Back from the madness that is the holiday season, I've finally completed some more large paintings. Also, my broken camera decided it was tired of being a drama queen and now works again. I hope this is foreshadowing of the rest of my encounters with technology--that if they break I can just ignore them for a while and they'll fix themselves without requiring effort or money on my part.
Actually, more than likely, my luck with technology has all been spent up and my next blog post will be scanned in at the public library after I had to write it on a typewriter.
So! Onto the artwork. The two seen here are additions to the Home collection, and are finally finished after much deliberation. On top we have The Storm Gatherers. This is one of the rare instances when I've made up an image to go with a title, rather than the other way around. The title comes from a Henry Darger piece, which is actually titled A Storm Gathers but, like I often do, I read it wrong and thought it said something cooler. The end result is this painting, 44 X 46 inches and about three thousand pounds of stand oil glazes. It features a theme I've been liking lately, which is an organized group of small girls, who seem unassuming but who are probably up to something nefarious, in this case, summoning a storm with the help of lightning rods, weather vanes and a barometer. A similar clutch of these girls can be seen in The Harvest. Most of the girls are based on photographs of me when I was little, and the outfits are actual clothes I've owned, namely ballet recital costumes and summer dresses. Stylistically, this painting echoes The Discovery of a False Moon in its glazy, open field-setting.
Then there is Outlands, whose bizarre size (8 X 18 inches) was dictated by the size of the fabric on which it is painted. This fabric was not purchased, but rather came from an old skirt of my mother's, so I didn't have the luxury of choosing a reasonable size. I wanted to do this painting for a long time, but couldn't find small enough stretchers until recently. Also, although I like the way it came out, I don't recommend painting on old fabric; it gets fuzzy and when gessoed (gesso'd?) the fuzziness ends up as stiff lumps and detail work is very difficult. There is also a hole in the fabric, which is hard to see but obviously not ideal, and overall the fabric is worn and not as structurally sound as new fabric. But I still like it. The figures are taken from photographs of my mother (in the white shirt, center) and some friends from her Brownie troop on a field trip in the early '60s. Like the ones used in the Huntington paintings, the photos are kind of weird and don't have a feeling of being in a specific place.
In keeping with the season, I've decided to share some images of both the bounty and the desolation of autumn. Or something. Top: The Harvest, 40X42 in. Bottom, 10X10 in, untitled as of now. I've always liked the fall--I find it refreshing after the summer, like a new beginning, clearing away the old brush and the humidity of the past year. To say that these were made in the fall, though, would not be entirely accurate--the untitled one was made over the summer. I have four other 10X10 canvases that have, over the years, experienced many incarnations. The latest have been these, in the "medieval" style (note humpy black body-masses), with lots of stand oil. I work on these rather casually, usually when I'm done with a larger project and need something to do with excess paint (which is really expensive and so throwing it out is an option I try to avoid). The one you see here is the only one I consider to be complete.
The Harvest is the latest member of the Home family, done on patterned fabric with collage elements. I think it's most similar to The Homestead stylistically, and I've used the same photographs. Like The Homestead, the idea is an ending, or a transition from one phase to another, but the past remains present (in both senses of the word) in the physical features of the place. The mood, obviously, is slightly different; lately I've preferred larger groups of figures to just one. I've been interested in the idea of a cultish little group, something like these skullhoodies, a united force.
Plus they have cake.
Here are some drawings I did sometime in the spring. They are all about 5 in. X 7 in., ink (pen) on paper. Extremely. Meticulously. Rendered. I don't know how long these tiny things took me. I mainly worked on them during downtime at the old coffee shop. Which gives you an idea of how business went there.
All three are based on real places, and are in effect an iteration of my current interest in landscapes and memory as place. This is, in effect, how I remember those places. Certain features remain prominent, or are made more prominent, and others have been erased entirely. I wasn't interested in recreating a realistic record of the place (though, when I compare these to the images in my little head, they could be considered accurate renderings. Don't make fun of my brain.), or an image that would be instantly recognizable to others. I was more interested in capturing the feeling of the place. That is not to say, however, that these are entirely impulsive pieces; the images as I see them in my head have quite bright colors, but I left them out of the drawings for the sake of the compositions, since color would overwhelm the delicacy of the lines.
Hopefully I'll be able to post some actual paintings sometime soon. They just take so long.
