Solitaire

A further idea for Silver Worlds; elaborating on the 'empty heaven' idea from last post.

I'm thinking this would be nice as a 1.5'x3' or so. I kind of like working on multiple, joined panels.

Sound of Silver

This is a piece I'm donating to Montserrat College of Art's Artrageous fundraiser, a juried auction/show. I'm a little sad to give it up, after working on it (on + off) for three years (I know!!) but hopefully it will be selected by the jury and get some good publicity. And I suppose supporting education is always a worthwhile contribution. The colors on these black ones have inevitably become warped in the uploading process, but if you click to view larger they look a little better.

Here it is from an angle so you can see the framing. I gilded (silvered? :s) the inside lip of the frame to produce an intimate little mirrored enclosure. Thanks Tim for technical expertise!!!!

Just for kicks here's the painting with the creatures (very hurriedly) photoshopped out. Actually a really helpful step that got me thinking about different compositional possibilities in the series.

Sketches for Silver Worlds series.
In an effort to be more focusing I'm going to be selecting a few pieces in the coming days and expanding them into series of about 1-0 pieces each - maybe I will choose ten types and thus have 100 artworks. We'll see. When I'm 28 or 29 I'll be able to have a show :P
The Silver Worlds idea is exciting I think because it will lend itself to a lot of permutations: space, underwater, caves(?) - obviously they don't all need to be set in naturally dark environments either.
From The Vault

Cicada God from large Moleskin, about a year ago. See The Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis

More Narnia Stuff

Hmmm...posting images isn't working so well today (it's been a bad day for the internet :P ). So all I can post is this, which was meant to be the 3rd in a three-pictures series.

Semi-final Stillpoint illustration for Venus/The Magician's Nephew.

...And Then My Emotions Manifested Themselves In The Form Of An Enormous Rabbit.

Rabbit In Action

Something I'm planning on doing as I prepare to go large. 70" x "80 or so.

How To Talk About Your Work

I attended a lecture/Q+A session this morning with curator/critic Barbara O'Brien, former editor of ArtNewEngland this morning. It was the third talk I've attended of hers (once when she introduced her exhibit Standing On One Foot at Gordon College, and another time with the art critic Donald Kuspit as Simmons College, where she now teaches). I'm been impressed each time by her sensitivity; usually I think of The Art World as a very scary and brittle political space with a clandestine sense of manners; a single wrong move can you booted or blacklisted. Barbara O'B., though, always communicates a sense of humanity and reverence, if you will, for the artist as person, and their work as an essential aspect of that. I like that.

Her talk today was on presenting your work to curators and galleries; the public, business side of being an artist. She said, interestingly, that in an artist's statement she doesn't necessary want to find out about the conceptual or emotional trappings of a work; she wants first to connect to the work on a physical level, on the level of materials and practice - and then discover its meaning later for herself. I love that; as for me the original meaning of the artwork is not something that the audience necessarily needs to know to appreciate it. I don't want my art to speak for itself necessarily (of course we could spend a long time unpacking exactly what that means), but rather to present a unified sybolic matrix that the viewer can extrapolate from. My repetition of rabbits, birds, metal leaf placement, etc. is meant to evoke a series of connections that will give viewers spaces to build their own narrative connections on. Time and time again the things that people tell me they see or 'understand' from looking at the paintings are widely divergent from my own initial understanding of the work, and while showing the work in progress, my continued work on a piece has often been influenced by what viewers have said. So in that sense, I would say that the work is collaborative.

Umm...trying to reunite this thought-train...in the end I got to talk to Ms. O'Brien for about thirty seconds. I've introduced myself every time I've met her, but of course she doesn't remember me :). She asked me about my work and I found myself telling her about my senior thesis work from two years ago, which is still important to me but not really the most logical thing to be telling a curator about, esp. since it's scattered and sold now. Immediately after she wished me the best of luck and walked away, I realized that I should have said something like, "I work on a small-to-medium scale with acrylic and precious metals, using a decorative, Southeast Asian aesthetic and animal imagery to intimately communicate a sense of simultaneous power, threat and vulnerability." Oh well...next time. We are only succinct in our own heads I guess.

P.S. After my Barbara blunder, another artist I know invited me to submit to an invitation-only juried exhibit, which I'm really excited about! The deadline's coming up though (they always are) so i'll need to get cracking to have my piece in.

Sneak Peek

I've doing some illustration for the new issue of Stillpoint magazine - there's an article on Michael Ward's new book Planet Narnia, which draws parallels between the Chronicales of Narnia and medieval astrology of the planets. Here's a sneak peek:
My sketch for the sun (yeah, this a pre-Copernican cosmology where we were still at the center and they thought the sun was a planet).

And the final. It was originally going to be yellower, but I ended up putting in the ocean... Some of them will be more straightforward images of planets (like Jupiter), while others like this will more Narnia-themed snowglobes, showing events and symbols from one of the books.
I highly recommend Planet Narnia; I read/skimmed it for research and it is fascinating. For really.

Ex Nihilo Rears Its Head

detail from Ex Nihilo: Birds of Prey, walnut ink and watercolor on Arches Cover Buff, 22" x 15", 2005. Collection of Bryan and Natalie Parys.

So three years after my best-selling-yet series Ex Nihilo, I am still getting comments about it, and how much people wished it was still going on. Never one to rain down sorrow when I could be dispensing joy, I am going back to the grindstone with a huge sumi brush, my trusty Arches Cover Buff, and that gem of art supplies, Walnut Ink. It practically does the painting for you. Process pictures to follow.

From The Vault


Here's something in Walnut; a picture of Bruce Herman working on his Mary murals in the bottom of the Torre del Moro, Orvieto, Spring 05. Originally to be included in Gordon College's Stillpoint magazine...and then not. Such is the publishing industry.

Highlighted with white watercolor. Probably about 4" x 6".

Ciao tutti.