“Sovereignty” is complete, and I thought I’d share some pictures I snapped of the process. I began working on her in October 2014 when I was staying at Earthaven Ecovillage in Black Mountian, NC. She got put aside for a while as I continued my road trip, and it felt good to finally finish.
08
Jun
Jun
It bugs me to think that my art may objectify women. My go-to subject for drawing is a beautiful woman from my imagination. I’m both drawn to and unsettled by art where women’s sensual features are accentuated. It triggers an ongoing debate in my mind.
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07
May
May
That’s right, my friends. I have just received via post not one, not three, but six big beautiful gallery-wrapped canvases!
My ideas for them include chunky-textured brushstrokes for the backgrounds, in green, teal, fuchsia, and all kinds of iridescence. I will have to up my game in photography if I want to get reliable pictures of these paintings (metallics and iridescents being notoriously hard to capture). But I consider it well worth it. Like some sort of fairy magpie, I feel I am making everyone’s lives better by infusing the visual field with glitter and sparkle.
For the foreground I’m imagining some sort of reclining figures and subtly dangerous creatures, but I’m not ready to commit beyond those glorious backgrounds just yet. Past experience indicates that the right ideas and shapes will suggest themselves as the background builds. Following those sorts of intuitions makes a painting feel alive and active to me. In the spirit of Spring, I want to develop that feeling as much as possible.
06
May
May
Finally! The mysterious forces of nature have granted me the correct lighting conditions to shoot these metallic, iridescent 5×5″ paintings. They were tricky to get good pictures of on a normal sunny Arizona day. Either the lines would look really pale from the metallic glare, or the brightness of the colors wouldn’t show. Today’s overcast sky helped me get these pictures.
I love the texture and simplicity of these little fairy studies.
10
Mar
Mar
I’ve gotten a lot of painting done the last couple weeks. It gives me great satisfaction, puts the world back into something like order. Since I was a little girl, I was obsessed with drawing. The language of images fascinated me, especially the shorthand that allows a line to stand for a gesture, a tree, a force of nature. Somehow these things are not just in the artist’s mind, but are communicated, translated. We all have different emotional landscapes, and what triggers joy for me may trigger something else in you. The more of the intended feeling that’s evoked, the more successful I consider the painting.