I've always--well, since college, anyway--liked Lisa Yuskavage (say it yus-CAH-vitch). Something about the lurid colors and the obvious porniness of them appeal to me. She has been described, in the introduction to her Small Paintings book, written by director Tamara Jenkins, as "one of those 'bad girl' painters." It's kind of a simplistic title to be sure, but there is a rebellious quality that I like about her work. It's the pastel colors, I think, all those awful, seventies-porno ki
nds of turquoises and peaches and pinks, the twisting of the classical nude into a twentieth-century pinup, and the willful distortion, bordering on the perverse, of the female form; they're not even like human beings after a point, they're like these strange, alien female creatures borne out of some subconscious childhood sexual fantasy. That sounds pretty pervy, doesn't it? But, come on, look at Wrist Corsage's butt. Her work walks several fine lines, between cute and frightening, between high and low art, between sexual and psychological, between exploitative and celebratory.
To create these girlie creatures, Yuskavage first created small ceramic figurines called maquettes so she could study the movement of light over the human(ish) form. Everything I attempt to make out of clay ends up looking like a tumor, so I find this incredibly impressive. I've also been a longtime fan of the study of beauty and sexuality in the female form, particularly when it's studied by a female, and goes into the darker, more uncomfortable aspects of it. And maybe the most important reason I like Lisa? She's fun. Her paintings make me smile. And maybe that's what ultimately counts.
Top to bottom: Couch, 1997-98; The Smoker, 2007; Fleshpot; Wrist Corsage, 1996; Redhead, Blonde and Brunette, 1995.
I feel not-quite-great about uploading all these older, smaller works. I want to show off some more awesome large oils, but I've been rather remiss about, um, actually doing the awesome large oil paintings. For one thing, it's been really damp here--the remnants of a tropical storm moving up the coast--and nothing, NOTHING, is drying. There's only so much underpainting one can do. Plus, the basement is dank and unappealing in weather like this.
So here are some watercolors I did a while back. They are all portraits of the same person, taken from memory. Top to bottom: Shiva Reclining, Sugarbear and Spiderverse. All are watercolor, ink and gouache, and the top one has collage elements, taken from magazines. The top and bottom pieces are kind of companions--both are mounted (hastily) on black cardboard and are the same size. Sugarbear is my favorite for mushy reasons; our dear subject walked into our bedroom one afternoon and greeted me in such a manner. The others were more experimental in terms of concept and material, and I'm pleased enough with how they came out.
These were kind of done in a spur-of-the-moment fashion, so I'm afraid there is very little concept or backstory to explain in these, other than that they are visual celebrations of someone very special to me. I tend to be less careful, in a way, when it comes to water media, basically because I can afford it. Oil paints and products are, let's face it, really freaking expensive.
I was thinking of collecting all the small works I've done over the years into some kind of book or something, since right now they're all floating around my room in and subject to violent death and demise and that would really be a shame.
More oils soon. Really.
Happy Autumn! I never made much jewelry because you have to buy all those little bits. Or, you have to have a bunch of potentially fire-starting tools and chemicals at your disposal and I don't. Usually, it takes a formal environment to kickstart the process of doing something you don't normally do, which is why I don't do all the things I always say I want to learn how to do, like knit or do yoga or some kind of martial art or fly on the trapeze or ride horses or scuba dive or...you get the idea.
So here is some jewelry I've made and even occasionally wear, when I have time to remember things like jewelry and am not in a mad dash to catch a train or something. All are fairly large (for jewelry). I took a class on non-metal jewelry which taught me the basics of handling all those little bits.
The top piece is a pendant based on the paisley design. It's stained wood, hand-carved with a flex-shaft (WANT) and set with glass beads (and by "set" I mean, "they're glued in"). Note jump ring fail at the top--I added that after my access to proper jewelry making equipment had ended. But I actually really like this one, and out of the three, I wear it the most often.
Next is a large brooch, about 2" X 2" square. It's an antique photograph, ca. 1850s-60s. A miniature scanned version of this (two of them, actually), can be seen in The Homestead, along with figures from some of the other photos that came with this one. This is the original. I think she looks kind of like Kirsten Dunst. I constructed the brooch myself, using bookboard for the back and painted balsa wood strips for the frame. The photograph and dried flowers are protected by a piece of plastic from a picture frame. (I'd rather glass, and I even have a glass cutter, but I don't have any glass around.) The findings themselves are store-bought, and everything is held together with bookbinding glue.
