Good Habits for the New Year

I do believe that if you allow yourself to pay attention, that helpful suggestions or themes will manifest themselves and even repeat in your life.  In this sense it seems lately that the Universe has been suggesting I reevaluate my relationship with my artwork and mend our differences.  Not an easy task.  I have begun by establishing a sort of morning constitutional with the drawing board, a pot of coffee and the Beirut Pandora station.  It's been good so far.

One snag I have not been able to figure out is the encaustic studio issue (ample ventilation, something not possible in my apartment setting).  To keep forward motion I have been attempting to gain the effect of encaustic layers through other mediums.  The experiment today was acetate and vellum, which was a learning curve but ultimately successful. 

charcoal and acrylic on vellum

So this was a doodle on vellum (fyi: the difference between the two is vellum is opaque while acetate is transparent).  I enjoyed the painting, but didn't like that the loose vellum was wrinkling drastically.  So I stuck it on my acrylic painting on top of an acetate layer.  (And I did paint it a bit pinker.)

acrylic, charcoal, acetate, vellum, not finished!

This is beginning to look like something I'm pretty excited about.  A lot of the detail work and the shine from the acetate gets lost on the blog of course, but for lack of a studio/studio-mates to share it with this will have to do.  I ultimately want layers of line work in these pieces.  This has been an intriguing method to achieve a degree of this goal.

Also today I worked on #2 from my last post.  Now this particular painting has been pissing me off every time I looked at it, I was very unhappy with it.  I mentioned it to a friend of mine who commented that it was surprising I was even trying for abstract.  That's when the lightbulb went off and I threw that goal out the window.  I re-attacked #2, and now it's something I can be much more proud of.  Not done, but it looks waaay better:

I have no idea why these shapes keep reappearing with me, but I love them.  This still needs a few more hours of work, and the colors are a bit sickly in this picture, but I am so happy to have this appearing here to show progress from earlier.  Looking forward to where these pieces will end up.

Choices

I've been thinking quite a bit lately.  Specifically, I've been spending time pondering the ideas of free will, mental construct, perspective, choices, how learning happens, value, honesty, and how these all relate.  On that note, I promise this will be light reading, don't be scared.

sketch

Let's talk about mental construct and perspective, these go hand in hand.  Perspective is essentially the lens you view the world through; the judgements you are likely to make dependent on past experiences and social pressure (i.e. this person is pretty, they must be nice.  That person wears american flag parachute pants, they must be uneducated and shop at Walmart).  Now, a mental construct is more tricky, it has more to do with personal experiences, character and a belief structure.  Contrast person A who is likely to lend a friend twenty bucks and generally believes people are trustworthy with person B who distances themselves emotionally because they've been hurt one too many times and generally believes people cannot be trusted.  Two opposing lenses/perspectives, significantly different mental constructs and gut reactions when presented with the same situation.  (Behaviorism yes, tho I will allow that it is rarely this cut and dry.)  Without knowing much about a person, it is interesting how much is understandable by studying their typical reactions to things.  In most cases, without waiting for proof or result, we all react according to our mental construct.  So what do your typical responses say about you?  Honesty with yourself is key, yet is supremely challenging.

Now let's switch to the question of value.  To be honest I've been stuck on this idea lately.  Not the idea of how much value something has, but where it is one garners value from.  Let's talk in examples.  I am a bartender, and have worked in the service industry for approximately ten years.  In relation to the American Dream, I am not that high up on the food chain.  No way to climb a corporate ladder, become an expert of my field, I don't make tons of money, barely have health insurance and job security...actually I am in one of the more demeaning industries; anyone can do my job.  Despite this, I find value in my work.  To answer the question of how much value my job has, I couldn't judge - there is probably jobs out there I am better suited for.  So where does the value come from?  Specifically for me it would be social interaction with a wide audience and a certain element of flexibility and challenge.  This is an exercise in answering the question 'why.'  I think it is a great way to learn about oneself and others.

Now comes the tricky part; how do people relate to their value system.  I think it stems from history and mental construct.   There is a heavy influence here from our survivalist nature.  But the interesting part is that values and perspectives are choices, and therefore are learned.  As in the case of Pavlov's dog, the more a person is exposed to something (without further input or consideration) the more their reaction will become fossilized (to use a term from my grad readings).  Not that this is unchangeable; arguably a person with an open mind, aka willing to entertain the whys of opposing perspectives in relation to their mental construct, could end up changing their value structure.

