Triple Project Update!

Hi all! I have three projects I want to update you on. FIRST PROJECT: Were you wondering what ever happened to Project Fox Bed? Well, I'm still working on it! Here is the progress on the headboard:

I am excited about how far it has come, but I clearly need to finish up those dandelions. I also am going to do the back of the headboard even though it will be up against the wall. I'll know it is there even if I don't see it!

SECOND PROJECT: Marker portrait practice is ongoing:

 

Look! Some of them are even not in profile and they have their eyes open! PROGRESS!

And finally, THE THIRD PROJECT. I am introducing a new project for 2014-- Every year I get a wall calendar and aside from helping me organize my busy life, I think the images set the tone for my year in a way. It is important to me to have a calendar that I like, that makes me smile, or inspires me. Then I save my calendars from past years-- I have calendars dating back to my high school days. I have had Penguins, Japanese Woodblock Prints, Black and White Photographs of Paris, Gundam Wing, Van Gogh, Ferrets Dressed in Silly Ferret Costumes, Bread and Puppet, Inuit Art, and Goats in Trees (who knew-- goats love to climb trees!) 

Anywho, this year I waited until about January 6th to start looking for a calendar and by then they were %50 off at least, but they were also the worst ones that no one else wanted. I could not find the calendar of my dreams to define 2014! I found a $2 calendar at Walgreens that has pictures of beautiful and generic landscape photography and I was like, "ok, fine, this one is not the worst" but then I decided that these landscapes would be perfect surfaces for collages or drawings. Each month I'm going to alter the photo in some way and create a new, interesting art piece! Here is January-- I turned the negative space of this glacier into a disgruntled hippo monster and its grand baby:

I'll keep you posted on the upcoming months!

Project Fox Bed and Why I Don't Paint Flowers

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?