counting sheep

counting sheep #6, 2012 gouache on Yupo

counting sheep #5, 2012, gouache on Yupo

time and temporality #1- 7 Rings December 2010

I'm now going to suspend disbelief and ask you to do the same. As I suspected, I am no better at blogging than I was at keeping a diary as a kid or a journal as a teenager. I'm really bad at it, in fact. But I am going to post some blogs now about the work of the last few months.

So, imagine it is not August, it is December 2010 and I am posting about my experience doing Huffington Post's  7 rings !!

I was excited to get an invitation to participate in this ongoing game of artist telephone, as I'd been reading and viewing it since it began. I was given 24-48 hours to to paint "a response" to a piece of writing by Anna Abelo, and then Steve Tuttle had the same amount of time to write a response to my paintings

I don't know if I'm allowed to repost Abelo's or Tuttle's work here, but the link to the original article works and you can read for yourself:   7 rings

You'll need to scroll down towards the bottom to Day 7 to find Abelo's piece about a recurring dream.
My paintings are Day 1.
I really loved Steve Tuttle's response on Day 2, entitled The Scold.

I was pretty happy with the painting called dreaming of the perfect.  Unfortunately, the other painting came second and needed one more day, but... that's the way things go.

dreaming of the perfect, 2010, oil on canvas 20x20 inches

the woman with the owls, 2010, oil on canvas,
 24x20 inches

the organizing principles paintings- I

While attending a (psychoanalytic) lecture, something struck me when I heard the phrase "unconscious organizing principle," a phrase I had heard or read hundreds of times in reference to how we organize our experience and how we are organized by our experience.  I wrote this after a weekend of painting:

    

 The image I am obsessed with is a kind of concretization of that phrase ‘organizing principle,’ because for the first time I saw it like a structure: birdcage, prison cell, house, antlers, architectural shape.  my figures are in relationship to the structures which hover and move in an articulated way.

My ongoing dilemma is how to convey a concept in image form. These images include examples of  works with structures and shapes replacing the head.  The next post will continue with coming into being paintings, somewhat more rendered scenes of childhood.  

A composer friend/collaborator has written a most stunning piece of music that was inspired not by any particular painting from the series but by our conversations about the series and the ideas.  I have the long-term goal/fantasy that I will be able to make the figures move! It took John Frame 5 years. I might be content with 2D paintings but who knows...

      

clinging to the scaffolding, 2010, 36x30 inches

predator, 2010, 6x6 inches

shattered, 2010, 6x6 inches

islands

after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan I started painting these landscapes. the paintings have something to do with what it is to be an island both geographically and emotionally. Some of these were donated to a fundraiser which was to raise money for the Red Cross.

the strange thing is that although I don't think of myself as someone who paints 'landscapes' apparently now I do, as this has marked the beginning of a new body of work- I guess I would characterize as organic landscape or something like that. Stay tuned for those. Oh, and stay tuned for images from the organizing principles. 

dreams and nightmares

writing the dream, 2010

nightmare, 2010

dreaming of flowers newly forming, 2010

white flower, 2010

paint off

front steps with paint scraped off to reveal red concrete

deconstructed painting, 2010, canvas with several layers of paint scraped off

big and small

I finally had a good amount of time in the studio this weekend- many hours, relatively uninterrupted. I had in my mind the idea of big works vs. small, and the idea of painterliness.
the big vs. small was triggered by having seen Mary Addison Hackett's terrific show at the Kristi Engle Gallery ( for some reason I'am not able to link right now) and also Mark Dutcher's FaceBook thread about painterliness.
This is part of Mark's quote: "it is hard to make a small painterly painting (is) because usually when someone tries to make a small gestural painting, it comes across as either being a shrunken down version of the large work"

Mary Addison said in her talk on Sunday that she doesn't work small and yet in the past year she has done gorgeous small works.  Gorgeous. at least her blog is linked here even if I can't link the kristi engle site and MAH website.



I have been working small for a while and love it, love working big and small simultaneously and bouncing between the two. i work with brush, pallet knife (spelling?) and fingers. I am showing somewhat older work in this post because the photos that I took were too blurry! also it has been a week since i started this post. wow, it is harder than I thought to do this. I think I need to spend less time commenting on other people's facebook pages and more time on this. or maybe just paint!!!!

cordon sanitaire 2009, oil on canvas 48x48 inches

tantrum, 2010 oil on masonite 7x5 inches

red one, 2010 oil on panel 6x6 inches