It's only a sentence fragment, but it's my sentence fragment, and I love it.

My monkeys were called "finely drawn" in the NYT listing of "I Woke Up In A Strange Place" at Moti Hasson Gallery. Pretty cool!

'I WOKE UP IN A STRANGE PLACE ...' The Postmodern mindscape gets a good workout in a show that includes Samantha Simpson's finely drawn allegorical monkeys; Simon Keenleyside's small paintings of gloomily magical birch forests; a puddle of vomit made of pearlescent pink sequins by Craig Fisher; Edward del Rosario's precise paintings of tiny, oddly dressed people; and a Neo- Pop installation representing an old world hunting-lodge interior by Ryan Humphrey. Moti Hasson, 330 West 38th Street, (212) 268-4444, through Jan. 21. (Johnson)

I'm hard at work on section one of the 48 foot work on paper I'm making for the airport. I'm making it in four twelve-foot sections, and normally this would be a totally natural scale for me, but the whole thing is only four feet tall! It's a challenge to work that small, actually- I usually airbrush large and draw small, and this is airbrushing medium sized, and it feels strange. I'm loving the fact that I have such along length of paper on which to make a narrative. I've got a very complicated story going involving lemmings, monkeys and badgers with vacuum cleaners. We'll see how it all ends.

I won! Virtually...

I don't imagine I'll post much until I get most of the piece I'm doing for the airport done, but I've been lucky enough to see a lot of good work lately, and I do have some updates before I disappear into the studio again.

I recently returned from a visit to my family in Texas, where I saw the amazing work my mom, Margaret Simpson, and her partner Tom Drucker are doing at Slugfest Printmaking Workshop and Gallery, which the two of them run together. I like the work they show very much, particularly that of Jill Thrasher, Mark Dennis and Jennie Schmid who made a great series of morality prints about young girls. Slugfest's current show has some beautiful photographs and a lovely print of chicken heads that I'm going to buy with the virtual money I got from my virtual Pew.

I should explain. When I got home from Texas I discovered that I got a "liberta" award on artblog. My liberta award predicts that I will get a Pew grant, which is a fabulous vote of confidence. The Pew grant is a big, exciting grant that goes to a Philadelphia artist. I have spent this virtual money from my virtual Pew already, of course, mostly on art and good-luck charms that will help me win an actual Pew.

I also returned to Philly to find that my recent show at Vox Populi was reviewed very nicely by Edith Newhall in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Lovely way to come home.