The World is a Wonderful and Curious Place

The other day I was taking a little break, lying in the grass outside my studio, when a dragonfly came and landed on my knee.  We looked at each other for a little while, and she flew away.  She returned, landed briefly on my nose, and flew away again.  I sat up and held out my hand.  She came back (not even kidding) and landed in my hand.  She stayed there for a good minute.  The wind started blowing hard, and she was struggling to hang onto my hand.  I didn't like the way her delicate wings were blowing all willy-nilly, so I lifted my other hand to shelter her from the wind.  This scared her, and she flew away.

I finished King Kong Cardinal earlier this week and took more high quality digital pics of my latest batch.  I made it to the framer with this series and my big vine piece, so everything will be ready for my show at the end of August.  

I've been spending the last couple of days working on my bird egg installation.  So far I have seven eggs completed, and two in progress.  Actually, one of the two in progress was finished, but I decided I didn't like it anymore.  I like this one, though:

On Monday I played around a lot with different ways to mount them on the wall.  I made a mockup mini installation with masking tape and push pins, just to get an idea of how the eggs will look when they are grouped.  

After playing around with different ideas--making tiny shelves for each egg, wrapping wires around them--I decided I want the hardware to be invisible.  So I came up with this:
The result is that the eggs really become paintings, instead of little sculptures, because they no longer work as free-standing pieces.  But I think they're more interesting as paintings, so I'm happy.  

Lately I have also been inspired by my kitchen:

And by the inadvertent (and awesome) fort that Charley constructed in our living room:
He thought he was just airing out our tent.  

Naps in the fort are very nice.

I am a bad, bad, neglectful blogger!

And for this I apologize....I have many (and may I say valid) excuses, but I won't bore you with those.  Besides, I'm pretty sure I know everyone who reads my blog, and you all already know about the shenanigans that have been stealing me away from my precious studio/blogging time. In fact you were probably involved in at least one of these extravaganzas.  In any case, here's where I left off in my studio last week: 

I finished this guy.  I really like him and the evil deeds he is obviously plotting.

I started this sassy, Spiderman-inspired Cardinal.

And played around with the arrangement of this series of six.  

My original intention was to make a series of nine.  But like so many of my artistic exploits, It appears that I have aimed impossibly, ridiculously high, given my current time constraints.  I need to get these guys to the framer asap so they will be ready for my August/September show, so for now they remain a series of six.  

I know that I got a few hours of studio time in this week, too, but I cannot, for the life of me, remember where I squeezed it in....aha! It was Monday, between my day of teaching and my nighttime private lesson.  Yes.  On Monday I finished another bird egg portrait and started a new one.  I didn't have my camera with me though.  

Today I also went to Home Depot and bought some molding that I'm going to try cutting up to make tiny shelves for my bird egg portraits to sit on.  We'll see how it works!  Even if it fails, it's a good excuse to hang out at my dad's house and use his mitre saw.  

I have next week off from teaching, so I will have oodles of studio time, and many, many more things to share!  Huzzah.

Just a Little Update

I worked on this little guy today and expect to finish him tomorrow.  I was loving the summer evening light and shadows on my studio floor, so I included them in the picture. :)

I've been playing around with the arrangement of my giant bird-on-house series, and I think nine is the magic number.  Four more to go!  

On Friday I took high quality digital pics of my latest completed work, and it feels so, so, so, so good to be finished with this latest batch.  I even corrected the colors and backed up the files already!  In a perfect world I would employ a team of magic elves to take care of all of these pain-in-the-butt parts of my art life.  

Here's a glimpse of one of my classes from last week:
It's kind of hard to see, but all of the kids are behind the theater, holding up their puppets.  They were my dream group of kids and the memory of their positive energy completely makes up for the screaming banshee child with whom I've been blessed this week.  

I Am So Rumbly in My Tumbly

But while Pooh Bear's tumbly rumbles for honey, mine rumbles for studio time.  :( 

I'm teaching a LOT this summer.  A LOT.  And although I'm having a wonderful time with the kids, I intensely miss my long stretches of focused painting time.  I did, however, get a chance to make this quasi-sinister guy this week:
And I started this guy today:

The house is based on this house: I find myself painting directly from my computer with increasing frequency.

