Summer Daze and Studio Makeover

this table surface is way more beautiful than anything I can paint!
I am SO sorry my kind readers. It has been some time. I'm still chugging along- haven't put down the brush. For some reason I temporarily obsessed on 'doing up' my studio after the opening at Castle in the Air. My friend Chris Knerr, cement mason and graphic artist extraordinaire, helped me transform my scary chewed up particle board work table into a lovely cement surface. And I used up a lot of reallly old paint to break up the old band-aid colored walls. One of those- "why the heck didn't I do this ten years ago" projects.
Meanwhile I am working on a commission- a trade for a computer-yay. And while that challenging partnership resolves itself I am working on a more epic animeople painting of foot soldiers marching throughout time. And after that? sigh...I have to decide where my focus will be for the next year, for the show at RiskPress Gallery. More animeoples? hanging Box Art? more trees with a touch of the whimsical or sureal?

Chris teaching me how to make the cement table. I turned all the cement in a rusty wheel barrow with a shovel. it was pretty muscle intensive. then we added this adobe red.

hee hee power tools. hee hee

Not sure why the blue paint looks yellow here, but the finished table is almost too nice to work on!
more studio corners:

Castle in the Air Show Opening Night

Thank you so much to everyone who was able to come to the opening reception at Castle in the Air. And thank you for all the support from people who wanted to but couldn't make it. It was a lovely evening of animal headed good times. John, one of Castles teachers and a fabulous artist, put together the lovely bird headed lady in her crepe dress, demurely yet confidently passing out the catalog and card for the show. I wish I could say I shared that same confidence but she did inspire me to try harder to discuss my paintings with complete strangers and pretend I am not a rather shy person. My Elephant headed self-portrait, Will Work For Peanuts, was fabulously shown on a boxed Easel, its large paint drawer full of peanuts. And I was happy to see people walking about actually circling titles in their catalouges of paintings they wanted to buy from the walls, willing to wait until May 15th to actually get their treasures home. Almost half the 24 paintings sold (or will soon be) so far! I did not bring my children to this show. I would have had to put bird masks on them, dressed them in little velvet suits and hung them up on the wall, which, while entertaining to myself may not have been appreciated by them. Thanks again and please stop by to say hello to all my painted friends up on the walls if you happen to be passing through Berkeley.

On Animeoples in General and the Reception in Particular

Well Deer Reader, my sister, a Jungian trained psychologist, gave me a possible answer to the question that has flited at the back of my brain like a small moth headed person. That is- WHY am I seeing so many Animeoples in art lately? I, occasionally, when time permits, and so not often, go web surfing through the incomprehensibly huge world of art blogs and sites. And more often than not I find artists who are painting animal headed people. Some pieces are fantastic, some are less than. Most are in clothes worn hundreds of years ago. And I wonder- where is this all coming from? Are we dragging these images up from the depths of our collective unconscious?
My sister suggests that people are wanting to go back- pre-industrialization, to find our animalistic natures and return to nature. Is that it? To be less refined? To take a step back to the simplified, straightforward and slower paced days? So we stick a deer head on a woman in Victorian hoops, whose hands and garb are human and indicative of a past century or two, but whose outlook is toward the hills.
I like this answer.
So while perhaps I am searching consciously for some totemic chimera my unconscious strives to live on berries in a unmolested wild wood.
I hope you can all make it to Castle in the Air next Thursday at 6 for the opening!

River Gods and Zip Lines

River Gods and zip lines...
two things you might not think go together, but in my world...
I am the queen of multi tasking, the empress of creative mothering, and heiress to the throne of put-it-off-till-later-so-we-can-do-what-we-want.
My house isn't too clean, but everyone is happy.
So Benjamin plays monopoly (rolling for both of us- "do you want to buy Boardwalk?"), while I work in the garden. And an hour of building a platform for a zip line is followed by an hour of wiring paintings for the Castle in the Air show. I rather like it. How dull it would be to do just one thing. Though I often do long for simplicity I soon find it dull when it occasionally shows me its serene face.

River Gods (framed)
based on Manet's Luncheon on the Grass (did you guess, dear reader, from my last posting?)
uh...14"X20"?
Did you know Luncheon on the Grass was Manet's version of an even older Roman artpiece called River Gods? (and that one was a version of an even older piece as well) It makes me feel like what Im doing- ripping off these antique portraits is more justified. MANET did it after all. And I actually didn't even know that Luncheon was based on this older piece until after Id choosen and find ref for Racoons. So how perfect to call mine River Gods. More odd intuiting.

Meanwhile, in the backyard....

Fearless Phineas getting ready to jet down the zip line. Parents, are you quaking in your Mommy boots? 12 feet off the ground, the line dives across the lower yard to only about 5 feet. BAM! They get going pretty darned fast. The beginnings of our future Ewok village?

Knight, Stuck, and Benjamins Interior Design

Knight
10"H-oil on wood
almost done almost done! The show goes up on the the first, opening is the 14th. I want to wrap up these last few pieces so I can get to the hellhole of matting and framing. I have the supplies but I need the quiet space of no children, the soft tap of rain on the skylight to keep me company while I measure and cut angles.

close-up of Knight


Stuck
I was stuck for awhile on stuck. I had boring grey walls and the piece was lifeless. Im not usually a fan of metalics but this pseudo-gold sure did the trick. I think I might go back into the hand/key and bring it out a bit. The tiles were a makeover course in perspective. Yikes. I didn't get it perfect but hell- YOU try. yeash.

meanwhile, in the intersection of art and home and child...I had woven curly willowbranches into my lamp shade with teh paln of hanging paper cranes all over it. But my six year old snuck in and tagged it before I could. He, of course, choose to have Bionacles (Lego Robots) crawling and climbing up it.

But his best stab at decorating took place weeks before I even noticed it- and I happily left it in place, for its whimsy. A Ferby riding my guardian dragon.

and finally- a sneak preview of the final piece. Can you name the painting it's based on? Come on- its a classic- right at the beginning of Jensons History of Art book.

Starting Smoking and Sofonisba

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Sofonisba
um...7" square
I can never remember her last name. I think it's amazing I can remember her first name. Anguisola or some such. Anyway- a very neat lady artist, who lived an interesting and all encompassing life as artist, court painter, wife and mother. A good roll model for me. Someone I'd really really like to sit down to a cup of tea with. After I learn Italian. And she really did look like a lemur. It wasn't exactly a stretch of the imagination.

I thought I'd lost three of my watercolors today. It took me an hour to find them. I felt so ill. Afterward I started smoking again...but not really. I did consume a cup of coffee late in the day as well as a large hunk of frozen cookie dough. Now everything is, suffice to say, VERY orderly and organized.

Watercolors on a Rainy Day

The Lovers
10" High

based on a very old German tarot card. I finished this one early this morning and then proceeded to paint another tarot card- the high priestess, which most likely will be finished tomorrow morning. It is a lovely and peaceful thing to sit inside with the heater blasting and paint light filled watercolors while outside the slate grey sky throws down heavy blankets of rain. I am so reminded of when I lived in Northern California- more Northern California, and the rain was constant and I only painted in watercolor. The nostalgia and melancholy of that time in my life hit me so hard I was impelled to buy clove cigarettes at the gas station after getting Ben from school, though I'm not certain if I will actually smoke them.