Dinner

Tonight I made us (Philip and me) some food. It was a concoction of my own, Hot Honey-Lime Glazed Chicken. You should make it; it came out really well!

le recipe

• 
  a package of chicken (I made it with 4 small breast pieces, but I would recommend more. Philip and I had to continue eating for several hours after this course - "The abyss demands sacrifice!"


• two limes, thoroughly juiced


• 1 tablespoon soy sauce


• two tablespoons of honey


• a teaspoon of Tabasco sauce (you could vary this. I didn't put in a whole teaspoon, just 5-6 drops, and it wasn't really hot enough for the recipe to warrant it's name)


• freshly ground black pepper


• a teaspoon of ground cumin


• a teaspoon of turmeric


• a small onion, coarsely chopped


• two cloves of garlic, treated similarly

Combine the lime juice, honey, soy + Tabasco sauce and spices in a bowl. Cut and clean the chicken and put it in the marinade [if you pierce it with little holes all over it will absorb more sauce! -Ed.]
Heat up some vegetable oil in a pan or on a skillet. Add the garlic and onion and let cook til golden. Add the chicken and remaining marinade, and continue to cook until done. The marinade should have reduced into a sauce at this point; leave it a little longer if you want it thicker.
Serve immediately over jasmine rice.

From Out Of The Gloom

Some pictures I took directly upon arriving at the studio last night, when all th elights were still off. I love the Byzantine effect of the dim light glimmering off the gold.




Having this mounted with Conquered Rabbit underneath as they will be once installed has really helped me figure where to go next with it.

Photographing it in the half-light has this great negative effect as the gold reflects but the rabbit does not...mmm yum.

Resurrection/Revolution/Resolution Rabbit (still have not figured out which one is quite right) after some work last night. I've been really cautious about this and have not worked on it for a few months (since Feb?) because it's really delicate and I don't want to overdo it. I think at this point I'm leaving it and will come back for continuity s necessary once the rest of the series is done.

The gilded half of from battles! freshly glazed and out to dry.

A firefox I drew while on the phone with Liz.

Studio set up for visits.

Open Studios

So open studios is over and went pretty well. Thank you to all who came by.
As usual such gregarious pursuits have left me fatigued, but I'm a lot less worn out than I was from Dec. open studio, so I think I might head back in tonight for some gold leafing.

I hung everything up on the walls to get it out of the way and make it presentable, and it really helped me wrap my mind around what I have going on, where things need to go (with some help from the excellent Michelle I have come upon a compositional solution for Revolution Rabbit, a longtime bane of mine), and what needs to happen next. I am pleased to announce that most of the prep/craft work on the panels is done, and soon I will be able to *gasp* actually get out the paints again and paint.

Crazy right?

English Language Comix

Some stuff from 2005 (?) involving a place called Animal Kingdom *Goodland*. Maybe do more with this after Dec.
Think the comix are really funny.

Animals And Fungus In Formalwear

Solid Gold

Gold lamé jacket, American Apparel, $58.00
Gingham shirt, H+M, $29.00
Levi's 501 Superskinny jeans in black, Urban Outfitters, $49.00
Black and orange Venetian blind shades, NYC street vendor, $5.00
***

The bulk of recent work has been working on the bulk of this Enormous Rabbit. There's a lot of embossing to be done before anything else can happen. So I embossed and embossed...


Here's what it looks like as it goes on.


And here (mostly invisible) is what it looks like once it's dry (there's a little bt near the bottom right reflecting some light). You can't really see the results of your work until the piece has been gilded and the emboss shows up through the gold. It's a little mysterious and satisfying.


I've already gilded a little bit because I'm impatient. The main gilding for Battles! will occur tonight, starting 6.30 p.m. Eastern. Have had troubling finding enough of the composition gold I'm using; everyone seems to be out in this crucial week. Hopefully 4 packs will be enough.
My open studio is this Saturday and Sunday, the 21st and 22nd, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday and from noon to 3 p.m. on Sunday. Come by and see what's up! I'm trying to get everything, or as much as possible, gilded by then, to present a united front of metallic splendor.
***

Here's the carved final for Moon Over Independence Park. One night I was out there with Brendan and Alissa and the moon was incredibly huge and casting a sheet of glow over the water towards us. It was a very particular cold-warm gold-white, so I chose moon gold for the gilding on this piece. Moon gold is a blend of silver, gold and palladium, and is even more fragile (!!) than 23 kt. gold, which made for some stressful times on the gilding table.


In process.

The unearthly sheen of moon gold, more so than the other metals I've been working with, cannot be reproduced digitally. Colder than gold and warmer than silver.
***

I don't know if this has ever been on the blog before; it's the bottom piece of the rabbit diptych, Conquered Rabbit to hang beneath Resurrection Rabbit.