Lastly is another piece I made in the jewelry class. It's a brooch, and is my one great attempt at metalwork. The back is, I mean. It's pretty clumsy, but I'm personally happy with it. The making of an actual pin is a complicated process that I won't get into right now, but let's just say it functions correctly. The back is dyed leather with burnt-in paisley detail (I had a theme going) mounted on wood. The figures are scrimshawed rawhide (scrimshaw is traditionally done on bone or ivory, but can be done on just about anything, including rawhide, though the ink blurs a little), the frame is carved wood, and the pearls are real. Interestingly, the two girls here are reminiscent of the character sketches I mentioned in the last post. The piece was meant to evoke an old family photograph, something to do with memories of childhood.
So sometimes when I get bored or when I'm watching TV or when I'm bored watching TV I make jewelry. Admittedly, I'm not very good at it, but I rather do enjoy manipulating minutiae, and my style appears to be somewhat Victorian, which I never really realized until now. I also seem to go about jewelry making like a painter--note all those framed images. I don't think I'll be posting anymore jewelry, though. This was something of an experiment, I guess. On to more paintings!
It was a windy day in New Paltz, New York, and I was wearing a muumuu. It's a rather nice muumuu, vintage Hawaiian, bright red, that I bought for $45 from a lovely lady named Shabbat who plays guitar and sells homemade and vintage clothes. Anyway, it was a windy day and we all know nothing picks up wind quite as well as a muumuu. And thus the Tumblies were born. There's really very little concept behind the Tumblies outside of cuteness--they're small, lightweight girls in large dresses who drift through the air in a variety of themes. They're very straightforward, universally accessible. My mother tells me I should 
market them to Hallmark, and I just might. The top three images are some examples of them--the ones I like best, anyway. They are, top to bottom, Aeronautic Tumblies (note the protective eyewear), Tumblies of Summer, and Pollen Tumblies. Like I said, their main concept is being adorable, since I can't be expected to plumb the dark oceans of emotion all the time. Sometimes I just need some cute. These Tumblies are created using watercolor, ink and colored pencil on paper.
Below the Tumblies are two pieces that speak, in a way, to 
my other interest, which is writing. Generally, I don't mix my writing and my art. They come from very different areas of myself and I find it ultimately detrimental to both disciplines to mix them. Maybe it's vanity--I like my art to be able to communicate without words, and my writing to be able to communicate without images. Graphic novels and comics, in case you were wondering, bore me to tears from the standpoint of a creator, though illustration doesn't repel me quite so much. The second picture from the bottom is a rare exception (one of them, anyway). She is a character from a story I once started to write, and have put on the back burner for the time being. Her name is Mary, and her tattoo is a snake that wraps around both arms and over her shoulders. The one overlap I have is a habit of sketching characters. Something about seeing them physically as I see them in my head is helpful. There are two other, similar images from this story showing other characters, but Mary remains my favorite. It's India and acrylic ink and pen on paper, the same smallish (about 3" X 5" ish) paper the Tumblies are on. I'm really bad at identifying paper types, you'll have to forgive me.
Below Mary is a rather strange image--even for me--that occurred one evening seemingly out of nowhere. The day, I recall, had been filled with rather sordid activity as befits college kids in an empty summer house, so maybe that has something to do with its origin. The result, anyway, were those wonderfully ugly children all stained with mulberry juice--or possibly something more gruesome. Mullberry juice does make one look rather like the undead if one gets it all over one's face. This image, unlike Mary, has no greater narrative, but is one of the rare images in which I've used text. I don't generally. For me it's too rigid and, like I said before, I like my art to not need the addition of text to make its meaning or even feeling clear. But there's always an exception. Here's one of them, watercolor and pen on Bristol plate (I remember that, because it's in big letters on the pad), 8.5" X 11".
I'm getting better at water media, and there's something nice about it. For one thing, unlike oils, water media is nontoxic and can be used in the comfort of your living space, which is a nice break from standing in the basement. They're also easily portable and easily prepared and cleaned up. My watercolor, ink, and gouache palette is a piece of aluminum foil, for example, and all the paint tubes can fit into the relish jar I use for water. With the exception of We Were Eating Mullberries, all the images here were created during the month I was living on my good friend Jillian's futon. I had no permanent studio space at the time, and obviously I couldn't use (toxic) oils in her apartment, so my only outlet, artistically, was water media. So if you're ever camped out in someone's living room for a period of time, bring your watercolors.
