Day 141: Patterns

'Patterns', a mixed media painting on canvas

If you didn’t notice, they had an INTERACTIVE PacMan game up on the Google homepage today. I was in my studio this morning when tell-tale video game blip-bleep noises beckoned me to the office, where I kicked Rob out of the chair and wasted a good half hour dusting off my childhood gamer skills. I estimate that massive amounts of work hours worldwide were lost to this clever commemoration of PacMan’s 30^th anniversary. Except for the people who didn’t realize that they could use their direction pad to gobble ghosts, who are going to be totally bummed out when they hear about it tomorrow.

Seeing that PacMan is 30 made me think of how 1980 is now 30 years ago (crazy!), how I am a lot closer to my 30’s than my 20’s (I’m only 2 years younger than PacMan), and how interesting it is that the paper bits I used in my painting today are older than that by a couple decades or more.

Detail shot

Today’s painting on a 9”x12” canvas features a colorful, abstracted landscape with a bit of retro flavor. Using vintage sewing patterns and book pages, I layered colored glazes in acrylic and oil pastel for the “fields” and “sky” and edged them with charcoal for contrast. With layers of printed information behind the image of manicured acres of agriculture, “Patterns” was inspired by the increasing awareness of organic food safety and natural health concerns I’ve experienced and that I’m also seeing in others.

Happy Birthday to my cousin Jaclyn, an amazing young woman and teacher! Have a great Friday night, everyone.

Day 140: Good Times

Good Times, a colorful 9"x12" mixed media painting incorporating vintage ephemera.

I’ve been culling local thrift stores and homes of my relatives for awhile now, collecting bits of interesting vintage ephemera as if I were some kind of art bird building a giant mixed-media nest. Come to think of it, with all the piles of completed pieces, stacks of books, bags of paper, fabric and scraps in my cozy studio, it pretty much is my little art nest right now. And I have to say, I do feel safe and happy in there. Rob even visits me from time to time to make sure I’m watered and chapsticked, so I’m well taken care of. 🙂

That’s something I’ve come to realize about this project. Even when I don’t feel like making art, the process of working on it brings a mental relief and joy of presence that I don’t often experience otherwise. It’s made me start to think of how great it would be to get involved in implementing art therapy programs for people who could benefit from it in ways they may not expect.

I got a mental image of a mixed-media abstracted landscape in a kind of assembled grid pattern the other day, jotted it down in my notebook and decided to take a whack at it today. Embedded amidst charcoal lines, glazes of acrylic paint and oil pastel on this 9×12” canvas are pages from piano hymnals, a child’s guide to maps, a book on public speaking, a Spanish/English dictionary, an atlas, a good housekeeping book and sewing patterns.

Detail shot

What I love about putting lots of different paper bits together in my paintings is the way they are both random and somehow connected. When I make a piece like this, I first pick out bits for no particular reason. As I put them together, I start to find connections that seem to evolve on their own. In a way, I see this kind of work as a metaphor for humanity- we may all be doing different things and considering ourselves to be extremely distinct from one another, but at the same time, we’re all part of one colorful composition. I like using vintage papers because they invite me to explore to concept of nostalgia and sociopolitical factors from the past and present.

A sewing pattern sky

Plus it’s good, clean fun! The title-“Good Times”- is from some words visible in this piece from a title page of a children’s library book called “Good Times with Maps”. Apparently they decided to give it to a thrift store since maps have been replaced by GPS devices.

Don't worry, mom, I'm going to paint the edges of the canvas black.

Day 139: Color Fields

The muse of Rothko was chillin in my studio today.

If you’ve ever seen a piece by Mark Rothko, you’re familiar with color field painting. It’s just that- fields of color sharing space, vibrating in their color-filled glory on top of and next to other colors- simple, but lovely.

Today’s painting on wood is clearly Rothko-inspired (for a better visual of his works than the Wikipedia article I linked to above, do an image search on Google with “Rothko”, and you’ll see what I mean). Most people start off drawing in pencil, and the leap to color can be a scary one. After many years of mixing and mingling them, I still feel that color itself is enough to take center stage without any subject matter. If you were to try and paint an emotion, what do you think would end up on the canvas?

Detail of brushstrokes and dripwork. (I think I just made that up. Dripwork? Really? 🙂 )

For me, the best expression of an emotion is often pure color. And some of my favorites are the warm ones. Red, orange, yellow and purple just hum for me in this piece. I think it’s kind of striking.

