrained, i guess! :) and that's a good thing!

Page 28 (Blackland 2)

15" x 11"
ink on paper
2008


i don't know what took me so long to get around to the idea of drawing my very own book pages but i'm sure glad i finally did. i guess i had been sort of turned off by the idea of my own hand writing being present in the work. thankfully, i got over that weird little hang up and here she is... Page 28 (named after my age). the text reads "black as her ribbons" and i leave it to you to interpret that fragment in whatever way pleases you best.

(click on image for larger view)

anonymous girls....

Anonymous Girls #3
22" x 15"
ink on paper
2008

this has been a secret series of mine for about a year and a half now. only a few people have seen this work... until now! the gallery took this piece for the november show and i am so excited about it! it's work that people seem to feel pretty strongly about- they either completely love it or hate it more than any thing else. :) which i get a really big kick out of! when i first started this series, i was sort of just doing it to keep my hands busy and quickly ended up having a huge stack of little 8" x 10" ink drawings of girl heads. at the time, i had been really invested in the untitled sisters paintings... portraits of girls cropped at the neck (headless), and a classmate of mine made the statement that maybe this was where all their faces went. i really enjoyed his outlook and decided i'd let these drawings happen as they needed to and to not force them in any particular direction.


Anonymous Girls #4
11" x 7 1/2"
ink on paper
2008

it's been nice to have a low-pressure/secret project that grows and changes at it's own rate. i have so many that still need to be photographed. hopefully, we'll have a few more days of beautiful and bright weather... i've got an amazingly large (and constantly growing) pile of artwork that needs to be documented. i get so wrapped up in new work that i keep forgetting to take pictures! now that this project is no longer so secret... i'm anxious about what kind of reception this work will get next month during the exhibition... documentation will become quite important.

anyway...
any one else see the similarity between this work and the "black apples" series? a pretty nice partnership, i'd say! i really like seeing these pieces together... maybe i should make a zine of my own? definitely something to think about.


black apples (2)
15" x 11"
ink on paper
2008

poems, painting, and the problem of memory...

i've spent the day so far (up since 4:30 am) alternating between painting and reading the complete poems of anne sexton... which means i have also been alternating between moments of exquisite joy and the torture of reliving old, bad memories. nevertheless, a wonderful day!

the oil paintings are coming along quite nicely and should be finished sometime during the next 2 weeks. i also started a new canvas based on this study:




study for 'the fall'
11" x 7 1/2"
acrylic and graphite on paper
2008

the canvas is 3 feet square (so it'll be a few weeks before i'm done) and so much fun to work on. i've been wrapped up in smaller works on paper for weeks now and it feels wonderful to go big.

this image is largely inspired by another painting i'm working on for rana kelly's 'witch of the bayou'. i'm still so struck by her story that i feel compelled to respond to it visually. the task will be to do the story justice. the paintings need to be thoughtful. they need to mirror how gruesome, how beautiful, and how haunting the story is.

some new stuff i've been working on...

siblings. shadows.
40" x 30"
oil on canvas
2008



dahlia 1
11" x 14"
oil on canvas
2008

always creepy, never cute

there's just something about dolls...

i'm not quite sure what to say about this painting aside from the fact that it's scary as hell. it's currently hanging in my living room which may not be the best space for it. the guests seem a bit uncomfortable. i guess that's an appropriate reaction.

i've always thought dolls were kinda creepy. even as a child, i preferred stuffed animals to dolls.

dolls are sort of like rosaries... beautiful objects, meant to be held and loved... and extremely effective brain-washing tools.