This is Angelus, the center piece of what will become a triptych, complete with hinges and wooden cover. The two outside panels will be based on some of the stages of the alchemical process. He's 14 X 14 inches, oil on canvas.
This image was what happened while I was reading a book about Byzantine art while listening to the amazing soundtrack to the equally amazing game VVVVVV, resulting in an ancient-religion-meets-retro-space-age thing. Those are astronomical glyphs in the halo (which did not turn out as perfectly round as I had hoped). It's also based on the original cover of Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel trilogy, which I never actually read but always kind of thought about reading when I was in middle school. But I think mine turned out better.
More on this piece as it progresses!
It happened.
I made a cartoon.
A real cartoon with panels and speech bubbles and everything. (Click to make it readable.)
It's only a page long, because that's all the cartoon-making I can stomach. Seriously. I hate making comics and cartoons. Hate it. It's tedious and dull and completely unfulfilling. I like to write and I like to make images, but I don't like to do both at the same time.
Part of the reason was that was I was younger, I was somewhat pigeonholed into being someone who made cartoons exclusively. To the point that people seemed to get annoyed when I expressed interest in doing any other forms of art. You know, because to admit anything other than entirely predictable behavior is hard for some high-schoolers. In fact, I've been told by one particularly silly human being that I "should really stick to cartoons." Needless to say, I didn't take this brilliant advice. It should be also mentioned that this person was not a terribly good artist and was troubled by the fact that anyone might be better than she. It should also be said that this person asked the school librarian what anal beads were.
But there are times when I feel the need to cartoon. It's good, cheap, dirty fun. It's like smoking cigarettes or doing Jell-O shots or making out with strangers. It's not good for you in any way, and you'll feel cheapened afterward, but damn if it isn't fun.
Enter Duck Vs. Cactus.
Duck Vs. Cactus was born on a dark night in a diner while waiting for a spinach-and-American-cheese omelet. There are 5 in total (I think) and they're all scribbled on the backs of placemats. It tells the (roughly put together, non-sequitur, surreal) narrative of the conflict between drug-using criminal lowlife Duck and shady, two-timing Cactus. On Duck's trail are cops Octopus and Triangle (Cactus is revealed in one episode to be on the police force while simultaneously being a strong presence in the underworld). Other episodes feature Duck's girlfriend, who is kind of a cross between a bird and a bowling pin, a gang of violent drug-running Goldfish crackers, and Wendy Williams. It all takes place in a desert. Duck has died several times and it doesn't really matter.
This is Duck Vs. Cactus #4, the shortest one. Because it's so short, I was able to clean it up and render it in ink pen and Sharpie on Bristol plate. It's tentatively titled "You Might Be Trippin' Balls." Because, well, that might be what's happening. This should probably have a continuation of sorts, but I haven't been to a diner in a long time and these only really manifest in diners.
I suppose this can actually tie in with my fascination with corrupt and decaying Americana. But this is less nostalgic and less informed by 19th and early 20th century images, and is more snarky and post-modern.
Or maybe I'm just trippin' balls.
These make me squee a little every time I see them. Which is quite frequent, as they currently live on the dining room table, waiting for a protective coat of polyurethane.
I purchased a set of plain wood matryoshka dolls through Amazon. They were, on the whole, more expensive than I thought and so my collection of these will have to grow slowly. These here cost about $16 plus the shipping. I primed them with white latex paint and painted them with acrylics. The black paint, however, is Rustoleum, and the white is latex house paint. They were somewhat difficult to work with, being round, and the little one, which stands less than an inch high, was particularly irritating. But in all I can't complain. I especially like the way their little skeleton hands came out.
And yes, the one second from the left, in the purple kerchief, has a Hidan face. I kind of couldn't resist.
So here they are in all their squee-inducing glory, and I'd like to do some more of these in the future.
If you're looking for some pre-painted matryoshkas, Matryoshka Madness on Amazon has quite a collection.
I very much like ovals. They're instantly decorative and pretty, and there's something charmingly old-fashioned about them. They make me think of cameos and lockets and old photographs. I think it's a lovely format. Oval stretchers and canvases, however, can be quite expensive and hard to stretch.
So instead of buying oval canvases, which cost $25 each, I decided to experiment and bought a package of six wooden embroidery hoops of the same size (6 by 12 in. diameter) for about $13 in total from Create For Less, which is a pretty cool crafting site. Many hoops are plastic these days, but they still make wood ones. Embroidery hoops are simple to use, and for painting I recommend tightening the screw with pliers to keep the fabric as taut as possible. Even with this extra tightening, though, expect the fabric to buckle slightly, especially after priming. There isn't really a way around it.
I originally only planned five of these oval paintings, though I do have an extra hoop kicking around, so I may do another in the future. These are made with scraps of fabric from other paintings and projects (like that dress I said I'd make like two years ago). Being small, they were rather painstaking, but they are easily portable and very lightweight--they can be hung on a tack.
I find the embroidery hoops to go well with the concepts I've been working with in the Home body of work--domesticity, tradition, and safety, as well as a nod to children's book illustrations. I also got to give each figure a carefully planned-out set of clothing and accessories.
From the top:
Father's Daughter was the first one I thought of, and is admittedly a bit hipster-ish. But I like it anyway. The deer refers to my dad again, but I think I'm beginning to separate deer into Dad deer and Me deer.
Next is Rabbit Eater, the only male in the bunch. So called because he's going to eat that rabbit. This is the same subject known in other works as "Beast Boy."
Of A Feather is a double self-portrait, and while it would be nice and simple to say that each figure represents a side of myself, that is not the case. Two aspects, maybe, but even then, that's not quite accurate. I think it's really just a nice tea party of narcissism.
Everything Must Someday Die features a cute little skullhead. I kind of picture her in the "goldengrove" of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring & Fall" , except that instead of weeping for the passing of time and the concept of death, she's joyfully part of it.
Finally comes The Smell of Decay, with an exterminator, looking grim and destructive. As exterminators do.
I plan to hang these as a set--they look better together than alone. More big paintings coming soon!
Marlene Dumas (you pronounce the S), born in South Africa in 1953, lives and works in the Netherlands, and creates these ethereal human figures. The immediacy and the watery-ness of her faces and bodies is at once clear and simple, even childlike, and darkly complex. She explores many aspects of the human condition in her work, from age to sexuality to race to death. She gained some notoriety for Dead Marilyn, which is taken from an autopsy photo of Marilyn Monroe, and call to mind issues of celebrity, sensationalism and identity. She has also done several images of Kurt Cobain--one called Alizarin Kurt I particularly like, but can't find an image of. She's also known for doing a portrait of Osama bin Laden, stripped of his usual turban-and-glower ensemble and almost looking like a nice person. (On a personal note, I have a theory that Obama ordered bin Laden killed so everyone would talk about something other than Kate and William's wedding.)
Dumas works almost exclusively from photographic sources, adding another layer of separation between herself and her subject, and making her work somewhat dependent on the quality of the photo. I can appreciate this, though my style is nothing like hers. I've often been chastised for working from photos rather than from life, but I find photos, which evoke feelings themselves, to be better for the kind of work that I do. The captured instant is, to me, fresher and more natural than a posing model. (Obviously, I work from candid or at least informal photos.) I especially like "bad" photos--washed out, under- or overexposed, or at weird angles. That way, there's more room for interpretation and generally, I find, a better translation into a painting.
That, and getting someone to sit still for several hours usually costs a lot of money.
Marlene Dumas, everyone.
