Showing posts with label Coronation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coronation. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Coronation

On Sunday night it was too late to go to the studio, so I stayed home and worked on some Coronation drawings for open studios (June 20-21).
Coronation drawings are done without photo references and without erasing. In each drawing I try to highlight some fact that I happed to know about the animal, either of scientific or folkloric nature.


naga king (three great rivers.)
It usually takes me about one drawing to warm up, and the king cobra sadly got the brunt of that...I think I'll have to go back in and add some stuff...or put him in the bargain bin.


lonely bird (bittern)
I really like this one: that it's a little sparer and sad.


four-gems firefox


poison-spur tyrant (platypus. down under.)
+++


must you have battle in your heart forever?
study for I am from battles!

I'd like to do a bunch of studies for from battles! because
a) it is a subject matter that has obsessed me for a while
b) it's going to be the most obvious piece so i want to get it perfect

Monday, March 24, 2008

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!

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Back To Work

I took a little studio break starting on Wednesday, to give myself some time to air out and let off some painting nerves. I did have a little at-home project though: I repainted my room with much noble assistance from bryan (looks SO MUCH BETTER!!!!! - I feel like i've living in a different apartment, or even someone else's life!), AND embarked on a 26 part series of drawings that I can work on here (on my newly cleaned and organized desk) when I can't or don't feel like going to the studio.
I'm calling it the Coronation series; the idea came to me at around 11.49 on Wednesday night as I lay abed (good thing I keep a notebook on the nightstand!), and it is based off a series of drawings, I did for Gordon's faculty/alumni show back in December 07. Mostly animals, with some embossed gold leaf, on that queen of papers, Arches Cover Buff. Will post some soon.