new stuff

I started a new painting to fit in with an ongoing series...so far it's pretty.

In an entirely different direction, my lovely friend Eileen asked me if I would paint a picture of the temple where she and her hubby married. I hope she likes my interpretation! I need to mat and frame it and touch up just a tad now that it's totally dry so you can't really get the final effect just yet but I know she wants a preview :-)
...below are some scraps from trial and error pieces before this final one. After playing around with acrylics I decided to use inks. What should I do with the leftover pieces? They seemed to cool to throw away.

hoppity hop hop

happy easter! I hope you enjoy spending the day however makes you and yours happy. Jeff and I are hanging out, watching movies and eating chinese food, enjoying spending some quiet time together. I plan to publish my goals tomorrow, a slight delay but what's life without the bumps in the road?
I have a few memories of easter, my parents hiding eggs and my dad usually in uniform because he was leaving (or coming back) from work. He was in the air force at the time. My mom would make little bunny cookies with raisin eyes and she always got us a book in our easter baskets.  We had these really beautiful painted paper eggs I believe they found in Germany. They would fill them up with jelly beans and I still remember loving the black jelly beans the most (yep, I'm a black licorice lover. You either understand or you are disgusted!) I miss those pretty painted eggs. I miss a lot of things.

still...life?

I totally abhorred the dreaded still lifes in drawing and painting classes. They were boring and horrible but nevertheless a great teaching tool to study light/shadows, to learn shapes and forms and to hone your skills on learning to really look at and "see" objects.

I remember having a class with a girl that was sooo good at looking and then mimicking real life objects. They looked so real! She was kind of snotty but I admired her abilities. My still lifes definitely resembled the objects but were not always super great.

For those of you who are wondering what I'm talking about, wikipedia gives the definition:  A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, flowers, plants, rocks, or shells) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on).

Some teachers are pretty innovative when it comes to the increasingly boring world of still lifes. I had one grad student teacher who created one out of a lot of edible things. There were peeps and various hardened easter candies, bowls of beans among other things. He also had us bring in exotic fruits to add to the display. Sometimes there were crumpled up paper bags (um, that's hard to draw) and always various linens with stripes, floral or other hideous patterns. One of the most torturous ones I remember was a bunch of different colored translucent glass vases on this blue and white striped cloth. Yuck.

Sadly, I have nothing left to show you from my still life days because I either painted over them or cut up the canvases to do collage work on other paintings. One of my first successful turns into the world of abstract art was this "still life" I chose to do in a painting course. I did cut up old apples from an oil painting class and turned a vase and other pieces around backwards and then painted over them to create the objects. I still love this painting, it's one of my absolute favorites and I got an excellent critique. It's funny to me, I think my work has gotten progressively better since the time I painted this but I still feel like it stands out as a really beautiful piece.

I decided that I liked my abstract take on a still life so one night when I was bored and wanting to paint something different I just so happened to have some lovely square canvases and lots of fun scraps...I made these. I decided they needed a new name so they are now known as life stills, the alternate universe of the still life. 

words make life bearable (thank you)

definitely in a slump...luckily I have my headphones with me and Suzanne Vega is whispering sweet somethings in my ear.

The other day I declared I am lyrically in love with Suzanne Vega.

she is such great painting music for me;  I think I hear something new every time I listen to her words. I have to give a big shout out to Bradley Campbell my uniquely great high school English teacher. I am pretty sure he played the first strains of Suzanne Vega  that I ever heard and yes, they seemed weird at the time.

Mr. Campbell was such an awesome teacher. He had a ton of cheesy jokes and particularly liked puns. get the drift even though it's not snowing? (somewhere if jalaine reads this she is laughing and shaking her head) He brought a lot of pop culture into our English classes, music and movies and different video clips. He was great at showing us poetry outside of the book pages. While all the other classes were embarrassing themselves and putting on ridiculously bad versions of Shakespearean tragedies we were studying grammar. Maybe that sounds boring but I learned more in those lessons than I ever would have wasting time making a fool of myself in front of the entire school. Maybe that is uncool of me but hey, I wasn't cool in high school and I'm definitely not cool now. I do however, know how to use a semi-colon.

Anyway...Mr. Campbell was one of the several English teachers that really helped me understand what I love.
I loved being read to and reading when I was a child (thank you mom)
I started to love amazing, beautiful, incredible, adjectives in elementary school (thank you Ms Neilson)
I especially embraced creative writing in junior high (thank you Mr. Romine)
I became a better writer and learned how to spell the word separately in high school (thank you again Mr. Campbell)
I learned how to read literature and analyze poetry (thank you Mrs. Lair)
I matured with both reading and writing (thank you professors...you all helped in specific ways)

And to you Suzanne Vega...you are sublime and your words make my dreams feel like they could burst out of my head at any moment and dance across my eyelids.

Thank you. It means the world to me.

happy things

 

abstract art

sunsets and beaches

jeffrey tyler

drawing on the floor (literally and otherwise)

not still lifes

palm trees in your office

bird squash

i can see the light...

this is not quite finished yet and though it lacks some of the detail of the original painting  I think for such a scaled up version it's a great representation and slightly modernized with a smoother, more graphic look. I still have a little work to do but I am amazed at how quickly this progressed.


ps. want to see where it started? check out here and here

my work so far today

Last night we discovered I smudged some green paint on one of the outlets where I plug in my artificial light (because I have to paint in a horrible basement) I don't think Jeff was amused but he tolerates me :-) So...you think this is almost finished? I'll let you know in a couple of days...