If you look to the right hand side of this blog, you'll see a quip about cupcakes in the "About Me" section. It's true. I do find cupcakes, and all gooey baked goods, for that matter, to be somewhat sinister. I don't know why. Something about all that prettiness and sweetness...you just know it has to have a dark side.
I made these paintings a few years ago, when I was tired of using the darker, more jewel-like tones of the medieval-style paintings and wanted to do something a little brighter. I was also interested in the idea, especially after working with ideas informed by sacred art, of the line between high and low culture.
So I went out and bought some glitter.
Because glitter, many believe, has no place in good, grown-up art. It's for kids. But I say not so. First of all, I don't use just any old glitter. I use Martha Stewart brand glitter, which is seriously the highest-quality glitter I have ever seen, and comes in a wide variety of colors not generally associated with glitter (olive green and brown, for instance). I also bought Martha Stewart brand cupcake wrappers, some of which were collaged onto this painting and some of which were used to make actual cupcakes. Martha has a section dedicated to her wares in craft stores like A.C. Moore and Michael's, and a good time can be spent there pondering over how anyone could come up with this stuff. Say what you will about Martha, she knows how to make fancy, useless, amazing crap like a pro.
These paintings are the first in which glitter is used. For these, I mixed the glitter with neo megilp, which I had been using for the rest of the glazes, to create a glitter paint. The glitter use, compared to what I've been doing lately, is modest, and even hard to see in these pictures (it's mainly on the wall behind the figures, accenting the designs there). I've also found that I prefer using it with stand oil--because stand oil makes everything better. They are also the beginning of what I've been informally calling the "Trash" line, which uses a lot of pink and glitter and really bad taste as a way to explore the ideas of what taste is, what is acceptable as far as art is concerned, and what kinds of implications arise by using childish (and typically feminine) colors and symbols and calling it art.
The Cupcake Diptych is unfortunately quite delicate. Besides the collaged cupcake papers, there's a brittle batch of gesso underneath which requires they be kept in a safe place (like, not my closet). I'm not, looking back on them, quite satisfied with them as far as the modeling goes, but I can appreciate them, at least. More Trash coming soon!
I actually disco
vered Kara Walker in an old issue of Oprah magazine--someone 
had left it at my job and it says something about how dull my job can get when I am reduced to reading Oprah's publication. My consolation, I suppose, was learning about the work of Kara Walker, who creates vast cut-paper installations dealing with themes of race, sexuality and identity. She also employs shadow, performance and video into her work.
Walker was born in Stockton, CA, in 1969, and her family moved to the South when she was in her early teens. She received her BFA from Atlanta College of Art and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. It was during her graduate studies, in 1993, that she began working with the silhouette, which is tied to her contemplations of identity, race (and racism), as well as a look back to the portrait-making process of centuries past, when only the very wealthy could afford oil portraits. The lower classes made do with silhouette portraits, which at once portrayed and obscured the sitter. (On a somewhat related note, they used to make us replicate this practice in elementary school during studies of the colonial period. We all totally hated it.) She says of the silhouette, in an interview with PBS, "The silhouette lends itself to avoidance of the subject. Of not being able to look at it directly, yet there it is, all the time, staring you in the face."
Walker's work is rather startling, to put it mildly. Her depictions of African and African-American people, for example, are often uncomfortable to look at; Walker bluntly identifies them by race by using such politically incorrect markers as big lips and "nappy" hair, as well as typically "African" (i.e. scant) clothing. They look like the kinds of illustrations you might find in some eighteenth- or nineteenth-century book written by a white person about black people (you know, something about "Picturesque Slavery," which, by the way is part of a title of one of Walker's pieces), something really cringeworthy and embarrassing by today's standards. Seriously, just describing them is uncomfortable for me.
Walker sets these characters of hers in sweeping, fantastical tableaux, inflicting horrific violence on one another, including rape, dismemberment, and immolation, and these scenes often involve children. She plays with the various concepts that have been applied to African Americans, and more specifically, to African-American women. The expressionless silhouettes, however, remain emotionally remote, despite their activity, and force the viewer to decide what's really going on, and what statement Walker is making. Her charged images have, in fact, sparked some ire among other, older African-American artists who partook artistically in the fight for civil rights who feel that her caricature-like images are insensitive and degrading. It probably doesn't help that she also employs an arcane and somewhat ridiculous linguistic habit for the titles of her installations--things like "Gone, An Historical Romance of Civil War As it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of Young Negress and Her Heart," (based, of course, on Gone With the Wind. An image from that piece can be seen at top.), or the more, um, prosaic "Darkytown Rebellion," or that she will refer to herself as "The Negress" in the titles of her work.
