Self Portraits (a revisiting)

In the post above this one, I went into some length about how vexed I become concerning the misinterpretation of self-portraits. One of the issues I mentioned being frustrated with, narcissism, stems from the fact that I am very touchy about being labeled self-centered. This deeply upsets me because it may be a wee bit true, and I put a good deal of focus into keeping it from being so... after all I can't help that I am kinda awesome now can I? The point is, that my awesomeness is not the reason I use myself in my work. I shall go into a few brief examples...

"Self" this 24"x 18" panel is painted with nose bleed blood. Yes, you read that correctly... it was early in 2005, cold outside (heater induced nose bleeds) and I was in a rather dark place in my human development. I was rebelling against a gentleman whom I had deeply respected, who, having just dumped me, his judgement was in great question. One of the opinions in question was that all female artists who painted themselves nude were just looking for easy slutty attention. Several other topless pieces were to follow. bottom-line, what else would you paint with your own blood?

"Upon the Penultimate" this roughly 30"x 24" collage piece is as literal a snapshot as I could creating of my return from Eastern Europe. The emotions psychically felt like my neck opening up into a great Elizabethan collar. I rode the moving sidewalks all over the Chicago Airport waiting for my flight. I could never use someone else to express such a personal experience.

"Another Anticipation of Toads" 18"x 24" This is the second of two pieces dealing with the fiary tale idea that the good daughter is rewarded with diamonds and rubies and pearls falling out of her mouth every time she speaks, and the bad daughter having toads etcetera fall out of her mouth. I am totally into the weirdness of this tale, both times I have planned to have toads falling from the mouth and both times it didn't seem to need to be happening once the pieces were designed. In this case I knew exactly what pose I wanted and what shirt and what bathtub to use. I was easy to use, and that was why I was it. sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Whipping it out!

This is Jessi Lively, I drew her in a matter of days... this is quite an accomplishments for my methods. 20"x 16" Colored pencil, paper collage, conté and ink on board. Let us hope things continue this lickity split!

I've been debating in which ways to display this new body of work online, if at all, until its unveiling later this year at my shows. However, I must admit to a deep hunger for feedback. It is so difficult to create a piece of art and set it aside for later, it requires something of which I do not excel, the suppression of my own excitement. 

The other side of the coin is that I am letting the cat out of the bag. I am showing work that must rest here with me until at least August. For now until I have stronger feelings about how stingy to be, I'll only post work here, not on my other pages... You dear blog reader may enjoy, a lengthy preview. Thank you for joining me here.

We Have Come Full Circle

This is the finished piece, (as of yet untitled) that I teased you with, dear reader, in my very first post. I finished it just before the weekend, and I am very pleased... 

The specs are: Colored pencil, with an acrylic background on board measuring 24"x 36" I still have a majority of the pencils I used on this piece sitting out on my desk, I shall count and then share with you exactly how many pencils it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop.

For some reason this work has felt like it took an especially long time to complete, even though it has been pretty average, and gone smoothly. I believe this is in part due to having transported it on many of my travels, making it feel... almost like a ball and chain. Making it much more of a literal physical burden. BUT! Here we are today, and I have that nice sense of accomplishment chirping inside me.

This is Victoria Reynolds work. I love it, it's so beautiful and visceral without being gross... or at least I don't find it gross, (these things are subjective). I love that the frame is so integrated into the piece, some of her other work has more basic framing and those don't sing as well as they do when the frame itself becomes the stuff of cartilage and bone. I love that it is just a big unapologetic pile of meat. love love love. Life, death, self, nourishment, sanguine, goodness.

Let's talk about gross... I'm really not into it. Not in art. I think shock value is sort of what losers resort to, if I may put it so bluntly. I believe this is because it's the easiest way to get a reaction. Art is supposed to cause feeling, Art doesn't survive unless it gets noticed,  but what a sad state, for an artist to have to resort to horror in order to grab at you. Think about it. Try and make someone feel love, feel desire, feel compassion, make them feel these emotions by putting them in front of a painting. Well, good luck to you. It is almost impossible. These emotions are guarded, we're all so very suspicious of a piece of Art that wants to make us happy. However, in any situation, the fastest reaction, emotion, feeling you can evoke from someone, fully, honestly and completely is, disgust. Wipe one of your boogers on your sister and you're done. Message received and achieved. Reaction full, reaction bodily. So. Easy.

