THIRD AIB RESIDENCY: June 2013

TENDER MOMENTS: napping on a naked lady, made by the eminently talented Bobette Stott.

Some close-ups:

Wall #1

Wall #2

Wall #2.5

New drawings

Revisited an old painting and made some new ones:

After the kids go home- art room paintings

I've been making these paintings throughout the semester, so I thought I'd post them before the residency. Should I bring them? I'm not sure. They're more therapy than anything else.

1st grade clay birds, 3rd grade clay pots

If I'm painting in the art room after 3:30, it means that either:

A. the kids were so bananas all day that I need to vent,
B. I don't have the energy to start cleaning, and dabbling is more fun! or
C. there's so much paint left over from the day's classes that it seems like a waste to throw it out.

This day was flipping awful. I call it 'clay cart angst'.

 Entitled 'things I'm not allowed to say because I'm a teacher.'

And these two are from a few months ago. I wasn't frustrated or anything-- there was just a lot of extra paint. I lost these, though! Can't figure out where they went. Which is a shame because I would like to go back into them and play with them.

Process pictures:

Leftover palettes from 4th grade's "blue willow pottery" period in February

An accordion book made with abandoned kids' drawings that folds out to make a bigger painting

Workin it up.

Cleaning up edges, fixing up areas that need fixin'. I wonder-- will I know when I'm done?

5/26/13: tried flattening the grey mountains. Not bad, but the tape hills are too gimmecky--need to paint over them.  

Been looking at this artist, Chad Wys.

Putting love back into this guy after the scribblefest. Which elements of the landscape to reconstruct and which to leave 'ruined'? 

Tell me again why I scribbled all over most of the canvas?....

...oh yeah. inspired by Ill Lee's ballpoint pen work.

Adding details. Weaving slices of my apartment into the imagined geography...

Going to replace the procession of cartoon animals with my play-doh characters, so I can paint from observation instead of just imagination. I want to add better light and a more realistic gravity.

Back to Benozzo: the Journey Continues

After a few months of still-life practice, fantasy has swept me up again. Bought a big, sturdy canvas last week. I figure it's finally time to get this painting out of my system! It's a reimagining of my old muse, Benozzo Gozzoli's Procession of the Magi. Had it in my head for a long time. What I'm aiming for is something complex, kitschy, something that melds my apartment, my frustrations and a sense of 'process' with the fantastic landscape inside my head.

"Say, Kitty- what are your thoughts about this new project?"

On the left, me. On the right, a Medici fellow on his noble steed by Gozzoli.

Cheerful Ruin: response to Saturday's critique

I can't deal with perfection. I like it, I appreciate it, but whenever I make something nice looking I want to mess it up good. I can't help meddling. I pull stray pieces of my hair free after I put it up in a bun and I want to put sneakers on every time I wear a dress. I want to adopt the very ugliest puppy in the window. It's probably kind of messed up.

Now that I've realized this ruinous tendency isn't going away, I'm going to try to push it further-- until these pictures are about something more than a 'still-life'. This might mean wrecking them more confidently, so that they're about destructive impulses in general. Or increase the level of strangeness, so there's more ambiguity and makes you ask questions. I don't know... but I'm going to keep looking for stories and see where it takes me.

There was too much pathos in this one. Replaced my head with my halloween costume, a paper plate mask ('Finn' from Adventure Time with Finn and Jake!)  Hoping the tension between the happy face and the pile of stuff will produce a more ambiguous narrative.

This was based on a Matisse composition. I think of it as the art room after dusk, with cool rejected kids' drawings taking on another life. Is that story being conveyed? I don't know yet.

New drawing. Can you guess which side of the bed is mine and which belongs to my boyfriend Jon?

Critique #3 with Liz Thach

On Saturday I met with my mentor, Liz, for our (gulp) second-to-last meeting. She said I've been developing clearer pictures, that I'm starting to build a visual hierarchy. I'm still not sure what these pictures are trying to convey, but she saw in them a "quiet alienation", "quirkiness", and "sentimentality", which I've got to come to grips with. It's okay to be sentimental, but I've got to realize it and be purposeful. She advised me to look at Bill Viola, John Curran, and Lisa Yuskavage for works that play with kitch and self-loathing.

These are some of the paintings I've been working on. Or are they drawings? Most are still in progress.

I'm wondering, though, where to go next. How many more drawings can I make of slightly strange goings-on in my house? What's the point of them? are they personal narratives? What am I adding to them with the scribbling and words and cartoons? Why do I feel the need to ruin everything at least a little?

Toy Stories by photographer Gabriele Galimberti

 http://www.boredpanda.org/children-toy-stories-gabriele-galimberti/

Home sick with a stomach bug,  I came across this article on boredpanda.com: Toy Stories, by photographer Gabriele Galimberti. Please look at all the pictures on the original site-- they are really striking!

Galimberti spent 18 months traveling around the world, photographing children and their toys. He often played with them first and learned revealing things about their values and their parents' values (wealthier children were often more possessive, for example, and didn't want him to share their stuff). Some kids ascribed supernatural powers to their toys. A plastic dinosaur from Texas and from a plastic dinosaur from Africa were both said to protect their owners at night.

Isn't this what I'm doing? Painting myself together with my toys? Possessiveness and ownership and how the privilege of my childhood has colored my adult life is something I want to think about.