New Work! Continuing on the Labors

I'm finally finished with The Labors of Hercules Series! YAY!!! Now here comes the important part YOU ALL have to come join me for the "Nailed" opening at BWAC this Saturday (May 8th) at 1pm. 499 Van Brunt Street (right near Fairway by the Water Taxi in Redhook Bklyn)

You'll get to see the Labors Series, some black and white photographs as well as some other works on wood that were hand picked by the BWAC curators. I was initially only supposed to get one panel but they liked my work so much they asked me to bring in a variety of other work and now I definitely have 3 panels and possibly one more.

I'm really excited, and I worked my butt of the past couple of weeks preparing for it, so without delay here's a preview of the new works that'll be up in BWAC's "Nailed" show:

This is titled "The Return of Persephone: The Advent of Spring" This is not a Labor of Hercules but is in the same vein as the Labors series as well as the "Fall of Icarus," being that this too is a Greco-Roman myth. Oil an Shellac on Wood, 4x4.

"The Girdle of Hippolyta" The ninth Labor. Gesso and Oil on Wood, 4x6.

"The Nemean Lion II" The first Labor. Oil and Shellac on Wood, 8x10.

"The Cattle of Geryon" The tenth Labor. Oil and Shellac on Panel, 5x5

The whole wall, 2nd floor on the right hand side.

Finishing up the Labors Series for BWAC

I have off work tomorrow, and I’ve promised myself to work on a couple of things. As some may know, my dad and I are in the process of building an art studio space in the basement (where the darkroom used to be) so I can finally have a place to work. It’s almost done, I still need to transfer a lot of stuff from my room and give the new space a quick clean but I’m going to try to accomplish this in the morning.

There is another reason I’m anxious to start working again. I’ve joined BWAC (finally) and am going to be featured in their show in May. I’ve decided I’d like to display my Hercules series, which as of yet is still incomplete. So I have to get my arse in gear to finish off the series. I have an idea or two for the remaining 2 paintings. I’d also like to make a Nemian Lion II because I am no longer in possession of the first one. So that brings up the total to 3 paintings I have to finish before the second week of May. I think I can do it; I tend to work better under a deadline anyway.

I also plan on making a book for a special lady I know who gave me an awesome gift the other day. I think it’s going to be classic cinema themed basic sketchbook/notebook. The cool idea I had was that it would have random interwoven images of such classy folks as Lauren Bacall, Bela Lugosi and Gregory Peck. I’m not exactly sure how I’ll go about making this, but I’ll figure it out. Is it too much to put in a few Cinema quotes as well? Is that lame and dorky?

So looks like I’ll be a busy lady. My family’s also plans on taking a vacation in Barcelona for two weeks in the middle/end of May. I’m super psyched about that. I’m second guessing purchasing a scanner and might opt for giving my self a camera for my birthday. I can’t do much with a new scanner in Barcelona and all my film cameras are either busted or too archaic to use for tourist-ing. So hopefully I’ll have lots of new work to show everyone in the next month or so, painting, photo and book stuff!

Here are some random images, figure drawings and sketches from MICA years past and of course my Lauren Bacall woodblock print from LaG.

A review of "Red" a new play on Broadway about Rothko

Last night I saw "Red," a brand new play on Broadway. Alfred Molina plays a middle-aged Rothko, at the point where Pop Art is starting to "stomp" abstract expressionism. Rothko is commissioned to paint a series of murals for the swanky Four Seasons restaurant, and he hires a young assistant, played by Eddie Redmayne.

At first his assistant is eager, and naive about art and the art world, despite going to art school and being a painter himself. He really has no deeper knowledge about art, than perhaps the casual viewer, but he does have a passion for it, and he looks for truth, meaning and soul in the art he encounters. When Rothko asks, “Who is your favorite artist?” he replies, fervently “Jackson Pollock!” Everyone in the audience gave a knowing laugh, (it appears that us art dorks are in very good company) as Rothko rolls his eyes, “Wait, ask me again!” and Rothko does, “Picasso!” was expressed with equal exuberance, tempered with a little hesitancy. This is the sort of exchange that I think really hit home for me, going to an art school, talking with professors and other students about art, artists and various movements. Had the eager assistant said Rembrandt, Rothko might have been impressed but to choose his contemporary, even a rival of sorts with such gusto and in a way such ignorance at that point did not put him in Rothko’s good graces.

Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko

Rothko talks about the way he and his fellow Abstract Expressionists “stomped” Cubism to death, his usage of colors, lighting and the way he wants his paintings to pulsate. The Title “Red” of course comes from Rothko’s intensive use of various hues and shades of red, there are discussions about the meaning of “Red” and the connotations associated with it. Blood, passion, heat, life… Rothko says that his greatest fear is that if “the ‘Red’ were to be overcome by the ‘Black.’” The “Black” signifying death, the unknown, the absence of red, “Black” is the opposite of “Red”

One of the most visceral moments is when his assistant (who I believe remains unnamed) helps him prime a canvas. In the center of the stage (set to look like Rothko’s studio) there is an easel of sorts, just a panel and attached is some sort of pulley system, so they attach the blank canvas to hooks on the back and pull it up so it stands upright a foot or so above the floor. On the floor, they first put a drop cloth down, clean side up, it almost looks like some sort of ritual, as they do all these steps in unison, the assistant gets the buckets of paints and brushes. One bucket on the left and one on the right, they each take a brush and the music swells. They each start on either side, Rothko on the upper left, the assistant on the lower bottom. The first brushstroke on the canvas is magical and somehow painful, it’s sloppy and dripping, but you become more and more involved and excited as more of the canvas becomes covered. They duck and dive around each other in a sort of strange un-choreographed dance, that presumably they have done many times before. The audience sees the white canvas becoming saturated by this intense “Red” right before their eyes. When finished, both actors are covered completely in splotches of red paint, their heads and hands; faces and arms are totally red, even visible from my nosebleed seat. As they take the canvas off the hooks and move it to lean against the wall, you can see the gory remains of their paint on the white wall/easel and on the floor and drop cloth. It brought to mind the hanging beef in a butcher store, hung on a hook, like the one painted by Rembrandt.

This play really was fantastic for any art enthusiast, it was great to hear Rothko rant about Pop Art, Warhol and the soup cans and Liechtenstein and those “comic books.” Do you really think that Warhol will be hung in museums a hundred years from now?” – “Well he’s hung in galleries now next to Rothko,” one of my favorite discussions is when they are talking about the blatant commercialism of Pop Art and Rothko’s own latent commercial leanings (with the murals,) and how “at least Warhol’s in on the joke!”

Bottom line, this play made me think, it made me view Rothko I a new way (as I came into it being rather indifferent to his work,) it made me think about color, light atmosphere and the life of a painting. It spoke about being an artist and being and aspiring artist, the rapid changing of tastes and the art world itself. It was brilliantly written, and surprisingly fast paced for a play where just two guys talk about things I really care about for an hour and a half. Alfred Molina was great as the intense and often cynical Rothko. Eddie Redmayne as the assistant was so very similar to people I’ve known in real life it was incredible. The only problem is that it kind of does fall into that stereotypical “volatile” artist, grappling with his own obsoleteness in the face of the new generation and the “eager, naïve” art student grows and learns about art in the process of watching the death of the old form. But hey, it was fun, and entertaining but it was also much more than that. It made me think. More so than other plays, that when you come out you think about the characters, the writer, costumes, the acting, the sets, etc. etc. This play made me think about these larger concepts of art and meaning, issues impacting my own life and with relevance to the world we live in and the art world some of us aspire to live in.

Here's a link to learn more about "Red"
http://www.telecharge.com/behindTheCurtain.aspx

On the threshold and old Florence art

I feel like I'm on the threshold of something good. which is good - because I feel like I've been kind of in stasis for the past couple of months. I think December will bring good things, I've been stressing a lot lately about a great many things but this past week went from really, really low to a medium high in a relative short amount of time. Sometimes I think that things must happen for a reason, so I have a good feeling now about the future. I feel like now would be the time for a fresh start, I feel optimistic for a change, still not totally there yet in what I want to accomplish but at I'm on the right track.

I've been feeling the art itch again, but it's hard because I really have nowhere to work. I miss my studio in the Bank building sooo much! I made a handmade sketchbook for a present for one of my friends, so I think I'll make a few more if I can find a place that sells book-board and find a recipe for wheat paste. books don't really take all that much space to make, it's the painting and mixed media stuff that feels like a daunting task at the moment. And I would like to be sketching or drawing but I feel so uninspired at home to start on something. Ugh.

So for lack of any new work to post I'll post some of my stuff from my semester abroad in Florence. This was the Spring semester of 2008.

