untitled (beth)
10" x 8"
graphite on paper
2010

wow...

oh man! yesterday was quite a day! i drew and drew and drew and 7 hours later, elsie was done with me. so i grabbed my camera and went outside to take a picture in the good light and, of course, the battery was dead. by the time it was done charging, there was enough light left in the evening to snap one good picture and get it posted here... but no. the camera is bugged out and keeps shutting down. my GOOD camera. it may have something to do with the coke that exploded in my bag when my camera was in there too. hmmmmm. so this morning, first thing after the coffee was brewed, i tracked down my old camera and took elsie outside in the crisp, clear morning and took her picture.

i really can't stop looking at her.

she wouldn't stop talking yesterday. oh! such a gorgeous child! and so haunted, so delicate, so full of things i don't quite understand. it's going to take quite a bit of studying to prepare for her final portrait. an oil painting. who knows... maybe she doesn't even need or want that... maybe the roughness of paper is what she wants. i don't know. all i know is that i have to keep drawing her.

this is the 2nd study i've done-



Alpha (study #2)
30" x 22"
water soluble graphite and gouache on paper
angela simione, 2009


i went big with this one. 7 years of life-drawing classes taught me that while your learning, use the biggest piece of paper you've got. give yourself room to feel around, sound out the vowels of a form.

i don't use projectors and i don't trace. it isn't that i have a problem with those methods at all, i don't. it's just preference. i want my hand to be as diligent and specific as a camera. that's what i aspire to. a machine at the end of my wrist. but a machine that has embraced chance and flaw and accident.

besides, this work is too personal. a human has to do it, not a device. this work is more about memory than accurate rendering. doing her portraits are an act of remembering... remembering someone we know nothing about. no favorite color, no favorite food, we can't even be sure what color the cape she's wearing in the photograph is. her portrait is a portrait of loss... and getting every single shadow exactly right really isn't the point. it's about listening. it's looking at those strange eyes, light refracted all through them, and trying to see who she might have been...

who she could be now. or is.

you know her...

(click the photos to enlarge)

one of the little lovely humble things i've been wrapped up in. quiet work that, in spite of its simplicity and smallness (or maybe due to it), feels so very important and honest. a little tool with which i am learning the world. poetry and thoughtfulness. this work soothes me. it makes me better than i am.






you know her
10.5" x 5.5"
mixed media artist book
angela simione, 2009

transcription:

she wore the white dress and white shoes
snow-white
under the little wire clamps
pale, nondescript
harmless
her hand to her mouth
she'd had such trouble
cutting. cutting and cutting and cutting.

there is FAR too much to catch you up on and finding the starting place in the blurr of the past week is a tall order but the ball must be got rolling

so we will start with ART!

between last night and this morning, this is the poem i wrote.
a new voice-



act of waking





she is a difficult harbour
with the most wonderful compartments;
attractive lakes
and rivers that should be loved.
travelling over-night
to her mouth, that North,
her home waters, the still.
parallel to a pill-box.

she had been painted-
hard against yesterday.
a fissure in the mast.
the ice is never ordinary;
expectation read
in the briefest of nods.
her home waters
parallel. a pill-box.






angela simione, 2009

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

Shura 3

30" x 22"
mixed media on paper
2008

shura

12" x 12"
oil on canvas
2008