There were no images of Walker's work in the magazine, but the descriptions of them made me search her on Google, and I was immediately a fan. I love her brashness, and I love her complex, history- literary- and artifact-based approach to creating art. For such troubling, essentially socio-political-statement images, there is a certain sick sort of humor in them, along with an intensely personal point of view on race, sex, class and relationships. One feels one is reading a picture book of Walker's experiences navigating the racism, sexism and the preconceived notions so prevalent in our society. For their abject violence, the images are delicate and masterfully rendered. Because of their lack of detail, there are times when it takes the viewer a minute to figure out exactly what is going on--you know it's a human form in some kind of paroxysm, but what exactly are they doing/is being done to them? Then you figure it out, and it's usually quite dreadful, and the result is startling; you must peer into the form itself to see the disturbing activity, and if you don't, it merely remains a dark shape. I've included some images, none of which belong to me (it's called "appropriation" in the art world), which show some examples of Walker's use of shadow, and a picture of Walker herself installing an image--mainly for scale, although I do like how her yellow sweater looks in the shot.
Long ago, like, sometime in July, I introduced the the hoodie as a staple of my painting symbolism. Here are some more of them. These, like The Protector, The Discovery of a False Moon, and the other paintings on patterned cloth, these three are part of a body of work I call the Home project, which I discussed in the same posting in which I discussed The Protector as being a study of origins, so to speak, exploring the symbols developed in childhood and how they inform life as an adult. The images concentrate on memory as a space, with the objects within that space taking on a symbolic existence, standing in for people, concepts and emotions. HINT: The hoodies are all me. I wear hoods a lot.
From the top:
The Homestead, oil and collage on patterned cotton. Featured here is a homey bird, a plump, goose-like fowl that symbolizes being at home and being content there. We also have more floating trees, which are less involved with symbolism and more a reflection of how I remember treed areas--I can visually recollect the canopies, but often the trunks get forgotten. Basically this is what it looks like in my head when I remember areas with trees. I'm not weird you're weird. Anyway, incorporated into the image are scans of nineteenth-century photographs. (The originals are mounted on a thick cardboard, and I didn't like the idea of using the originals anyway) The photographs came in an album as a gift, and I am completely unrelated to any of the sitters. The painting is about the concept of home, what makes a home and what happens to a home when it is left and its inhabitants forgotten.
The Reunion, oil and collage on patterned cotton. I still don't know how I feel about the name. Besides just being a hoodie, this one is a skullheaded hoodie, or a skullhoodie. I amuse myself. The general reaction, when I showed this, was "Oh, how cute, a little fawn--WHY DOES SHE HAVE A SKULL FACE THAT'S FRIGHTENING." Collage elements are silver leaves, bought on a whim from an art supply store. This is something of a companion piece to the painting below, and deals with the idea of reconnecting with the past version(s) of oneself as a result of introspection, or as a link to personal understanding.
The Bone Gatherer, oil on patterned cloth. Hoodies and deer again. This is kind of the precursor to The Reunion, about delving into, and at times confronting, one's past as a way to figure things out for the future. It's the same hoodie, too, although in The Reunion she seems to have lost her boots. I'm quite pleased with the way the birch trees came out--they have many a layer of white and purple-black glaze.
So basically, the Home project is something of an attempt to communicate to the outside world what it looks like in my head; these are, in a way, still shots of how I remember and imagine (and some combination thereof) things. I'm surprised, in a way, but also quite pleased, with the fact that I am finally able to create these images. There are more Home pieces in the works, though I've been shamefully remiss about my painting. This whole having-a-job thing really cuts into my painting time...
On Wednesday I went to the Seattle Art Museum. I felt I had no excuse not to go, as we were staying literally across the street from it. It was a pretty nice place, smallish and not nearly as overwhelming as somewhere like the Met. Ironically (maybe), in the four days I was in Seattle, the SAM was having their "Kurt" exhibit, in which various visual (and, in some cases, performance) artists showed work inspired by late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. I know, I know. Seattle. I know, I know. Grunge. I get it. In all honesty, I didn't really want to see it. Something about our culture's morbid, erotically-charged fascination with the downward spiral and premature death of pretty, young famous people is kind of sickening to me. But still, I'm part of that culture, and I can't say that I am completely immune to the glamor of the live-fast-die-young phenomenon. So, after taking a respectable amount of time looking at everything else, I went up to see Kurt.