In other news, my Sharks are down by 2 games. SADNESS. That is all.

Day 138: Don’t Talk About The Weather

Look, it's raining disinformation!

I spent the earlier part of today working on the commission piece, which is on a wood panel. I love painting on wood. It’s soft and rough and absorbent and can take way more abuse than canvas. I’d just read an article about “going with the flow” in order to really enjoy life, so when I picked up a panel, I realized that the grain pattern of the wood itself is really quite intriguing on its own and decided to work with it instead of drawing something over it.

I traced some of the lines, which began to form a landscape-y composition. I painted in a large cloud and some ground, then I busted out the watercolor pencils for the sky. They had such fabulous names- heliotrope, carmine, vermilion… so I thought “heck, I think I’m going to write the names in there, like some kind of cool color-by-number”. And after I’d done that, I began to think of this video I watched recently that talked about the difference between disinformation and misinformation, and how “the powers that be” use both skillfully to successfully discredit dissenters. I can’t look at clouds without thinking about Chemtrails, and the particles of watercolor pencil began to fall on the cloud in a way that made me think of the particulates in aerial spraying tainting our atmosphere, so I wrote some of those in. Then I went back and crossed everything out and replaced it with the words used by the organizations that tell us everything is A-OK. I even included the title of an amusing, well-done documentary about Chemtrails called “don’t talk about the weather”.

I feel like it may have been better as a plain old landscape without the words in it, but then again, it was interesting to try to put some kind of written statement in with the imagery. And in conclusion, GO SHARKS! My game is on in a few, so see y’all tomorrow!

Day 137: Jewelry Madness!

Chartreuse pearls, jade and fiber optic beads + silver wire = atomic clusters of nuclear awesomeness

I was at a gem faire the other day (yes, I said gem faire. It’s not quite a Star Trek convention, so I’ll thank you to lower your eyebrow) and I managed to restrict myself to just a few strands of pearls to throw on top of my massive stockpile of beads. Chatting with a friendly stranger in line who let us use one of her free passes to get in since we’d been robbed of all cash at the extortion window (parking kiosk) moments before, I asked, “Do you make jewelry?”, to which she replied “Everyone makes jewelry.”

I could have been taken aback by that and had my ego offended if I were a jewelry artist first and foremost. I’m primarily a visual artist who paints more than anything else, but I enjoy making jewelry sometimes too.

Radioactive? No. Hot? Yes! 🙂

To be fair, that started off with a love for metal. My father’s in sheet metal, and my sister and I learned to weld as teenagers. In fact, we were the only two girls in the history of our lame ass high school to have ever taken metal shop. One of my most vivid memories from high school is the discussion I had with the course counselor about that very elective…

“Hi, yes, please sit down.”

“What’s going on?”

“I noticed you signed up for metal shop.”

“Yep.”

“Well, I really don’t think that’s the right class for you.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“You’ll be the only girl in the class. I’ll just change it to home ec for you..” she took my sheet and moved to amend my selection.

“Hey! I picked metal shop because I want to take it. Is there a rule saying I can’t?”

“No, but..”

“Does is conflict with any of my academic time slots?”

“No, but..”

“What is this, some kind of after-school special on sexism? Jesus! Don’t you change that form. I’m taking that class.”

She huffed and scowled at me while I stood and walked out grumbling about being taken out of English for this. I still think fondly of Mr. Gray, our metal teacher, who turned out to be one of my favorite teachers of all time. The lack of respect shown by the counselor was made up for in spades by this gentleman craftsperson. I didn’t make much jewelry then, though Mr. Gray had taught a jewelry class as well before they cut it, but I got a great foundation for metalworking there. Later, at college, I took several jewelry classes from a few amazing women who taught meticulous attention to quality, but also encouraged creativity in any form.

Graduated drops of rock crystal necklace

I have always marveled at the fact that you can ask 30 artists to do the same thing and you’ll get 30 different results. I can’t really argue when someone says “everyone makes jewelry” because hell- a lot of people do! But I happen to like jewelry… a lot. The more the merrier, I say! Today I made two necklaces- one with atomic yellow-green clusters and the other with cascading drops of rock crystal- and a pair of earrings, wood jasper beads wrapped in silver. These puppies will be in my Etsy shop soon (assuming I don’t decide to keep them, that is), so keep an eye out. And a Happy Birthday to my Auntie Kasey, another amazing woman in my life who’s taught me much.

