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Thanks for the art love, my friends!
I finished a new she-wolf painting yesterday.
This:
Plus this:
Plus a photo of myself that is best left unseen, equals this:
Such a good feeling to be done with this one!
Have a great weekend, folks. Happy almost-December.
This time, woodpecker shrooms, Latin name, Picoides Muscarius. OK, I just made that up. The source material I'm collaging together to create the little buggers (ha ha! the artist is playing mad scientist/God) fit together like puzzle pieces. I'm being completely tortured by other drawings (why I ever decided to paint a mangrove forest is beyond me), but this one went easy on me.
In the never-ending saga that is called Amy Gets Ready for Miami at the 11th Hour, I finished a few more pieces, with four more to go. Magic number 4! The fact that I am going to be there in person in 2 weeks, and my work needs to be there long before I arrive, scares me just a little. I am plugging along, though...
I am really excited about this one; it is the first time I combined collage and watercolor in one piece.
And then two more small collages:
I took a Thanksgiving Day hike in the woods in Concord, and it was warmish and foggy and sort of surreal looking, as if a creature would rise up out of the midst. There were so many trees half-eaten by beavers, freshly gnawed and barely still standing. I have never in my life seen evidence of such, uh, busy beavers.
Today I dropped off a few tiny collages, 5x5 inches each, for a group show called Artspotting. One of the curators, Robert daVies, does amazing printmaking/letterpress collaborative work with poets. You can see some of the prints on his blog. The show invite is half letterpress, half ink jet print, really cool.
Here are the collages:
I was really happy to take a break from the monster watercolors I've been working on and make such tiny, manageable pieces. It was instant gratification! Love that. I'm finally making a few large pieces that have collage and watercolor together. I'm really excited about them, especially the mushroom-headed falcons perched in birch trees. I'll post pics tomorrow.
Also tomorrow: I was tagged by a favorite artist, Jeana Sohn, who makes work I absolutely covet, to list 5 weird and random things about myself. I can only thinking of embarrassing moments in my past, like singing on stage at Carnegie Hall with my high school choir, drunk, so I will sleep on it and come up with a good list tomorrow.
Shapeshifter Series #1, watercolor on paper, 22x30 inches
Eating leftover birthday cake, drinking red wine, and finishing up work to take to the framer in the morning. Ha, I should go post that on Twitter.
I'm back to being obsessed with bird imagery. My daughter made me a picture at school today of a red snowman with a beak -- a cardinal snowman, of course! That's my girl.
*to the tune of "Me & Bobby McGee," with apologies to Janis Joplin.
On this day 120 years ago, the great painter Georgia O'Keeffe was born. Sharing a birthday with this incredible woman has been a secret pleasure of mine for as long as I can remember. In my art school application, I wrote about her and how she felt like a kindred spirit to me. (This was long before I knew enough about contemporary art and the culture of art school to realized how very uncool that was of me to do.) Back in the late '90's (gulp!), my trip to New Mexico, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and the Pedernal felt like a pilgrimage of sorts. So much about her life has inspired me: her legendary commitment to working, as if not painting were tantamount to dying; her reverence for the land; her no-nonsense style. Georgia O'Keeffe, I raise my glass to you today.
Photo swiped from this site.
I was walking home from Harvard Square this morning feeling sodden and downtrodden, right up until I passed by a huge holly bush that sounded like it had hundreds of sparrows hidden inside it, just going crazy with noise. I laughed in spite of myself, as they say, and my woe-is-me shtick just evaporated. And then I thought to myself, the only way to get by right now is with a sense of hope. To feel hopeful -- not even about any one thing in particular, just a generalized feeling of hope. (The cynic in me says, let's just see how long that lasts... but for now, the glass is half full, and I'm going to run with it.)
I stayed in the studio until nightfall, and the view from the windows was beautiful.
Ha, that little white speck in the second one is the moon!
I am working on some larger collages at the same time that I'm finishing up a few large watercolors for Allston Skirt to take to the Aqua art fair in Miami. I had a studio visit yesterday with Michelle Townsend, the gallery director from Spur Projects in CA, where I have a show coming up in March, and she suggested that I try to find a way to carry over the sense of play that is in the collages into the watercolors. Yes, exactly! Here are some very silly woodpecker shrooms:
I still have to glue them down. It looks like some sort of shroom showdown. Now it's back to the birch trees, the mangroves, and the bamboo forest.
Folks, I simply cannot keep up. So many art deadlines all at once, coupled with endless private school interviews for my daughter, an unhealthy dose of insomnia, no time to work out, travel plans to be made, and, oh yeah, the biggest art fair week(end) of the year coming up in less than a month.
I have so much catching up to do on email. If you are waiting to hear back from me (and there are many of you, I know!) please forgive me. I am trying my best.
Current obsessions: mangrove trees, military vehicles, bamboo, the color green, and of course those pesky wolves.
Tonight's notable conversation, while working on this drawing in my study:
Child: Mommy, you make good wolves.
Me: Thanks honey, that's sweet of you.
Child: That wolf has real hands, like people!
Me: It's a make-believe kind of wolf I like to paint.
Child: That looks like you with a wolf head.
Me: Yeah.
Child: Mommy, are you actually a wolf?
