Cocoon of Rock

 

This just in! I love gold.

Day 176: Golden

Call me old-fashioned, but I love CDs. I know, it’s kind of like hearing someone make a case for the 8-track. But there’s just something about the sound quality that is lost in the digitization of it. I especially love listening to CDs in my car, which has a single CD capacity (gasp!) since it’s an ’03. It also has a cassette tape player, which I rediscovered the other day while changing CDs on the drive to and from SF.

Detail of splashes of watercolor & photocopy transfer of the fishhook stitch

I suppose I knew the cassette player was there, but I’ve never used it. The last tape I even remember owning was a Boys II Men cassette in sixth grade. I think I remember being surprised that the cassette function was even there when the car was new, now that I think about it.

Why dots? Why not?

But I’m thankful for the CD player, because listening to a CD in the car nice and loud with the windows up is almost a holy experience. When the bass shakes the pennies in the door, the singer’s voice hums fuzzy in my water bottle, I am ensconced in sound, swaddled in melody, immersed in the rapture of rock.

I didn't dip a cup in paint, btw, if that's what you're wondering. 😉

Floating on a MUSE-made cloud of awesome this morning as I made a canvas run, I returned to spend several hours on the new cityscape.

So far from done. I haven't even done a single window yet. Sadness.

After making some (slow) progress there, I created another mixed media piece like yesterday’s in gold, orange and blue. Including a dictionary page, map of the bay area, Victorian key images, stitching references and sewing patterns, this 8×10” painting is an abstract loosely based on my love for my unofficial hometown, San Francisco. Which reminds me- Happy Pride Week to my LGBT brothers & sisters!

P.S. Which MUSE songs inspired this blog post? Tracks 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, & 8 off of their debut album, Showbiz.

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Day 151: Aurora

Aurora, an 8x10" mixed media painting about HAARP

Today I started on a painting from a photo of the mission district. Realizing that I had an ice cube’s chance in hell of getting it finished today, I decided to knock out another mixed media painting for my daily piece. There are a few specific bands I prefer to listen to while I’m making art- Radiohead, Muse, Interpol, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are my favorites- it’s as if their music somehow attunes my brainwaves to a special frequency that aids the artmaking process.

While listening to Muse today, I thought of their live album & DVD, HAARP. Muse is particularly sociopolitical in many of their songs, and this reference to the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Alaska is no exception. So I used that as my jumping-off point while rifling through paper materials.

“Aurora” includes a dictionary page, Nancy Drew page, sewing patterns, atlas snippet of the US/Canada border & Alaska and a table about “discharge through gases” from an old physics book.

What is this HAARP, you ask? You can see what Wikipedia has to say about it here. There’s a lot of opposition to this program because they’re being pretty willy-nilly about messing with our ionosphere. Which is kind of a big deal seeing as how it protects our planet and all. 😉 Curious? You can watch a good documentary called Holes in Heaven, narrated by Martin Sheen.

P.S. Muse- if you ever find this post by some miracle of the universe, thanks for the inspiration. If you happen to need some artwork for an upcoming album, I would love to work with you. 🙂 /end fantasy tangent