The first image is a painting I did in Piazza della Signoria of Cellini's Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi. I sat there for a couple of hours in the cold and dark with my paints, being harassed by Italian men but I think it was pretty worth it.

The second painting was done from the view up at Piazzale Michelangelo on the other side of the Arno. This was done in a few hours as well from about 1pm to about sunset at maybe 7. This was a whole other experience since Piazzale Michelangelo was pretty crowded on that lovely afternoon with tons of performers and tourists. I remember there was this awful music from this Native American troupe, it was like listening to Yani ALL DAY. That coupled with the Japanese tourists the would want pictures with me was pretty frustrating and hard to concentrate. Any way, this painting is unique in that I first primed the canvas with gold spray paint and then went on top of that with oils.

This mask was handmade by me, using what I believe to be the traditional Italian mask-making process. There was a lovely mask store that I always would pass and one day I stopped in and started talking to the owner. He invited me to come to one of the workshops that he taught but unfortunately a lot of were after I would have had to leave, so he invited me to come anytime I wanted and he would show me one on one how the process was done. It's kind of a paper mache process with molds and glue. It was a lot of fun and a total cultural Italian moment for me. In return I gave him one of my etching I did depicting the opera Madame Butterfly and he gave me one of his prints. I painted the masks in oil and gold and black spray paint, not the traditional water based paints because I wanted a full range of color.

While I was in Florence, I took printmaking. I had not had the chance to take it at MICA and I had taken some classes in high school and again at the Art Students League, but I can't get enough of it, so I found myself in a position to take it abroad. In this piece I was trying to depict my love for both New York and Florence. They are such different cities but I wanted to show how much both inspire me artistically.

This etching was kind of an experiment. I was trying out the photo transfer process on a spare plate and I liked the graphic and textural quality of the overlapping images. I played around with layering, removing and adding parts of images, using cheese cloth to texture the resin and dripping the resin to get different effects. I then went on top of the finished print and used a reddish, greenish ink and watercolor.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, cheers!

Halloween Sketches

So I've been feeling particularly Halloween-y as of late. I've been watching a lot of the old monster and horror movies while working at the video store and I've also started reading H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man. I've decided to dress up this year as a Drive-in roller waitress from American Graffiti, mostly as an excuse to wear those rockin' skates that Jonathan Trundle gave me. I was going to be Cesare, the somnambulist that strangles people from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but I thought it might be a bit obscure.

Anyway, here are some recent sketchbook drawings, all done in pencil. And of course my pumpkin paintings, done in acryllic, Vincent Price and Frankenstein's monster. Creepy bugs, monsters and bodies are basically what's been on my mind the past couple of weeks. Happy Halloween!!

Lumenhouse/Studio job

For those of you whose ears I have't talked off about this, I've been working at an art studio a couple of days a week. The artist I work for is Aurora Robson (her website is in the "people I like" list) and she mainly does large scale sculptures and installations made entirely of re-used plactic bottles, it's our job as her crewbies to help clean, cut rivet, melt or paint the various parts of these bottles together. We try to use every single part of these bottles- the screw top, the cap, the tube, the base and even scraps of plastic get used in a variety of ways to make many differnt forms. The plastic becomes entirely transformed and "trash" is the last thing you think of when you look at the final product.

So today at the studio we helped Aurora get the sculptures ready to be packed to be taken to the gallery at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island. For the past couple of weeks we've been preparing her show entitled "Landmines," I brought my camera so I could document part of the packing process. It was a really exciting and hectic day but it was a lot of fun. We wrapped and packed everything in a UHaul truck and it just barely fit. I can't wait to see pictures of how it looks set up in the gallery with the right lighting and the sculptures installed and lit up.

so here are some images

The Orb named "Fat Skeeter" who is maybe about 6 feet wide

One of the two "Landmines" which are floor peices

"Scrapple Strands" which will be layed on top of the landmines and the orb as a decorative and textural element.

The infamous "Cap Blanket" which is made entirely of white, black, gray, silver, clear and red bottle caps, strung together both horizontally and vertically. Its supposed to look like a vortex-y outer space nebula thing, it looks really cool in person.

The "Cap Blanket" close up

Oh, and P.S.

Aurora has a 6 page article in October's issue of "Art in America" so check it out! she talks about her work and her process as well as this new show that'll be in RI. I keep checking Barnes & Noble but it's not in yet, it'll most likely be out tomorrow or monday. So, yeah cool beans!

