I have had a project in mind for a while and I finally have the time to devote to it: I bought a secondhand bed frame at a thrift store. I was very excited because it was both ugly and boring. This means that it was both a blank canvas and I would have no qualms covering it in paint. I knew I wanted to paint something on my bed but I didn't know what.
After a lot of thought, I decided on foxes. I don't entirely know why. There just needed to be foxes on this bed. I went as far as to look up foxes in a dictionary of Jungian/dream symbols. They don't seem to correlate to my life in any way, except that I am painting them. Painting foxes onto my bed is what I have been doing for the last two days and here are some photos of my progress!
I usually don't depict flowers in any of my artwork. They don't interest me because they are too pretty. Flowers seem to me like a shortcut to making your painting pretty and I am interested in finding beauty in things that people don't necessarily find beautiful already. This is why I don't love Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings. She was all, "people don't stop to notice flowers so I painted giant flowers so that everyone is forced to stop and look at flowers." And I am like, "No! Everyone thinks flowers are pretty! They are like the most generically pretty thing there is!" So I am usually not interested in painting them.
(Though to clarify, I am a big fan of Georgia O'keeffe. Her desert paintings rock my world and there is this GIANT canvas she did of clouds that is in the Chicago Art Institute that totally blew my mind. ALSO I came across a book once that quoted her as saying, "I hate flowers! I paint them because they are cheaper than models and they don't move." So perhaps her artist statement about getting people to notice beautiful little things is not the whole story).
That being said, you will notice that my foxes are surrounded by dandelions. For me, dandelions are the exception to my no-flower rule. I think it is because when they are white and puffy, they don't even look like flowers any more. They look like surreal floating fluff balls. They look like stars. They look like they have some sort of internal luminescence coupled with transparency. They are also weeds, which are traditionally seen as "not pretty." So dandelions are ok with me.
I am working on both sides of the headboard next, which you will never even see because it will always be behind pillows or against a wall, but this bed needs more foxes.
I could do this forever. Anyone want paintings on their furniture?