These thoughts inspired me to make one of my first successful abstract pieces.

With this in mind, where is your value?

Encaustic block

Happy friday people.  Here's a little encaustic work I made at some point in the past week.  Working small now, hopefully will have a studio for the winter set up and functional in the next few weeks. 

Dia De Los Muertos Show is Up

Lunar Boy Gallery in Astoria, Oregon (yes, home of the Goonies) has up their Dia De Los Muertos show this month in celebration of the holiday.  It opened October 8th, and Deborah (the owner) allowed me to participate in this fine event.  I made two small acrylic pieces for the show, heavily based on typography.  Here they are;

In making these two paintings, I got to thinking.  I am a white girl from New England making works of art influenced by Mexican culture with the intent to hang in the Northwest, paintings that will most likely be sold to white people.  How disconnected can you get.  By the time my artwork is processed and sold, it retains no connotations to the religious background the Mexicans pay tribute to with this imagery.  Really, how could a person in my position do this theme justice?  (These ideas influenced the first piece, as you may have guessed.)  This is neither good nor bad, but what I am curious about is: where is the value?

The role of the themed group show in a small art gallery is interesting.  What is being sold in a group show has a lot to do with the curation of artists' styles, and it seems the theme tends to be used as a homogenizing vehicle.  Is it possible to find much depth in a piece of artwork in this situation?  Is an artist able to give a singular piece enough mindfulness and reflection?  Can this even be quantified, or is it not important?  I can't say as I know.  So if depth is not what we're going for, what is?  To answer this question is not easy.

This is no judgment on the works hanging at the Lunar Boy Gallery, as you can see from the link the pieces are of high quality and are a good grouping - Deborah succeeded in a fine showing.  What intrigues me is the context and the motivation, which it seems is a significant factor in any piece of art.  With respect to motivation, it is unlikely I will ever paint Mexican cavaleras again.  Somehow it seems disrespectful.  On the other hand, maybe I'm over-thinking it...

Encaustic at home!

Oops, never posted this piece.  It's the first I've made at home with my new setup.  Here it is!

Four to One

Encaustic!

Embedding

So I took a weeklong intensive workshop this summer on Encaustic (painting with hot wax) and became completely hooked.

Since then I've spent several hundred dollars accumulating all the supplies to make my own home studio.  What follows is images of what I produced at the workshop, as well as one piece I was able to create at home a few weeks after the workshop.

To say the least, I am very excited.  Please feel free to comment on the images, feedback is important.  I hope to become involved seriously with this medium in the future.

Yellow Blue Paper

Orange String

Pink

Birches/To Her

Diptych

Hands

Hot Dog Garden Christmas

Hot Dog Garden

Red

Strong

"Pop!" Published in the Brooklyn Review

"Pop!"  2008

My illustration will be published in this year's edition of the Brooklyn Review!  This is the first time this illo will be published.  I believe the Review is going to print this weekend.  Very excited!  This publication is art directed by my friend Julia Cocuzza, a great artist in her own right.

Decomposition vs. Composition

How pretty.  

These are pictures of marine pipes with years of enamel paint being eaten off by rust, the elements, and general use.

Amazingly, the colors are still vibrant after who knows how long.  Even the rust is such a contrast, it shows up beautifully.  What a difference this is from fine art or even graffiti, both constructs of art that are 'made.'  This pipe decomposed into this gorgeous look, after several coats of enamel was applied to prevent looking like this, cover signs of aging.

Ultimately these pipes stacked in a shipyard will most likely be thrown away, not useful with holes eaten out of them as can be seen.  So where is the art?
In the years of reapplied enamel?
In the time it took for layers of paint to be eaten away?
In the replacing of this original pipe with a new batch?
In the moment I took to snap photos of them before they become trash?
Or in the sharing of these images with you?
Or is there no art here, as can be inferred as soon as these pipes are trucked to the landfill.

Liar

Liar

acrylic and ink on paper, 2008

It's Hard to Pinpoint Your Place When You're In It

New painting for today...