Vinceward Van Hopper! Edwincent Hop-Gogh?

Hey all,

First-- a quick update on my screen printing class last night: It was SO much better! I am finally getting it! I finished the background of my print and moved on to the ship itself. The sails are done and next I will move down to the hull and eventually the water. And all the rigging-- I'll need to throw that in somewhere. I learned a new way to register each piece of paper (line it up correctly with the screen) and it made my life a bajillion-million times easier. Still no images for you though. Sorry!!

What I am going to write about in this post is a painting that I have in the works-- a new nightscape in oil on wood panel. I am thinking of it as Van Gogh meets Edward Hopper. I'm borrowing from the color palette of Van Gogh's nightscapes and using classic New England Architecture as subject matter-- the same subject matter that Hopper is known for (my work has been compared to his before and I take it as a huge compliment... though admittedly when I first moved to Boston, I had a bit of an artist block because I realized that Edward Hopper had already made all the paintings I wanted to make, so I had to shift in new ways).

So here is what I have so far:

Eh? Eh? Cool, right? Vinceward Van Hopper! Edwincent Hop-Gogh? 

No, no, the first one is better. Vinceward Van Hopper.

So what I am debating about right now, is 1) I want to finish this painting BUT 2) it looks kind of cool unfinished, am I right? There is something appealing about the sketchy boldness of the shapes I already have. I don't think I'll actually leave it like this, but a small part of me wants to. What do y'all think?

Oh and also, this isn't just any old house in Boston. This is MY house. My room is the one on the third floor balcony.

Works In Progress

I am leaving for a trip to Miami tomorrow to celebrate the start of 2013 on the beach, where it is warm! As always, my watercolors and paper are packed and ready to go. 

I wanted to squeeze in one more post for this calendar year, but I don't have anything completed at the moment. I do have a couple of paintings in progress. They are both at the point where someone might look at them and think they were finished, and that they were just really boring. But do not be confused! They are not done yet! I have plans for their finishing touches, plans indeed!

JP Rooftop at Sunset

This is from the view off of my front balcony. The sunsets lately have been rockin' my world and since the balcony is a great place to paint, I expect to paint more rooftops and skies. Living in New England and painting houses is hard because every time I go to paint something I think, "Oh wait... Edward Hopper already painted this." Me and Edward Hopper have some things in common, artistically.

Anyway, this painting is not finished. I can't help but feel like it needs something else. Like a tree! Something that breaks up the barrier between the house and the sky. It is pretty rigid at the moment.

Nightscape: July 5th

I painted this nightscape on July 5th, but have been touching it up ever since. I'm out of practice I guess. Boo! I was having trouble figuring out what to do with the sky because there was actually a tree there but I couldn't get it to look right so I just took it out and I am pleased with it now. I have a bunch of other paintings in the works, but they are not ready to be blogged about.

The house is on the street that I walk to get home from the T.

Mexico Trip Paintings Part I: Cuautla

I am back in Ithaca again after a pretty incredible trip in Mexico and Guatemala. I took my watercolors and painted pretty much everywhere I went. Now I have a stack of more-or-less postcard sized paintings that altogether look like a visual journal of my trip. I think of them as little sketches that I could do more with or not. 

My first stop was Cuautla, Morelos, a town where I spend a semester in the fall of 2008 living with an incredibly sweet and generous host family, working with a local artist, and learning about Mexican history, literature, social movements, and Spanish. On this trip, I was able to visit a lot of people who were very important to me that semester as well as see some places surrounding Cuautla that I had never been to, namely Tepotzlán and Cuernavaca.

I mainly painted places rather than people. Places tend to hold still longer than people, so they were easier. Also, when you paint people they tend to want to keep the paintings, so that is also why I don't have many. I have a habit of giving away portraits. 

Without further ado, These are places I saw in Cuautla, Morelos during the first part of my trip:

Emiliano Zapata Grafitti! Viva México!