It was, in a word, weird. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was playing, cut with some other songs (including the Neil Young song Cobain apparently quoted in his suicide note), and there were some grainy photos of Kurt writhing around on stage in a lot of baggy flannel, and everywhere were signs saying PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH and a lot of cold, white lighting. I couldn't help but feel a little bad. As self-aware as the exhibit attempted to be, it was the same old sensationalist stuff you can find on any newsstand anywhere. There was one mention of the weird eroticism found in stories like Cobain's in one of the sort of overview plaques written by the museum staff. The image they mentioned, however, was actually a staged photograph of a naked woman in a motel room, meant to evoke a groupie. Um, what? What does that have to do with Kurt Cobain, exactly? There was also, much to my dismay, no mention of the fact that Cobain had a family. There was no mention of Courtney Love, his widow, or their daughter, Frances. Which miffed me quite a lot. Pretty much because I like Courtney Love and Hole better than I like Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. There. I said it. You may commence stoning me now. All around, even though the Kurt show claimed to be an examination of the nature of the fascination with celebrity and celebrity meltdown, and a study of Kurt the man and artist, it seemed to me like more of the same voyeurism, the same callous glamorization of a sad person who tragically did not get the help he needed, and eventually did a selfish and cowardly thing.
So I've posted pictures of the stuff I actually did like. Unfortunately, I have also completely forgotten all of the artists' names. I wasn't planning on a blog post when I took the pictures, so I didn't bother to write anything down. It's pretty much just stuff I liked. I realize now that, with the exception of the big mouse, I liked clothing. Apologies for the poor photos--they don't allow flashes in museums. Anyway, from the bottom up:
The sweater-and-hair suit-person was cute. Or anyway, I thought so. There was a brightly-colored one with a big columnar head/neck as well, but I liked the brown one. Both were approximately human size. The bristly gold wire suit was supposed to be evocative of conquistadors and caterpillars. There was a silver companion, and both were about 2-2.5 feet tall. The array of costumes are from an African (I forget the country. Sorry) festival and these seated ones are representative of the very participatory audience. There was one "father" figure whom no one at the festival is supposed to talk to, since he is too wise and such, so I didn't take a picture of him (though part of him is showing in the far right). The awesome metal coat is made entirely of dog tags stamped with nonsense words. And that above it is a REALLY BIG MOUSE.
I also got to see the museum's sculpture garden on Tuesday, which is not part of the museum complex proper but farther away down the road. It's quite nice, with neon orange chairs instead of regular benches. (This was also the day Obama was in town, and some private plane flew into the no-fly zone. About four minutes and several sonic booms later, the plane was escorted out by two F15s that came up from Portland. LOUD.) Seattle being a weird and layered sort of city, the garden was spread out over a highway. The runaway eraser (top, Claes Oldenburg, because who else) is situated on the embankment, as if it is about to roll into traffic.
So, Kurt-deification aside, I'd recommend the SAM and its satellites. It's manageable and easy to navigate, and seems to have a good selection of art. It's nowhere near as extensive (or exhaustive) as something like the Met, which is just as well for the strolling tourist. The Met makes me tired; the SAM didn't. And sometimes that's all I ask for in a museum.
Here are some little things. I've been concentrating on large things and I think it's time the little stuff got some love. The three images you see here are three pages from a tiny little art book I've been working on. It's quite small, only about two-and-a-half inches tall. It will, when complete, be eight pages of illustrations like these. I don't generally like to mix text and images, and therefore, no, I don't write comics. People ask me that a lot, since I do the art thing as well as the writing thing, but I've just never gotten into comics and graphic novels. I like to read them, but the truth is, I'm too impatient to make one.
They are made with watercolor, ink (acrylic ink and India ink) and gouache (white, for the highlights) on paper.
Anyway, the pages of the book are kind of like a guide to the symbols that appear in my work. They don't have a direct meaning, but are mutable and dependent on the work in which they exist. These images are the symbols in their purest forms, and illustrate ideas such as power, family, growth, spirituality, sexuality, and emotion. Which, when you think about it, are the things that everybody thinks about and works with, in art and in everything else.
Due to the fact that I have not yet installed a decent photo editing program onto my new computer, I can't upload the new photos of the newest (complete) paintings without their having a weird white space where I've cropped the pictures. So here is the latest of the old photos, a painting called The Protector. As we saw in The Discovery of a False Moon, there are some floating trees. Unlike some of the other symbols, I don't really know why I like the floating trees so much.
