Greek Chorus - Work Shot in the Studio

Mini Journal: Still Life in the Studio and Brutalist Architecture

The Plaid

Copied from a lovely Sottobosco

From Cornelis De Heem's "Vegetables and Fruit Before a Garden Balustrade," although I managed to elide all that make this a beautiful sottobosco picture, including the grey-pinkish night(?) sky, the balustrade, the small structure in the distance in what looks like a large field, and the romance of the trees creeping over the protected garden wall. Sottobosco (forest still life) is one of my new favorite types of still life.. even supplanting the sumptuous or pronk still life. (I'm currently reading "The Magic of Things: Still Life Painting 1500-1800" published by Frankfurt's Städel Museum.) My copies are always rough and somewhat ham-fisted, I like the speed of these things.. I hope that the awkwardness translates into the slower copies in the paintings. Certainly the elision of much in the ground that makes this picture special is a comedic error born of a certain myopia I'm trying to unlearn.

Another View from the Easel

They All Lose Their Charms in the End

In Progress / Show and Tell

This new painting is something of a labor of love for me. I'm taking her really slow, working on each likeness with slow building marks. Many of the likenesses are invented, notwithstanding my portrait of Abe Lincoln at the bottom of the Tondo. It is kind of exciting to teach figure drawing and cast drawing at the same time that I am working on a kind of cartoon of these disciplines. My students have been making remarkable works with sharpened charcoal and determination! My caricature and pile habit nods to such labors, but makes a fanciful diversion from them at the outset. While I consider these oil paintings a discipline, perhaps they are more a habit of repeated mark-making and intimate portraiture (12" diameter round). Well, off to the studio and to figure drawing group!

The Ministry of Operatic Self Effacement and Other Such Rot

So my old friend Arthur Whitman blogged about me, so I can remain anonymous and naive no more, so I better start putting up the new paintings too. Hey Arthur, this is what I'm really doing in the studio.. just kidding, I really do like the drawings. But these 9 x 12 foot paintings are kind of my bread and butter right now. Two days ago someone asked me after I had read bits and briefs of my nasty/crazy RISD thesis, in a lecture I was lucky enough to score with a wonderful old professor's class, why I was working with classical still life painting painting if I wanted to talk about operatic self-effacement, eating disorder, perversions of the celebration of identity, etc. I couldn't really answer, but I found the question intriquing. This astute artist mentioned Todd Haynes, also a Brown grad, who has made cracker jack eating disorder work with barbies in Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. I wasn't sure I knew the work, but when I looked him up I found he had done that lovely little movie Safe, one of my faves, if you are paranoid or germ phobic and sometimes housebound like me some of the time. The color in the movie was startling, and as I started to respond to chemical odors in like ways over the years, I have enjoyed the work even more. I like the stuff he's done with film, I don't know why I remain so classical, or why I'm stuck with this devotional and formal homage to excess. I don't think Brown's media theory really rubbed off on me very well. Maybe I'll grow out of it. Maybe I'm just playing dumb. This big painting is called Pile of Cliches and Dead Things. A big hurrah for dumb and literal in the face of disintigrating notions of what I can do with my paintbrush, my politics, my identity, my stomach, etc etc. Maybe when I post the older nastier big 9 x 12 foot painting I will post bits of my statement, I'm just afraid I might be censored on blogger if I get too gross here too quickly. Cut up torsos and heads on sticks are one thing, but I started to honor my thesis and get into Marquis de Sade territory these past few months in my drawings, and I'm afraid of losing my happy little webspace, or scaring my nice studio-mates. They already think I'm the most well-adjusted creepy big-litle girl artist they know.