Today on "Artists You Should Know," we're taking a look at some of the people who I've not only known, but have given me wond
erful guidance and advice as a young artist. The three artists I'll be discussing were teachers of mine at SUNY New Paltz, all of them sweet, lovely, and immensely talented and smart.
The painting seen here is Big Whoop by Robin Arnold, and features her awesome mouse character. Robin is pure awesome. Her critiques were always on point, and she always seemed to know what we were trying to say with our paintings and how we should go about expressing ourselves more clearly. I have a special appreciation for her work because, like mine, it deals with nostalgia and the eerie-but-comforting and always inescapable qualities of memory. Unfortunately (for me), hers is the only site that actually allows me to reproduce an image here.
Up next is Audrey Francis, whose work is bright and moving, and deals with identity, the body, and more. I did probably the best painting (The Council) I did in the entirety of my college career in Audrey's class. I'm not sure that she still works for the college, but her site is great and you should check it out. I particularly like the "Santos" section, as it appeals to my cultish qualities. That body of work was done, as she put it, "a lifetime ago."
Finally we have Kathy Goodell, whose name I can never remember to spell correctly (the spelling here is right). Kathy taught Water Media and Collage and was the kind of person who made you feel totally comfortable explaining your weirdest, most convoluted art concepts to. She also can be seen in the documentary Crumb, having once dated cartoonist Robert Crumb. Really. But more important is the vast scope of her work, which utilizes a wide variety of materials and methods to create forms and images that speak at once to the universe at large and the dark human interior. Working with beeswax, glass, found objects and wood as well as watercolor and pencil, she captures deep and complex emotions in organic shapes and lines. Her website is arranged by body of work, so you can easily see the concepts of her pieces.
Check them out!
Normally I sketch in preparation for a larger project--they're like maps to the image in my head and they don't make a lot of sense on their own, and I typically include lots of little notes that amuse only me with arrows pointing to things and such. But here's one that I liked on its own. It's after the medieval fashion, and features intrigue, as usual.
I also made a video sketch, which came out looking like Kurt Cobain. It was unintentional, and I didn't realize it until it was done, thinking instead that I was drawing a sad Viking. I would have uploaded the video here, but Blogger and/or my Internet connection wasn't having it. I actually like the video itself more than I like the drawing, which is kind of meh.
Kurt Cobain would have made an excellent sad Viking.
In other news, I went to a farm the other day and farms are very good for artistic inspiration. Lots of homey things, and fields and fat birds. I have some sketches drawn up for possible future paintings. Hurray!
Finally an oil painting!
This is Big Wind, which is actually the title of a song by Myshkin's Ruby Warblers (but that is not, sadly, up on YouTube), but it seemed apt for this painting. It's oil and collage (dyed leaf skeletons) on fabric and is the first of a subseries within the Home series. This subseries, "Storm Country", is based on the Little Apocalypse monotype series, specifically on one print bearing the same name.
The idea is the decay of Americana, and the future of what was once the promised land. The three paintings star two exterminators, who I've been calling Sarah and Miranda without knowing which is which, who live in a blighted landscape of severe weather and the fossils of the homesteaders who went before them. Here's one of them taking daily meteorological measurements, gauging the day's weather. The thermometer/barometer set-up, the pinwheels, the sunflower and birdhouse are taken directly from the print. The whirligig, next to the pinwheels, is modeled on one I saw on Antiques Roadshow one time.
Appropriately, it is raining violently and occasionally hailing as I write this.
Welly, welly well, it's been a while. That's okay though, because that means I have a job and can't sit around on my computer all day.
It also means I've been shamefully remiss about painting, though things are under way and I'm hoping to complete them before the sun becomes a red giant and swallows the earth. (Although at that point, who cares?) I haven't even really been doing any watercolors, having been feeling rather uninspired lately. Here, however, are some pieces I put on my deviantART account but not here.
Up first is a group shot of me and most of my alter-egos. One more came out of the woodwork after this picture was completed, but you'll get to meet her soon. From left to right is an exterminator, a skullhead (a sugar skullhead, to be precise), me, a skullhoodie, and a surgeon.
Next is Beast Boy and his new necklace, because even Beast Boys need to feel pretty sometimes. I really enjoy painting teeth like that.
Both were done with the usual mix of watercolors, watercolor pencils, gouache, ink and colored pencil.
Last time I featured some images from my sketchpad, in which I have been doing pen drawings.
I've also talked at length about my writing, and how it intersects (or rather, how it doesn't usually intersect) with my art, and how I like to keep them separate. Both my art and my writing tell stories, but in vastly different ways. The art is a single image, and usually speaks to a more nebulous emotional space that is difficult to put into words. The writing, on the other hand, usually expresses a more intellectual or cerebral idea that translates well into words. They don't mix.
But, as with all things, there are exceptions. I find, sometimes, that drawing little portraits of my characters can be helpful (somehow) and so here are two of them. This is Annemarie and Isaiah. They will kill you. Like seriously. They'll kill you.
That's the other major difference between my writing and art--my writing's a lot more violent.
I don't feel like talking about the story they inhabit too much, but it's full of murder and mayhem (more murder than mayhem, though), and currently weighs in at 80 pages on MS Word--single-space 10-point font. And it's not done. But I like how it's going, and there are certainly scenes that scare even me. Fun times!
My mom gave me a sketchpad a while ago. I don't typically use sketchpads, or anything spiral bound. I'm very particular about my sketchbooks, but I started carrying it around anyway, in addition to my regular sketchbook. I decided it would be a good place to draw the stuff that I don't like to draw in my regular sketchbook, namely pen drawings. My regular sketchbook is generally used to try out new painting ideas, and I don't like to use pen in it. So the sketchpad became the place for pen.
Here are some samples of the pen stuff I've been doing. I'm not entirely satisfied with them, as pens have never been my preferred medium. I think they're a little cartoonish, and that's not a style I particularly like (even less so after everyone in high school insisted that cartoons were what I "should" create). Most of these images are drawn fairly quickly, and represent pretty uncomplicated ideas.
At the top is a form of skullhead. She's a grown-up skullhead, and kind of south-of-the-border-themed. There's not much to say about her.
Then comes a self-portrait. Yes, that's me. I consider all of my work to be self-portraits, in that they express interior feelings or processes of mine, which, to me, is a self-portrait of the most intimate kind. So it's weird to do an "actual" one, of a physical representation. And anyway, I don't feel that my physicality is terribly interesting. But I like this picture.
Then comes Spider Mouse. I had a dream about Spider Mouse one night and it was just the cutest little thing, crawling up the wall and being all fuzzy. I tend to dream about really fucked-up animals a lot, but they (the animals) are usually really friendly and cute. Recently, I dreamt about a small furry horse who lost two legs to a bear attack and lived in this family's front yard and ate cereal.
I really want a Spider Mouse.
Here's a little picture to tide you over until the larger paintings I'm currently working on are completed. It's been slow going, between the humidity slowing the drying process and work, but things are chugging along.
In the meantime have this. This is what happens to my hair when I get out of the shower--I've been calling this "Apres le Bain." Pretend there's an accent mark over the e in apres. And anyway, everyone loves tentacles.
erful guidance and advice as a young artist. The three artists I'll be discussing were teachers of mine at SUNY New Paltz, all of them sweet, lovely, and immensely talented and smart.