Three small children were very interested in watching me paint this:

While I was painting this one, this old guy started reciting poetry to me in Spanish:

The painting below was my personal favorite from the Cuautla set. It is the ex-convent of San Diego turned train station/art space/theatre/studio for karate lessons/make out hub for local high school students/museum. I love Mexico.

Tiny Couch and Some Art Also

My dad is visiting me this weekend! Yesterday we went antiquing. It is sort of a tradition of ours that we go antiquing whenever he's in town. He knows so much about so many things that people have made, particularly American art and craft from the Civil War era through the mid twentieth century. One antique place had an old rope bed. It is a bed with a wooden frame and where we now have things like springs, they once used ropes to hold up the mattress. When the ropes got loose you had to tighten them so your bed wouldn't sag. This is why we say, "sleep tight." Isn't that cool?

Also we bought a tiny couch!

We think that the tiny couch was either used for small children or it was a salesman's sample. Furniture salesmen used to travel with these mini versions of the furniture they were selling so that people could see all of the things they could buy without having to lug around a ton of furniture. Now it is the perfect size for a stuffed dragon.

Behind the tiny couch and dragon, you might notice the infamous ugly apartment painting that I have yet to complete (but I DID work more on last night). I thought it would have been funny if my dad didn't like this painting because he finds that building so ugly, but he does indeed like it. He says it reminds him of a southern plantation.

I also painted a quick little sunset piece last week. I usually don't paint in pink and purple, but it looks like candy. Also it looks sparkly because it is they view out my bedroom window through a screen and that makes lights look kind of fancy and twinkly. Now when I look at this painting, all I see is pink and purple and sparkles. All it needs is a unicorn. 

I must be doing something right though, because I already sold it. Hooray!

Yup, I'm still working on this

Work on the ugly apartments painting continues. I mostly worked on the willow tree on the right and I added the beginnings of the pink chairs. 

It is taking forever. I don't know if I will be working on a scale this large very much from now on, but here's where I'm at:

Bread and Puppet Apprenticeship

I am back in Ithaca after the 5-week apprenticeship at Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont. My brain is still transitioning. I spent the end of June and all of July living on a farm with no cell phones or internet access. I loved it. Loved, loved, loved it. It feels very strange to be blogging about an experience that introduced me to a lifestyle that was so alternative to the excess of technology in our culture.

To sum up my time there I will say that I was surrounded by a vibrant, creative, and diverse group of artists, puppeteers, musicians, and performers. We had a busy and, for me, exhausting schedule of parades, circuses, pageants, rehearsals, experimental dance and music, cooking, cleaning, and artistic projects. Also some really, really, really good parties. Sleep? Sometimes.

Peter Schumann started Bread and Puppet back in the 60’s in New York City. He and his wife, Elka and their family moved the theater around over the years and eventually settled into the farm, which is their current location. A barn that was built in the 1800’s is now a home for their museum of historic puppets. The puppets are mostly made of paper mache and range in size from masks or painted cardboard shapes to the giant Mother Earth puppet that takes more than twenty people to operate. Everything at Bread and Puppet is a surface for art: walls, fields, forests, bodies. Everyone helps with everything. The shows are very political and it was wonderful to learn about theater and puppetry as activism-- there are so many ways that art can be used for social change and it was pretty eye opening to see it in action.

As a side note, Peter is almost 80 and still gets up on twenty-foot tall stilts at every circus and wakes up at the crack of dawn to make fresh loaves of bread every morning. What a BAMF.

Here are some photos I took of Bread and Puppet:

I didn’t actually take many photos because I was always involved in things that were happening. To take photos, you have to not be the one doing the thing you’re taking the photo of. If you want to see more pictures of performances, I highly recommend checking out Mark Dannenhauer’s photography. His photos are spectacular!

In the spare moments we had for our own projects, I did quite a few small art pieces, mostly watercolors and drawings. Aside from landscapes, which are pretty normal for me, I started doing quick watercolor portraits of other apprentices. I am getting really interested in faces, so I was exploring that interest. I only brought watercolors with me to Vermont, but I am hoping to turn some of these into inspiration for oil paintings, so here you go:

Coming soon:

Artistic collaborations with Leda.