Wire-wrapped clusters of wood jasper earrings

Day 136: Hard Candy & Carousel

'Carousel', a photo of handmade earrings on milk glass

I manage a fabulous team of about 40 artisans and crafters in the Sacramento area who all have Etsy shops. Etsy.com, if you haven’t heard of it yet, is an amazing marketplace for buying and selling handmade and vintage goods. It’s a clean-looking, easy to use, supportive common ground for the “makers” of the world, and a great venue for connecting with people who understand that when you make something by hand, there’s a special attention to quality and actual love that goes into it. And of course, handmade goods are often unique and extra special for that reason. For example, I have never understood the desire to have a brand name purse for $400, when instead you could have an amazing handmade/upcycled/one-of-a-kind one for a lot less. To each his own. 🙂 Check out our team blog here.

I always found it interesting in art history class that “movements” in art- impressionism, dada, pop art, photorealism- always seemed to become identifiable only after the fact. It made me wonder how we art folk would be able to figure out what kind of “movement” we belonged to at the time, while we were making stuff. I’ve come to realize that it certainly couldn’t matter less. Those who are passionate about making will make what they must regardless of a label.

However, if I had to put a finger on what I think art historians will someday turn back and call it, I would coin this “The New Arts & Crafts Movement”. With Etsy’s continued growth in sales over the past few years and other sites like it cropping up constantly (Zibbet.com, Artfire.com, ShopHandmade.com, iShopIndie.com, CraftMall.com, just to name a few), it appears to me that a renewed appreciation for handmade items is on the rise. Perhaps the continuing exposés revealing the cold machinations of huge corporations are making people think twice when it comes to purchasing mass-produced items. I say our repulsion for big business in general pulls us back to thoughts of humanity, makes us nostalgic for simpler times, and helps us believe that an individual dedicated to creating something- whether that’s a painting, pair of mittens or jewelry- is capable of making something valuable.

I find that a lot of people who purchase my art like to be able to meet me or communicate with me. And with the internet and sites like Etsy, there’s virtually nothing holding you back from doing that today.

Today’s pieces for the art project are two photos of some earrings I made today. Using colorful freshwater pearls and wire-wrapping them into clusters, I made several pairs of fun, dangly earrings. Photographed in a piece of milk glass my grandmother gave me, I picked two of my favorite images- one mimicking a swing carousel and the other resembling a dish of hard candy.

'Hard Candy', photo of handmade earrings in milk glass

Day 135: “Misbegotten” Art Card

Ah, Red. Poppy red- bright red with a twinge of orange in it- is my favorite color. To be fair, I love most colors. But there’s just something about red. That was fun about today’s piece- the textured red paper behind the drawing on the dictionary page, the red stamp and thread in the photo…the perceptive (and nerdy) in my blog reading crowd will also notice a unique bit of red in the upper left of the first photo- the distinctive red of the Star Trek officer’s tunic. Ah, Jean-Luc. Our illustrious captain is talking to Deanna Troy about a menacing entity they’ve encountered that just killed a crewmember (enson status + red shirt = trouble), and they are on red alert. See a pattern here? 🙂

Today’s drawing of a hillside in SF is on the “misbegotten” page, which has some other fabulous “mis” words that I hope remain in our beloved vernacular like “misadventure”, “misanthrope” and “misappropriate”. I have to wonder if the long-used prefix “mis” has somehow sunken into our social consciousness as being connected to its homonym “miss”. Maybe our ears have started to tell our brains that anytime we’re thinking of a “miss”, something must be wrong with her. After all, the title word on this page, misbegotten, hearkens back to its original definition of illegitimate birth- some “miss” who was “misadvised” and thought it was okay to pop out a baby without having become a “mrs” first. You came here for some art and ended up beset with an English lesson and geekery. That’s your “misapprehension”, bub! ArtProject2010 is like life- you never know what you’re going to get. 😉

Day 134: “Joviality” Art Card

You don’t have to take a color theory class to know that certain colors are associated with certain feelings. A sunny yellow piece of paper as a background for today’s SF cityscape drawing/painting on dictionary page card (wow, that’s a mouthful!) seemed appropriate for the page with “Joviality” on it. And kind of funny since SF is so frequently gray and not sunny at all. 🙂 This card is posing in front of my trusty Singer. How I love thee, sewing machine.