The Preservation

Hellooo, sorry about the long lapse between posts but this time I actually have been fairly busy. Recently I've been working at the video store around the corner, doing this freelance animation thing which I'm super glad is over because I've never done animation before and I felt incredibly out of my depth, and I started working for Aurora Robson again (the artist I interned for last summer.) So yeah, I've been a busy bee.

This post will be highlighting my final for my book class, it's titled "The Preservation" and I really tried to combine elements from the Family Series of my Thesis with what I learned in book class. It's a Coptic bound book and I used a variety of methods and materials to get it to look and feel right. In this book I was really interested in texture both physically and aesthetically, some of the pages have collaged or layered elements to them next to flat printed images. I wasn't as concerned with the placement of images on the page, I wanted it to seem somewhat random.

The printed images often look 3D, as I xeroxed leaves, flowers, photographs and other objects directly onto the page. I also played a lot with my printer, printing on top of already printed things, feeding different types of paper and making photograms with the xerox machine in it, sometimes altering the size and scale of what I was xeroxing. Another element that tied it very strongly to my Thesis is that I actually took digital photographs of quite a few of my little Family collages, these photographs were often purposely blurry, and extremely close up, to only see part of the collage, I used these images as pages in the book.

The book deals with memory, family and personal history. It also simultaneously explores the history of photography and image making. One part I particularly like is that I took and old family photo, scanned it, played around in photoshop and inverted the black and white, I then printed it out on regular computer paper and oiled it to make it transparent. I took that "negative" and made a Cyanotype with it. I then took a digital picture of that Cyanotype and printed it out on a piece of paper to use as a page in this book. It's the process that I'm very interested in, of course I want the end product to look interesting but in the process I've used one of the oldest forms of image making in conjunction with some of the newest forms of image making. I also find it interesting that Bookmaking itself, along with Printmaking, have such a rich and old history, that many do not even think about day to day.

I do realize that in using actual flowers and putting the oiled images in the book, it will eventually look, smell and feel different over time, things will get browned and washed out but in I actually really like it. It's called The Preservation because I feel like I'm preserving the past, preserving history and like photography itself preserving moments in time. I had a ton of fun assembling this book and I feel that it is really what I was trying to get at with my Thesis, a sort of conclusion that sums everything up succinctly.

Capturing My Sole

I'm sorry I haven't updated in like forever. And the sad thing is, I can't even say I've been really busy with real life. I really haven't been doing much this past month to be honest, I can say I've been extremely lazy and remiss in my blogging duties. And for this I apologize and I will try to update more frequently.

Ok, so this book, titled Capturing My Sole, was my midterm project. I thought it would be cheeky to take pictures of all the shoes/footwear that I own (or rather, that I had in my possession with me at school) and make an album book of them. I took all the pictures myself and I decided that I wanted to show both the instep and the outside of the foot, so when the viewer turns the page you see the other side of the foot. I did pay attention to which images I thought would look good next to others. I even made it fit (sorta) in a shoe box I had, with the tissue paper and everything. I put the colophon on the inside of the lid of the box and I bound the book with a shoelace in a bow from my red Doc Martins. I really like the fact the the cover looks really elegant and somewhat serious, with the font and that title but the first page when you open it is an image of my Batman socks. I just had fun with this project, despite the fact that it was extremely expensive to print and some of the pages got smudged, all in all I think it was one of my most successful books.

Literary Hodgepodge

This book was for the Coptic binding assignment. I think that this type of binding is my favorite, it is very neat and the stitches look great on the spine. I like choosing colors for my thread, I always think about which color would go best with the color palette of my book, for Literary Hodgepodge I chose a sort of gunmetal grey color to compliment the black and white of the cover, and as its a neutral, it wouldn't interfere too much with the multicolored pages.

I also had fun with my fonts. I know there are people who are font people, who can look at a random flyer or advertisement and say "oh, they used a rounded helvetica," I'm not one of them. The only thing I've really learned in art school about various fonts is that Comic Sans is the worst font ever. Personally I don't really have too much against it, besides it being a bit juvenile and overused. Anyway, for the various fonts in the books I used different downloaded fonts from free font websites. I think it works, I wanted unique fonts that didn't stand out too much. I also used my own handwriting and actual pages scanned from books.