I also started this guy last week, but I felt like the composition was too dead and boring.  I'll keep this and see what I can turn it into.  The chickadee piece is my take two of this first attempt:
Yesterday afternoon, in a moment of extreme obsessive compulsion, I spent two (*cough* unpaid) hours creating this puppet theater for my puppet-making class at the Arsenal Center.  Don't get me wrong, I spend a lot of unpaid time preparing for my classes, but this was a bit over-the-top.  Especially, since I was feeling very cranky for lack of painting, AND I was working in the room directly next to my studio.  But the kids in my class are REALLY cute and REALLY excited about performing with their puppets in an end-of-week show.  So I made this for them:My students painted it today, but I forgot to take a picture.  I'll get one tomorrow.

Yesterday I got my creative juices flowing with a walk through the Arsenal Center for the Arts Nature in Balance Exhibit.  It's all right outside my studio door.  Here are my two favorites:

Yuya Shiratori, RE: Project

Nicole Colella, Hanging Pods

Feeling inspired, I promptly quasi-destroyed a painting:

Oops.

I felt like it wasn't quite working, so I cut a strip from one side.  And then a little more.  And then I regretted it.  Sort of like a jalapeno pepper in curried beef stew.  (By the way, adding a little half & half to the stew effectively kills the spice.)  So I decided to sew the painting back together, a task which has occupied me for the past two days:

And voila!  DONE.  

Proof of Life

Where have I been?  Last week I was teaching all day, every day, going to yoga, and finally coming home to deal with this:
And this:And Saturday morning we made these:And Saturday afternoon we got engaged. 

Oh yes, I am a coy one.

By the way, if your name is Jennifer or Daniel Kirchner, we're waiting to tell you in person this weekend, and I was 98% sure that you wouldn't read this.  So don't be mad, even though finding out from my blog is super lame.  

I also read my second favorite novel of 2008, The Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich.  I highly recommend it to anyone who loves language and beautifully depicted, intricate webs of human relationships. 

I am also preoccupied with my love for our new kitchen.  It's a fun kitchen, with red formica counter tops, and lot's of room for two people to shuffle around each other.  (I chose to cut out the view of our nasty, sweaty yoga clothes piled on top of the washing machine.)  

I've been experimenting with a different "concoction-in-a-pot" each week, since we don't have time to make dinner every night.  Tonight I made an absurdly enormous pot of curry beef stew.  I think that I missed out on a stage of cognitive development somewhere, because I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my brain around volumetric measurements.  Matching the correct sized tupperware to my leftovers is a task beyond my capabilities.  And concoctions-in-a-pot tend to get out of control, so that we somehow ended up with a two-week supply of curry beef stew.  This is particularly unnecessary, since we're going on vacation for four days this week.  Anyway, the fun of concoctions-in-a-pot is that I use a recipe merely as an ingredients reminder, instead of following it line by line with all of that pesky measuring.  I also like to add ingredients that are not listed in the recipe, which can be risky.  For example, I decided to add a jalapeno to the curry beef stew, just to give it a little kick, and now it's almost too spicy for me to eat.  But Charley loves it, and had three helpings last night.  So overall I feel like it was a win.  

Another thing I like to experiment with is beverages.  This interest is rooted in my former life as a professional mixologist at the Knights of Columbus.  In any case, while I was making the curry beef stew I slipped some little bits of ginger into this gin and tonic that I was sipping:

and voila!  Best gin and tonic ever.

So, basically, the mad-scientist way that I cook is remarkably similar to the mad-scientist way that I paint.  Ha HA this IS an art-related post after all!  

I promise to resume my usual, more abundant posting as soon as I finish unpacking and get all of the loose bits of my life under control.  But for now, here's what I've been up to in the studio this week:

On Tuesday I struggled with this tiny figure for hours and hours before I decided (after a little mini crit. with Deb) that her presence in the painting is 1)conceptually redundant and 2) compositionally icky.  So I scrubbed her out again:

I really liked the little figure though, so I'll save her for another painting.  

Wednesday I made this new cut-out moth that I'm planning to sew onto the painting.  I was originally planning to use a different moth that is featured in some earlier posts, but after a whole lot of staring and contemplating, and staring some more, I decided I wanted a more luminous one, with folded wings.  I'm planning on making him some little legs and antennae.

And today I added some more little bits of human debris:

Overall, it's been a week of fussy tweaking.  And a lot of interruptions!