The figure on the left is a Hoodie. I started drawing these hooded silhouette girls about a year ago, and they are essentially symbols of myself--shorthand self-portraits, I guess. The deer-headed man is my dad, because I associate him with deer. Disney's Bambi was my favorite movie as a child, and Bambi's family structure basically mirrored my own at the time. Therefore my dad has antlers. I also was under the impression that Bambi started life as a girl and grew up to be male. Anyway, deer and hoodies, as well as some other symbols, show up later in the body of work that includes The Discovery of a False Moon, the Huntington paintings, and Croton Point, that is collectively called Home. The concept behind Home is memory and personal symbolism, or the way that children, and later adults, use specific images and objects to inform more nebulous aspects of their lives. For me, for example, deer with antlers are symbols of my father. Home is still in the works, with a few more paintings planned. I seem to have three veins in which I work: the Home style, sort of soft and faded, with dense patterning and natural settings, the medieval style that has broad areas of jewel tones, and a bright pink and glittery style that I haven't unveiled yet (mwahaha) that I'm calling the "trashy" style. There are similarities between the three modes, and the symbols found in Home appear in the others, and I think to an extent they each reflect an aspect of my person.
The Protector is oil and neo-megilp glaze (yes, that is really what it is called and I have no idea why). Neo megilp was called "atmosphere in a bottle" by a painting teacher of mine and she was quite right. It creates a soft, filmy glaze and it dries fast. I love stand oil, but the speed at which this stuff dries is amazing. The patterns on the figures were traced from a piece of wrapping paper.
So as soon as I can figure out/feel like getting the other pictures together, I'll put them up. Till then...
I've always liked patterned fabric. I have, currently, an overflowing grocery bag full of scraps of old clothes stuffed in the back of the terror-jungle that it my closet. I've made a few quilts with them, starting from the traditional patchwork squares to the one I'm currently "working" on (quotes signal that in this context, "working" means "leaving it sitting on my dresser for the past six months") is more of a landscape, complete with silver raindrops (old curtains left over from when my room was space-themed in middle school) and elephants. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that I like patterned fabric because for me, it evokes memory, the way that old clothes and blankets do.
For a while, I was in the habit of painting very intricate patterns in the backgrounds of my paintings. You can see some of them in the Woods series that I discussed earlier. It was, to put it bluntly, a pain in the ass. So one day in the summer, I stretched and primed these three canvases--er, non-canvases. Huntingtons I and II are primed with clear gesso, which I don't recommend as it dries to a weird, sandy sort of texture that is difficult to work with, particularly on a small scale. It can also fog up the fabric itself. Croton Point is primed with acrylic gloss medium, which s nice and smooth and wonderful. (Note: If you choose to try this, be sure to coat the front and the back of the cloth several times with the priming medium, as fabric like this is much thinner and has a more open weave than canvas.) They are quite small, the largest of them being only a foot square.
Painting on fabric is really fun. For one thing, the painting surface becomes part of the image, and you can fade it in and out of the painted areas with a pretty nice effect. These are all based pretty literally on photographs. Huntington I (Shadows), top, and Huntington II (Starfields), center, are taken from photographs of my mother and aunt as kids with some of their younger cousins. They're weird photos, in that little square 1960s format, taken by kids in strong summer sunlight, lending them a strange and spontaneous sort of quality. Croton Point, at the bottom, is based on a photo taken by me, of my friend and his now-ex-girlfriend, about two years ago. The weird brown animals are my own invention. Fittingly, my mother brought me the fabric samples of the Huntingtons, and the green piece I bought at a vintage shop in New Paltz. These are the first paintings in which I dealt with memory as a place, and I took a fairly literal approach, using photographs, which are what people commonly use to preserve memory.
I happened upon Marianne North by chance one summer in high school on vacation with my mother in a rented beach house in Sea Isle City, NJ. There were a number of books left behind by other renters, and one was A Vision of Eden: The Life and Work of Marianne North, written by North herself, chronicling her life from her birth in Hastings, England in 1830, her world travels, and the end of her life in 1890, as recorded by her sister, Catherine.
