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.
Here we continue the medieval theme. These paintings are all 9in X 11in panels of wood (pine), and currently reside stacked on top of my desk. Because I'm not sure if I like them. The idea, in keeping with the medieval theme I'd been working on (and may be returning to?) in early 2009. Much smaller than the paintings posted previously, and on different material, they are inspired by personal devotional objects like the Duccio Madonna, which would have been used in the home for prayer.
Of course, these guys are a little different.
Truth be told, I got the idea from an episode of The X Files. One of the good ones, before they replaced Mulder and Scully with those other two. Anyway, instead of celebrating the perfection that is/was so often depicted in religious work, I was instead interested in the celebration of imperfection, as well as getting into some of the more mystical aspects of the Christian religion.
Before I explain any of that, though, I feel like I should explain why I like early Christian art. I like it, first of all, because I am not a Christian. I come to it as an outsider and so I don't have the dogmatic implications that can make people who were raised in the Christian tradition uncomfortable with the images, or reliant on their context in a personally spiritual manner. I don't have any of that, so for me they are simply beautiful things, and examples of one form of spirituality on a spectrum of spiritualities. Also, I like the earlier examples because they're less about the creepy institution (sorry, sorry, but that's how I feel) and more about the spirituality itself. They also speak to traditions that have been largely lost or disregarded by now, and often speak to modern Christianity's pagan origins.
These little paintings are called, collectively, the Nephilim (Nephil is singular). Nephilim are, in the Old Testament, these freaky sort of half-angel, half-human creatures that were not altogether good or bad, and somewhat frightening-looking. They are also referred to as "giants," and as a race who disappeared or were destroyed. There are a few interpretations, but I liked the idea of a being with uncertain origins and morals, who, in the rigid good/evil system of the Bible, remain somewhat ambiguous (DISCLAIMER: That's a broad statement, I know. I know next to nothing about the Bible--Hebrew or Christian--and am therefore not at all qualified to make that statement an academic one. It's more how I feel about it.)
Anyway, enough rambling. I don't even really like these paintings. I mainly put them here to record their existence. I should have sanded down the wood more, to prevent the glaze from pooling and not be generally ridgy and distracting. I also had people tell me they reminded me of Tim Burton's creations, which is dismaying because I really don't like Tim Burton. Oh well.
In keeping with this retrospective, I'd like to now examine another period of my work. The paintings here are from fall 2008 to January of 2009, but I will still occasionally use this style or integrate it with other influences--I really like the solid black bodies and the saturated jewel tones. There's still evidence of the way I worked earlier, with the pale, creepy faces and the unnatural coloring, only these were done after I discovered the joy of glazing. I can't work in any other fashion now. The bottom image has a light linseed oil glaze on the faces (it's pinkish over the blue-gray underpainting, and I was going to do more, but I liked how it looked and I stopped), and the other two have a stand oil glaze. Because stand oil is the best stuff ever (and also responsible for the shine that somewhat interferes with the photographs).
They are inspired by medieval pieces, mainly from illuminated manuscripts and the like. It probably also helped that I was taking a medieval art course and a medieval literature course at the time. The top image is Jesus from the Godescalc Gospel Lectionary (Frankish, ca. 781-783 C.E. Godescalc was the guy who made it. Note the lack of beard on Jesus--that didn't become the tradition until about the mid 1000s. The Lectionary was written in gold ink on purple parchment and is generally REALLY REALLY PIMP. This has been your art history lesson).
Top to bottom (not counting the Godescalc image): The Pardoner, The Silver Tree, and The Council. The Council was inspired by the way people who live with one another come to form a way of communicating particular to them, and the gold background is likely an influence of Byzantine art. The Pardoner, of course, comes from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (if your haven't yet, read it. Read it now.) The pardoner is my favorite character because of how creepy he is, the way his guilt manifests itself in his mania, and the way he is convinced that he is beyond redemption and talks of his evilness in a way that is both proud and despairing. Good stuff. And those are pig bones around his neck. If you want to know why, read the book.
Currently, The Silver Tree and The Council hang in my mom's living room, and The Pardoner hangs in my bedroom. It's one of my favorite paintings and I'm quite pleased with the way I got the eyes to follow viewers around, and even though he's creepy I've developed an affection for him. My boyfriend, however, has not: "You hung it UP? Now I can't escape it!"