Yes, yes, horror and the grotesque have their rightful and respectable place in art. These things do need addressing, from booger wiping, to genocide. They are worthwhile, some in their own right, some importantly so... but the shock is so over used. Since it is so easy to shock why can't we have a slow and thoughtful reveal? If you want to deal in the disgusting, the vile, the violence and the cruel give it the respect it is due, give it beauty, give it bravado. Perhaps in a light example, the way Ms. Reynolds gives her dead animal parts provocativeness... Sexy dead animal parts. That nuance alone makes me think about it much more than if I were, in fact, presented with a pile of slaughtered elk. Another more heavy handed example might be Andres Serrano's Piss Christ which is a beautiful photograph! And that is one of the reasons it works so very well at delivering its sucker punch message. 

What I am trying to express is best described in the cliche, the dark looks the deepest against the dawn kids. If you're going to make big angry artwork about awful/gross/violent/sanguinary topics, I demand that you give me my damn spoonful of sugar to go along with it.

Collaborations~

"Nurturing the Fertile Spirit" the central piece, 24"x48" in a series of new works created by myself and tribalbot, the figure is mine, the setting is Mr. bot's:

Greeting in the New Year... yes... I realize it is now somehow February... I have no idea how that happened. But let me tell you this year is off to a roaring start and I am feeling like a flapper at the worlds fair. Speaking of Worlds Fair, which is the name of the Flaming Lips record label, Friday night, Jan. 30th 2008, I sold one of the below collaborations to Wayne and Michelle Coyne. This fills me with a certain glowing pride, knowing that something I had a hand in creating is uplifting and will be hanging out in the home of two such Dreamy Dreamers as TFL's lead singer and his wife.  I feel cool. 

It couldn't have happened without the help of my lovely coconspirator and collaborator tribalbot. The piece is centered around his tweaky twiggy black and pink flower, and the Coyne's have expressed interest in Mr. bot's work in the past, all that plus my flashy gold background sealed the deal. Yay for us.

The show opening where all this went down, was the annual fund raiser for City Arts, and it was fantastic. Great energy in the room and great feed back on the paintings. I feel that the hard work I put into this body of work, has paid off. Cheers 2009, I'm totally into you!

"Fitful Flora" 10"x 6.5" the sold piece in question:

"Ode to Bee" 5"x 5" which sold to the talented artist Ryan Cunningham, I drew the bee tribalbot painted the glowing yellows and purples:

"Converging Trails" 10"x 10" My bit in this piece would be the snails:

"The Natural Order of Things" 10"x10" I did the background in this piece, tribalbot painted the centipede:

"Kiss Me!" 8"x 10" I drew the pretty pocky toad:

"Pink Moon" 12"x10" I drew the trees and the soft pink and grey background, tribalbot applied the glowing fowl:

Women

I am caught like so many, by the beauty of women. All the work I am currently planning involves a beautiful woman. I cannot help myself. This is after all a universal and timeless obsession for artists. Although the work smattered across the pages of art history books is dominated by men painting women, today the female artists of notoriety are often as inthralled by their own forms as their homo and heterosexual male counterparts. The female body is art. It just is. I won't be tiresome and attempt to explain or explore why women embody artwork, let's just accept it as true, and let me say in passing that I am grateful to get to be a part of such a renown gender.

I've always been more interested in drawing women, I think it's because the female form was much more popular in the drawing books I taught myself from, breasts are easier to get published than penises, I suppose, and of course, my own figure was always the most available for study. I've always thrown in the token male figure, some pieces need a yen and a yang, I have even attempted a few pieces with men as the sole subject, but they're pitch has always been a bit flat. the form of a woman inspires me, I identify with what or who I am creating, perhaps. Or perhaps... I don't have a good answer, and I am just tiresome in my justifications. It is tiresome to me. Justification was shoved down everyones throat at school and I'm damn sick of it. I love drawing women just because. It seems to be what I need and desire without any good reason at all. So there.

