BACK

Ok, I hope everyone had a restful easter because I'm Back with a big B!! I haven't done a real, straight-from-the-studio entry for a while, so there's kind of a lot to cover.

1. Heavenly Creatures, which I submitted to Montserrat's Artrageous! fundraiser, was selected by the jury to be part of the live auction (other pieces will be silently auctioned throughout the show).
The jurors for this year are Michele Lamuniere, Charles C. Cunningham Sr. Assistant Curator of Photography at the Fogg Museum down at Harvard, and Dina Dietch, Curatorial Fellow of the deCordova Museum in Lincoln. 180 pieces were reviewed and 25 were selected for the live auction.

2. Art scans!

Sketch for Scylla and Charybdis, from the series Luminous Seascapes Real and Imaginary (based on this painting). Text is from the Odyssey:
Circe(to Odysseus after he asks if Scylla can be fought):
Must you have battle in your heart forever?
That nightmare cannot die, being eternal evil itself,
Horror +
Pain +
Chaos;
There is no fighting her, no power can fight her,
All that avails is flight!

When we were little my father read us this book called Ulysses Found, about a guy who had traced Odysseus' voyage in the Odyssey and thought that, just as Schleimann had discovered a historical Troy, most of the Odyssey was in fact grounded in fact (you know, geographically speaking :P ). There was a really cool chapter on the strait of Scylla and Charybdis and I guess that always stuck out to me.


Scylla and Charybdis, in progress, diptych with each panel 5" square, to be embossed, gilded and painted. I'm going to emboss the rocks all the way down (as if they were sticking into the air like mountains) and then paint the waves over the top so that that you get a tactile/visual sense of the rocky structures under the breaking surf.


A small White Rabbit piece to be embossed, gilded and painted. 6x8" This one is on hardboard not clayboard (a dark brown base vs. a more expensive white base), so I experimented a little and gave this one a fairly intensive ground treatment involving a lot of coats of translucent yellow, sanding, then some thin washes of red and more sanding for a lustrous reddish-orange that will be 99% covered by gold in the final product. I like the pieces to have a slavish, lavish, devotional, meditative element to them, even if the viewer won't be consciously conscious of that in the final product.


sister fox in demure ascendance, from Coronation series. Mostly done, seal and crown need to be embossed and gilded. Ditto for this one, salamander princess (beneficent. very calm.)


I'm not such a big fan of sister fox who is looking a little clumsy and unaccessorized, so I might scrap that one and redo it.
That's not even all of them! But the other ones are too big for my little scanner, so I'll have to put them from the scanner at work tomorrow.
Goodnight!