We’re having a garage sale tomorrow! It’s our first. Maybe it will somehow make us feel like extra-bonafide-homeowners. Then again, a monthly mortgage payment is pretty effective in that regard. I’m going to ‘clearance sale’ some old handmade jewelry to make room for new goodies. Yay! Oh also, I’ll get a little more room around here so I can set up my drafting table and get some of the stacks of canvases out of my studio. Maybe I’ll even set up a formal areas for paper, fabric and paint. MAYBE. 🙂 We’ll see how it goes.

 

Day 133: “Memorablemente” Art Card

'Memorablemente' cityscape on vintage dictionary page

Back in high school, when my last name was Ramirez and I was dating a guy with the same last name (unrelated, I assure you), I used to watch a lot of Spanish TV over at his mom’s house in San Jose. They used to keep the subtitles on (sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish) because his stepdad is hard of hearing. I enjoyed it because it helped me learn more Spanish, believe it or not. Ex used to get all pissed off when I tried to speak it to his mom, of course, because he’s an everlasting douchebag. (That’s like an everlasting gobstopper, except instead of hard candy that never runs out, it’s jerk-face-ness that lasts forever. There’s a lot of this out there in the world, ladies. Now you know- and knowing is half the battle.)

My favorite shows were the novelas, or Spanish Soap Operas. If you’ve never seen one, you really should. They are hilarious. Imagine a regular soap opera, but somehow even more over the top. Every spoof you’ve ever seen of a novela is probably not much of a stretch. You don’t really have to speak the language to tell what’s going on. Affairs, forbidden love, secret pregnancies, kidnapping, crazy ass moustaches, amazing hair- they all breach language barriers.

Today’s piece is another cityscape drawn/painted on to an English/Spanish dictionary page- this one with the word “memorablemente” at the top which I’m assuming means “memorably”. I know. Mad Spanish skills in action with that cognate there. This is another San Francisco hillside image; in fact, I’ve been able to use little portions of the same couple of photographs for multiple works. I’m probably going to do a couple more of these; at the end, I’ll show you how many different paintings I’ve made from just one photograph, and that photo. Not nearly as big of a cliffhanger as say, a character everyone thought was dead showing up to stop her fiancé from marrying her sister or something, but hey. I do my best. 😉

Day 132: City Art Card

Art card with drawing of SF hillside

So I realized the other day that I’ve got the promise of daily snark up there in my blog header, and to be honest- there have been plenty of snark-free days around here lately. This can be partially attributed to this quantum physics/law of attraction stuff I’ve been learning about that generally recommends being positive. But it’s also because I can’t seem to craft cackle-worthy moments of quality snark every day. Some days it’s hard enough just to get the art out. That said, I want to commit to more good old-fashioned mini-rants to help jokingly illuminate some of the dusty corners of the art world. So you have my word- more snark on its way!

And to kick that off, I’d like to make some comments about emo hipsters. What’s a hipster you ask? Take a look at this site for some fantastic mockery of this too-cool-for-words breed of art school dropouts. Warning- not entirely safe for work. Thanks for sharing that gem with me, Nick!

ATTENTION HIPSTERS- ENOUGH WITH THE MOUSTACHES. That’s right. I said it. Shave that junk off or grow a groomed goatee to go with it if you’re one of the few men in the world who can pull it off, i.e. this guy:

Food gets stuck in them, your hand-rolled cigarettes/joints stink them up, you look like a failed Vaudeville performer plunked into the 2010’s right in front of an American Apparel store adjacent from the film department at private art college. It’s like every single band I see on every late show recently has 6 dudes with dirty hair, tight lavender pants, ugly glasses, scarves and MOUSTACHES playing keyboard and singing in stupid high-pitched voices. That means you, MGMT. Ugh. Knock it off already.

Thinking about my upcoming show in July at City Art Gallery in the mission district of San Francisco today, I got out a photo of the city on the hill and did this drawing/painting on a vintage English/Spanish dictionary page. I drew it in with watercolor pencil, then painted clear acrylic medium over it to brighten up the colors and finished the lines in black pen. Sewn on to heavy cardstock with a piece of shimmery aqua paper, this 5×7” art card is an example of putting together two of my favorite inspirations- words and cityscapes.