A note on the subject of men, i.e. a counter argument of the above:

I fine men delicious. I am one straight lady and I am bonafided and certified boy crazy. I love being boy crazy too, I think it's healthy and entertaining. I love to look at men, and I love to take them apart... yes in the emotional way of course, but I'm talking figuratively here... I literally mean figuratively... The male body is fantastic, I am particularly fond of mens hands and forearms, also shoulders. I could look at the male form all day, taking it apart and putting it back together. Muscle structure is always much more wonderful and easy to study on a man. But, perhaps here-in lies the problem... I'm attracted to men, I covet and attach hopes and desires to them. Women seduce me esthetically. Women seduce me the way a beautiful sunset does, only better, because this landscape contains within its gloaming light, innate sex-appeal. Men are more like joyous 2x4's to the back of my head than sunsets... the last thing I'm thinking about while examining the esthetic grace of a mans hand and forearm exposed underneath his cuffed sleeve is drawing it.

Bottom line, I'm going to be drawing women, because they keep inhabiting my ideas, but I haven't given up on getting past my twitterpations and expectations to capture the form of a man, it's a challenge with winning possibilities.

These are some of my current favorite images of women from my reference stash of online finds. Enjoy!

Also, if anything you see here infringes on copyright law it was found on public forums and likewise believed to be for public viewing. Upon notification any copy-righted material will be removed.

Image Credit:

1. Autumn Whitehurst
   
2. Coby Whitmore
   
3. Raphaelite Harpies (credit unknown)
   
4. Nude with spear (credit unknown)
   
5. Amy Adams
   
6. Sylvia Ji
   
7. Kris Lewis
   
8. Chiara
   
9. Jean Giraud
   
10. Tamara de Lempicka
    
11. Tank Girl by Jamie Hewlett
    
12.  Kevin Francis Gray
    
13. Fashion Photograph (credit unknown)
    
14. Harajuku Girl
    
15. Philip Hale
    
16. Adam den Haene
17. Hashiguchi Goyo
    
18. Maggie Gyllenhaal
    
19. Owl Mask (credit unknown)
    
20. Natalie Portman
    
21. Factory worker at realdoll (adult content at this link)
22. Egon Schiele
    
23. Image from: ffffound
    
24. Image from: ffffound
25. Image from: ffffound

The Moth Man

I've found the stories of the Mothman fascinating and only mildly disturbing since I first heard them years ago. If you don't know what I'm talking about you can read more :here: You will probably disagree with me about how disturbing the accounts are, but I look at them as modern day fables. Thinking of them in that way it is easy to apply my own set of ideals, by dedicating a certain amount of hooliganism and hidden morality as derived from fairytales to the mix. (ugh... that was a mouthful I shouldn't blog so late at night.) 

I have read my share of fairy tales. Ones meant for children, adult's, those redesigned by literary geniuses like Angela Carter and those paper backs that fill the fantasy section of your local bookstore. I have read about other horrific and yet strangely majestic moth-folk in these books, the Mezmurden with deadly sweet kisses and hexagonal eyes, and those that will sing you to sleep. I'm into it. 

I'm also into moths just as they come. I've caught a few giant caterpillars in my day, and waited with them through they're secret metamorphosis. Such as the cocoon we kept on out kitchen window sill when I was about 12. We were certain it contained one dead polyphemus moth/caterpillar, but no... when we least expected it... there came a scratching within! Those are the sorts of gifts you can't unwrap yourself. 

Now I am working within my head (mostly) on a piece of artwork dealing with the Mothman. It's been a while in the making, something that has skipped across my consciousness but never come to lie until now. I've done a few sketches, but I'm rethinking the female element and her position which started as standing... There almost always has to be a female element. I can't really tell you why at this point... I just accept it. So, for now more sketches, figure out the pose and then pick a model. Note: this ain't no weird hairy red eyes glow'n kinda Mothman, this is my mothman... and I rarely do anything... ghoulish. I'm more inclined towards the exquisite kind of corps.

I am Interviewed.

the two people discussed in this post.

 

My dear friend hissingfauna the savvy little artistic blogger that she is, has begun a weekly interview (each monday to be exact) of artists and other creatives that she publishes to said blog. I happen to have had the honor of being the popper of her bloggidy interview cherry. Lucky ducky me. No really. Please be so kind as to humor me with at least a little skim through of my witty retorts to her thoughtful questions and if that isn't enough to lure you away from my shiny page onto hers you can check out the rest of her cute blogs as a bonus prize!  Go :here: and do it now! pwees?

Collection of Mouths