Together, but stacked inversely.

Some Random Stuff + Vault

Beverly, MA, present day:

Sketch for Snared In Its Glory, last projected major work in the White Rabbits series. I had been working on an (unintentionally) similar image for the tondo from Silver Worlds a few month ago, but eventually abandoned it because it hadn't been planned superwell, but the other night Susie and I were looking at the underdrawing for From Battles! and she asked if it was going to get tangled in its horns, which of course is the obvious logical conclusion if you look at these images from a purely biological/practical point. Plus I love the stimmüng of this; goes back to Thorn in the flesh/at the height of his powers. (no image available :( )


This is a thing I've been side-burnering; using a transfer technique that Steve told me about (Kellogg might use it too -but her ways are a mystery...). (Steve, you need a blog so I can link to you at opportune moments!) As you can see, I've transferred the Day At The Races drawing from a few posts ago onto this panel; starting to build up an interesting collage effect. Not sure what I'll use this for in the future but it has all kinds of imaginable applications in the fields of Exactitude and Perfection.

Sometime In The Past

Hmm, this is an interesting one. Digging through The Vault, I found this from last October. It's after Murakami after Francis Bacon. Not finished - can't find the .psd I was working from - but interesting. I like it.

Murakami's^

Bacon's (BBC News)^


on Arches Cover Buff


on Arches Cover Buff. Sometime in August 06.


monotype from printmaking I.


artist's proof from the telamon plate that I used in The Sheep and The Goats.

I Am From Battles!

Quick update of last night's studio actions:

Underdrawing for Battles!


Susie silverleafing the panel for The Sunless Sea.


Painted sketch for From Battles! This will now be embossed, gilded and painted.


The battle zone.

© MURAKAMI Pt. 1

This was the best art exhibition I've ever been to.
Unfortunately they wouldn't allow picture taking inside, so, perhaps channelling my mother, I had Philip take a lot of pictures of me outside the museum with the big sculpture of Mr. Pointy. (They wouldn't even let me drink water inside, but I guess when you're surrounded by 15 million dollar pieces of art, you get nervous about that kind of thing.) Come to think of it, that sculpture is probably the most expensive thing I've ever been close enough to touch. ...Interesting and awkward.)



Mr. Pointy was riding on an enormous squashy frog.


The level of detail all over everything, even on parts you could barely see, was incredible:

©MURAKAMI Pt. 2: Eyeballs With Teeth Vomiting Mouths Vomiting Vomit

When Tim went a few weeks ago he snuck some pictures with his very capable camera phone. Below we see two views of Tan Tan Bo.




Here are two of 727-272. This was one of several that were elaborately sanded down to create a shifting series of colors and textures.




This was probably the most breathtaking one: Tan Tan Bo Puking - aka Gero Tan. It was probably about 40 feet long and 15 feet high, and the level of detail was astounding. You could stand back and see the whole scene, with enormous cascades of vomit oozing out between the teeth into the mouths of melting frogs, or go in close and see all the other details - tiny creatures holding staffs topped with skulls, eyeballs with teeth vomiting mouths vomiting vomit, a field of little spiky exploding antennae...and it goes on and on.
Just breathtaking.


This one below kind of shows how big it is. But it was actually bigger than it looks here.


Another great one: Reverse Double Helix. I'd only seen these in print reproductions, and hadn't really had any idea how big they were. I knew they were large, but I was thinking maybe 4 ft square or so...I think this one was about 8 feet tall.



I was really happy that this one was there: Homage to Sir Francis Bacon (Portrait of Isabelle Rawsthorne). This is my favorite piece by Murakami. It reminds me of a huge fleet of living Star Detroyers morphing into...something even more awesome.

*phew*
Ok, I could go on and on, but there was some other stuff that went down in the city, too! Saturday was the first hot day of the year, and entering the humid odiferous air of New York reminded me SO MUCH of being in Bangkok. Perhaps such an atmosphere is common to all big cities, but NY like Bangkok seems to keep the apparatus of its existence on the outside. Everything is slightly used, a little dank and crumbling; even in the nice parts of town you could tell that there would be a grimy little alley opening up just after the next storefront. It wasn't necessarily bad.

This is Philip drinking water in Yaffa, an underground (literally) restaurant in the East Village, every square inch of which was covered in animal prints (leopard, zebra, dalmatian), Rococo decorations, enormous faux cameo brooches, chandeliers, mirrored stickers, little blinking lights, statuettes, paintings large and small, the color red, antique tapestries, vintage pinups, a mirrored portrait of Jim Morrison and fake flowers. I had a wrap.


I was fascinated by the wealth of fire escapes that this building somewhere near Union Square possessed.
***
In a word, I would sum up my New York visit by saying: 'There was a lot.'