Originally intending to be a singer, North's voice failed and so she turned to painting plant life of the world. She traveled with her father until his death in 1869, and then took a world tour, recording the flora of the areas in paintings. In 1871-72, she lived in a hut in the Brazilian rain forest and painted. By 1878, she had been to the Americas, the Caribbean, India (where she cataloged plants sacred in Indian literature and religion) and Japan, and several places in the South Pacific. She contributed significantly to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (The North Gallery, as her area is called, is in the east section of the garden, not the north one). In addition, several species of plants are named in her honor.
A Vision of Eden is quite long and detailed, and I have to admit I haven't read it in its entirety, but the images were so lovely I, um, had to steal it from the beach house. North's style is somewhat strange; her only formal training came from "a Dutch lady" who evidently gave her private lessons, which North describes as giving her "the few ideas I possess of arrangement and colour [sic] and grouping." And there is something slightly unschooled-seeming in her work, but North is talented enough that the work appears fresh and youthful while still retaining an intelligence about the subject, instead of being naive and purely decorative. The bright, saturated colors, the strong, ambiguous light source, and the uniform crispness of her subjects gives the paintings a slightly eerie, otherworldly quality which somehow reminds me of the work of Italian Surrealist painter De Chirico. Her body of work includes detailed close-ups of plants and animals, as well as broader landscapes and buildings. Although they are, in some ways, simply recordings of the natural world in a time before photography, and certainly color photography, they are also deliberate and dreamlike compositions that speak not only to the exploration of the natural world, but of Marianne North's unique vision of that world.
The paintings lack formal titles, and are instead referenced, in the book, by caption. I abridged them and updated some of the place names. Anyway, top to bottom: View of Mt. Kinchinjunga, Darjeeling, India; the "quicksilver mountain," Tegoro, Malaysia; an old red cedar, Manchester, MA; rubber trees in Sri Lanka.
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There was a time when you couldn't pay me to do a landscape painting. They seemed like the default painting subject, after vases of flowers and bowls of fruit. Even the standard naked lady was more interesting. I grew up in the Hudson Valley in southern New York, home to the Hudson River School of painters, who, in the romantic period of the nineteenth century, sought to celebrate the sublime by painting immense landscapes of the area, and of other grand vistas around the USA. Needless to say, they were the subject of many a school trip. So maybe that was what turned me off to landscape painting. There is also, to be honest, something distasteful to me about the macho, plein-air painter swaggering around the countryside.
To be fair, though, when you live in a place as beautiful as the Hudson Valley, I suppose landscapes become part of you.
Even if you don't live here, landscapes are part of you.
There are, after all, landscapes everywhere.
Even inside your head. Especially inside your head.
It's something I've been thinking about--the landscapes that exist inside the psyche, how feelings and memories can be imagined and depicted as places, and how places or images of places can evoke certain feelings. Typically, for me, these places are represented by images of the natural(ish) world, usually involving trees and expanses of land. Lately, I've been particularly liking fields. Particularly fields bordered by dark trees, which is likely owed to the fact that all the fields around here are bordered by trees, this being the deciduous-forest-covered Eastern seaboard. Around here, woods are the normal natural state, and fields are something of a break from that. There may be a psychological reason for this, too, with fields representing the known and the visible, and the woods representing the unknown and the hidden (something that may have informed the Woods series as well).
The top image is a painting I made in 2009 called The Discovery of a False Moon. It is based on a photograph I took on a field in New Paltz, NY, where I went to school. It was daylight, and the clover was blooming. There was a university building across the street with a clock that lit up at night, and at first glance resembled the full moon. Lots of stand oil, very shiny. Next is a typical view off my back porch in early September. You can see the Hudson River in a small silver sliver (say that 5 times fast) near the middle. Next is a shot of Croton Point Park in Croton, NY. The park sticks out into the water, and there is a big artificial hill that is actually a capped garbage dump. Since the soil is not deep, no trees can grow, and so the land on the hill is completely different than the surrounding land, this big, arid bump surrounded by woods. You can see the normal ecosystem across the water. The last two shots were taken about a week ago in Rockwood Hall, which is part of the Rockefeller Preserve in Sleepy Hollow, NY. Early evening, as the park was closing and all the deer were out. They look up for pictures if you call them.
What I like about all of these images is their composition. It's classically bad. If you notice, they all have a horizon line in just about the middle of the image. Apparently, you aren't supposed to do that. But the photographs came out that way unintentionally (swear). And anyway, that's how vistas are seen by humans--there's above and there's below and they meet in the middle. Therefore False Moon and other, later paintings have a horizon line than generally bisects the painting. Later landscapes also have the phenomenon of the floating trees, which I will get into later.