The idea of the book was to make pages for some of my favorite books or types of literature, I only ended up with nine double spreads, (five one page sections) I printed these pages on my home printer on bristol paper. Which was very aggravating as I had to get the page orientation exactly right (because of the double-sided printing) but in the long run sooooo much cheaper than going to the print lab. I think the quality of the images is probably just as good.

I used many different methods in designing the pages, I scanned various pages in books and sketches I had already done as well as photographs I had taken. I also googled images from the internet of Winnie the Pooh and Boris Karloff etc. and designed quite a few entirely in photoshop, I would then print them out and in some cases I would collage on top with paint or pen, wintergreen oil transfers, images printed or drawn on tracing paper. The cover was also done entirely in photoshop, based off of an assignment in freshman year which I re-did and improved upon.

The sections are Spread 1: Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, Spread 2: Pablo Neruda 1, Spread 3: Pablo Neruda 2, Spread 4: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind 1, Spread 5: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind 2, Spread 6: William Carlos Williams' The Great Figure 5, Spread 7: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Spread 8: Various children's books, Spread 9: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

The last page is a single page dedicated to Where the Wild Things Are and The Little Prince.

As for the images in conjunction with the text, I tried to choose images that really represented what the text was about, like for the Coney Island of the Mind spreads, I chose images from Coney Island that I took during the summer that I felt really went well with the content of the poems. I chose the poems simple because they were my favorite Ferlinghetti poems and I believe it was just pure luck that I had images that I really liked that went perfectly with them. I draw a lot of things in my sketchbooks in response to works I've read, like the Neruda pages, I find his poems so visually stimulating that I want to depict them. And in the cases of The Raven and The Great Figure 5, I wanted to copy works by masters responding to the same text (Manet and Demuth. And as for the children's books and The Hobbit, I used images found in the books themselves, the original illustrations that we all know. I just had fun trying out different processes and exploring my own connection to the literary works that I love. I think all in all it is one of my most successful books that I've made, there would have been a few things I would change if I could (like adding a nicer table of contents, a title page and a colophon) but I am very proud of this particular book.

Blank books & Stuff to Buy book

Here are some more books I made. In class we always made a demo book step by step so that we knew what to do for homework on our own. These books were usually blank, so Laurie would call them “gifts” as opposed to “art” or “artists’ books” because there was no content. These books I will use as sketchbooks or notebooks.

The above pictures are of the demo books from the following assignments: Album binding (green), Coptic binding (purple with multicolored paper) and Case binding (Italian paper and blue book cloth). The long purple one is Stab bound with brown butcher’s paper, the sketches are from when I went to Dr. Sketchy’s a live model drawing session at a bar in Baltimore. For some we painted our own paper for the covers.

One assignment I found fun was the Stab binding project. This type of binding is a traditional Japanese binding and is typically made with very long, thin Japanese paper in the inside for flexibility. The paper is cut very long and then folded over and bound on the open side. I thought about the idea of the long, thin paper and what kind of project would lend itself to this type of binding. Finally I decided that I could bind all of my old shopping receipts in a book which I aptly titled “Stuff to Buy” the front and back cover is simply the back of various cardboard food products that were in the apartment. I wrote out my usual shopping list in red colored pencil and bound it with red thread. I wanted to keep the color palette black, white, brown and red. I find it kind of diaristic and somewhat autobiographical in that you can probably tell a lot about my personality through the products I buy (mostly food and art supplies) If you took the time to read you would notice patterns, like the fact that I eat a ton of Mac n’ cheese along with various blueberry products. I don’t eat meat, I prefer to buy more expensive fresh mozzarella and I spend a lot more money on art supplies than clothing. Along with the fact that I’m a pack rat and I have actually saved all of these receipts in the first place!

So I'll be a busy bee this week, which is really good because I spent the last two weeks basically in my room because it was rainy and I was super lazy. My brother just graduated H.S. (congrats Alex!!) and we're planning a duel graduation celebration/family get-together. Also one of my favorite gals, Jasmine, is in from California and there's going to be an amazing Glam Rock themed welcome back party in her honor. I'm throwing a dinner party for some of my guy friends where there will be lots of win, Scene It and Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. And then, hopefully I'll be working on some freelance stuff and working for Aurora again, which is super-awesome (and lucrative!)

That's all for now, I've taken more images, which will be up soon, so hold tight for more book art stuff!