Tuesday to Tuesday

This week.....

Friday Night: I attended an artist talk at Plum Gallery with Laura Mongiovi, a wonderful colleague and fellow artist.  Images of her visually supple and amazing work can be found here. Listening to Laura discuss her background and process made me really excited to get into the studio, and very thankful to work with such talented individuals. 

This Weekend: I spent family time celebrating my husband's birthday, we watched football and ate borsch. Below is an adorable photo of our nephew with our dog at the in-laws!

And then some paintings:

This is the painting that I can't quite seem to finish. Every time I think it's done, it's not. I have left this painting in the studio declaring victory too many times! I know it has the best of me at this point, but I am stubborn. I am hoping to loosen up the marks and trick it into something cohesive. We will see. I mostly hate everything but the girl bending over in the creek. Of course she is the figure I have touched the least, I really need to leave things alone more.

A new start on a small 9" x 12" painting, based on a single source photo. This painting features my mother, myself, our dog "bummer" (great name, thanks mom), and my brother's hands. I am most excited about my brother's hands, floating arms are really in this season with my paintings!

Finally, I am working on a group of 7" x 5" paintings. I posted two last week. Here is a shot of the four recently completed, followed by two close-ups made this week.  You can tell the time of day changes, because my carpet color shifts.

(school)work

With the fall semester fully in swing, it can be very challenging to keep up with creating new work. Luckily I have several deadlines that are forcing me to stay on top of working (at making art, not teaching it)! Next month my work goes back up at Plum Gallery, located on Aviles St. in St. Augustine. At the end of October-November, the collaborative works between Liz Robbins and myself will be on display at Flagler's CEAM (Crisp Ellert Art Museum). In January, I have a solo show scheduled at Florida School of the Arts in Palatka.

Point being, outside of teaching, I still have a lot of work to do. I left my house at 8:45am this morning and am just stopping now to sit down and write this post (with the exception of my 45 minute dinner break). With all of this said, I would like to point out that I am not complaining because I throughly love every minute of the whirlwind that is my life. I recognize how lucky I am to be in this position.

So on to the work...I promised my Exhibit Portfolio class that I would post weekly, since I am asking them to do the same thing...so hopefully I will be able to keep up the bargain. This is what I have been up to.

To double check the feasibility and outcome of a drawing one assignment here is a 45 minute blind contour self-portrait. It is pretty entertaining!

On to the birthday cake painting, which I'm pretty confident will be titled Birthday Cake Parade. At this point I think the painting is finished, but nothing is safe until it has left my house, so who knows. On a side note, this photo is terrible and I promise a better on in the near future.

The next painting has really shifted significantly in the past couple of painting sessions. At first, I realized that my brother's head (the little boy on the right) was too small, then too big, then the figures were all too orange...etc. Long story short, the painting has really changed dramatically, while appearing to stay almost exactly the same. I think the title for this one, will be taken from the back of one of the photographs, "At the 4H Farm for Chase's 6th Birthday Party". Since taking the last image, my mom's mouth has already changed a little, but overall I am a lot happier with the painting. 

Finally, I am working on 4 tiny-small commissions that I will share upon completion. Outside of that, I have two more small paintings to share, both are 7"x 5" and feature my most adorable nieces. On a tangental note, my BFF is also visiting her parent's condo this week and I took several photos of her amazingly adorable daughters on the beach (which will hopefully make their way into a couple of paintings). My oldest niece is officially the age I was when I first met my friend Kari, and the painting of her and her sister in the ocean makes me think of being in eighth grade again.

+2 to online

So this past week I dove off the deep end and started a Facebook Page so you can follow/like me there in addition to reading about my work here. Pretty soon this will just turn into a never ending loop. In that spirit, I am including the Portlandia clip that I previously posted on my personal Facebook Page to introduce my "public artist page". Following the completion of this post on the blog, I will probably link it to both FB pages...that's right folks I'm truly in the "technology loop" (the Portlandia reference is not a joke)!

So on that note...here is the progress made on my recent long painting with a birthday cake. Not sure what the title will be. It's 36" x 24". Please pardon the glare, I am mostly painting at night now, so the surface is much more difficult to capture with my iphone.

Additionally, here are two new tiny-smalls...

and finally 2 new drawings from poems. Both drawings are graphite and white acrylic paint on 9" x 12".

end of summer, fall starts

Technically we still have until September 22 until the first day of fall, and despite the 80 degree temperatures and tropical rains, in my life, fall has arrived. School is back in session, and I am excited to start teaching again. I introduced a painting class this afternoon and will meet with a bunch of new freshman for drawing 1 tomorrow morning!

I NEED to paint through this semester in a serious way if I am going to meet upcoming deadlines. With this in mind I have enlisted Marc to keep me in check, "tell me to paint everyday" and to be relentless about my evasiveness. Last night was a lost cause. However, Monday night and tonight I got it in gear. Below are the contents of all things brewing in my studio currently (with the corresponding timeline shots).

On a side note, I have been listening to Fiona Apple's latest album, The Idler Wheel, obsessively. So the work below was almost exclusively made under this album's spell. Before the artwork, here is my favorite song...right now.

Now for the artwork:

a new 20" x 24", oil on canvas

a new 36" x 24", oil on canvas

a new little dog, 16" x 12", oil on canvas

Finally, several drawings based on poems by Liz Robbins. 

Please excuse the quality of all the images, they are iphone shots taken after dark. Specifically, I made the drawings black and white to eliminate the color distortion present in the original photos. 

website rebuild

Check out the newest version of my website! This update is brought to you by a power crash and resulting memory loss on my computer earlier this year. I frequently fail to learn my lesson with file management and memory back-up, but on the bright side I do have an updated website.

ENJOY! 

Click the screen shot below to visit the site or click HERE.

Collaborations

I am steadily working on a Collaboration with Liz Robbins. Although I can't post the exact poems each of these pieces were inspired by, you can read some of Liz's work by visiting her blog here. Last week we meet up and she shared new poems based on the paintings I have created this summer, they are AMAZING. All of this work will be on display this fall at CEAM on Flagler's campus. Here are the paintings I have created so far...

each painting is oil on panel (thanks again Reeves!)

amy needs to unclench, oil on panel, 7" x 5"

barely rooted, oil on panel, 7" x 5"

deciding to depart, oil on panel, 7" x 5"

drive her to the shore, oil on panel, 5" x 7"

growing a third eye, oil on panel, 7" x 5"

no forsaking, oil on panel, 7" x 5"