a work in progress

Moving along very slowly on this one. Today, in between shipping art, baking little peepeyed pets, photographing prints, and adding items to my eBay store, I would go in and do a little more work on it. It will take many layers of paint to get this looking the way I want. I did several washes over the water and started messing around with the hills and was glad to have to stop just when I was getting carried away with detail. I’ll go back in and remove some of the detail in the hills. I still love the vision of this painting and am enjoying the process of developing it, but it is a new idea for me to create a very subtly hued landscape with very little detail visible. With the palette I have chosen it is tricky to stylize the piece without it becoming too kitschy. This is the piece that is teaching me to work in the daytime.

Each time I finish a new little peepeyed critter and place it on the table in front of me, I say something nice to it, as if it were my pet or child. I peer into it’s big round eyes and I immediately fall in love. It feels good all over and so I quickly make another. The cute syndrome works me over. For additional stimulation of my cute sensors, I reqularly visit CuteOverload.com . Tonight I noticed this article
NOW Magazine - The Goods in Toronto, FEBRUARY 23 - MARCH 1, 2006 on their site, in which Elizabeth Bromstein asks experts about her addiction to all things cute and finds that cute is good for your health. Cute isn’t the only way to create calm. According to animal communicator, Sheila Trecartin, “Beautiful things, in contrast, make us happy in and of themselves. Beauty can actually remove us from our desires, taking us beyond our personal wants and calming the spirit.”
And I think that is the best reason for people to surround themselves with beautiful artwork.

I started on the lake landscape. First I went back over the sketch with a light wash, fixing the pencil to the canvas and building up areas of light and dark. I spent a good long while preparing my palette, which for this painting consists of napthol crimson, yallow azo medium, pthalocyanine blue and ultramarine blue, and titanium white. I did a lot of mixing and thinking about my colors for this piece as I want to capture the peacefulness of the lake and the subtlety of the colors on a hazy day. I was happy to lay in the sky and felt pleased with its lavender glow. I worked from top to bottom, laying in the mountains, the water, and then beginning the foreground. I played around with the mountains a water a bit and ended up moving on to the foreground when I realized I was overworking something I clearly had a shortsightedness about. I have to frequently remind myself to step back and view the piece and not get stuck playing with certain areas too much. I remind myself the solution will come later and that I am getting ahead of myself. I stopped painting as the birds began to sing and the sky turned periwinkle. My legs were dead from standing so long and as I went to bed I wondered what it is about me that keeps me from making the changes in my habits that would make my life so much better. I will make this painting better in a short time, myself will take a little longer. Today after I saw my godson off, I watched a ridiculous movie and made more little Peepeyed critters. I’ll post a photo soon of the little guys gathering for their convention of cuteness. I need to find a better set up for the studio yet again, such that I can have more space to back into to see my work. I may take over the living room next.

I’m almost well again! I even went out today! I dropped off some cards and Peepeyes at a gallery and talked to the wonderful owner about which paintings she would like to hang for the upcoming May Festival of the Arts. Then I went out for a pizza and bought a birthday gift. After a good nap, I set up my store on eBay. I also started planning a really large landscape painting and did a quick sketch on the 2×4 foot canvas. It’s been a couple weeks since I painted, that custom wicker bathroom thingy does not count as painting!, and I am feeling my usual withdrawal symptoms: dissatisfaction with myself and my environment, isolated and yet finding it hard to communicate with others. I have done a lot of work on developing my internet presence and while I do love learning new things, especially by doing them, I am glad to have a lot of the basic building blocks in place and be able to get back to the messier tasks.

We set up a new fake tree the day after Christmas and my friend Eileen helped make a funky flowered girl with butterfly wings for the topper. We felt happy to be crafting together and silly to be doing the tree thing late. I always wanted the Christmas tree up until after my birthday and Eileen, who shares my birthday and is a good catholic girl, explained epiphany and little heathen that I am I went along with it so I could keep my tree. Well, no one wanted it down and so it has become a holiday tree, a real holiday tree. Speaking of good catholics, I’ll need to make some fabulous ornaments for St. Patrick’s Day. My Irish great grandmother, Gran, was like a mother to me and my sister. She always had a bedspread with green leaves and purple flowers that she said reminded her of Ireland. So, I’ll probably throw in some purple flowers and maybe make some blarney stones with kisses on them. My best St. Patrick’s day memory is from when I was living in an apt in a huge old house on Magazine at Camp in New Orleans.The parade came by and drunken singing people threw cabbages and potatoes. I filled my tie dyed skirt with them, went back inside and cooked an Irish feast. Interesting asides: that apt had been turned into an art gallery the last time I was in New Orleans. Gran filled her skirt with tomatoes when I was a kid and we have a great picture of her with her skirt filled up and revealing her slip. You know, she wasn’t a good catholic, she was a good woman, an independent woman of high morals who decided for herself what was right for her life and she felt the church was stepping out of bounds and quit attending mass in the seventies.
Well, I did not make it through the whole day and ended up passing out after my shower and not painting or even making up the bed. Just crashed on the foam cover and was out for hours. I made more lil critters and watched the Olympics. Maybe I’ll be all better tomorrow.

SOLD

I just entered my first eBay art contest. This month’s theme is the self portrait. The winner is tabulated by a count of bids. Looks like a fun monthly event. It certainly pushed me to release a painting I had no previous thought of selling. I took a look at the a couple of the other entries and once again had that feeling that everyone else is so normal and lovable with their flowers and fairies and such and here I am exposing my other side again. Oh well. You know, I actually do have an appreciation of cuteness. I love what is going on at cuteoverload.com , be sure to check out their rules of cuteness, a fun twist on an intro to anthropology topic.

I am working on setting up a blog that is easy to update and has a calm and clean look. My biggest task is always narrowing my focus, perhaps that is why I like to crop down my paintings to fragments of stories. I like the unseen part of the story and I think I will want plenty of white space on this blog.
I want my blog to be the place where all the different types of art that I love to do come together. I will use this section of my website to track some of my silly ideas and to show photos of works in progress. I think I will learn a lot about the rhyme and reason of my media-hopping and I hope that I will have the opportunity to meet some of the incredible artists I have stumbled across on the web. This blog will also be a great place to store articles about art and generally catalog some of the massive overload of information on arts and careers in art that threatens my short-term memory. I can usually remember ideas very well and talk about their implications, but I am always forgetting names and jargon. It’s a block I’ll keep and this will be my way around it.