Seeing through clouds

Oh, dust. Yesterday it was green, and my studio looked like it was covered in a fine soft moss. Today it's red, and the place looks like I've gone- or am going- to hell.

I mean the dust from my airbrush. It goes everywhere. It's in my eyebrows, on the back of my neck, all through my hair, and part of why my work is so bright is that while I'm painting I'm usually in the middle of a giant cloud of colored dust that I can't quite see through. So I make everything extra bright in order to compensate for how dull everything looks because I work in a super light cloud of colored paint. I'm putting in long days full of massive amounts of ambition, anxiety, and dust. Badger dreams in a colored dust bowl.

The other thing that's funny about this piece is that my studio walls are too small to hang more than one section at once, so I really won't know what the whole thing looks like until I hang it at the airport. I've devised a tricky way to make each piece match up with the next piece, so that's okay, but the overall look of the piece will be a complete surprise.

I'm at the halfway point. Finished the second piece today. I'll post images when I get a chance, but in the meantime, here is a detail from the first section.

Update

I forgot that I said I'd update this blog when I finished the first section. Which is bad. Had the poor people at the airport stumbled upon that last entry they would have developed instant high blood pressure thinking about how far behind schedule I was. But no. I'm ahead. The first section is done and I expect the second section to be finished tomorrow or Wednesday. I even took a day off last week to see all kinds of amazing art in Chelsea and at Moma. I'll write more about that and post images of the first two sections one day soon.

The Curse of the Monkey's Fur

I've been working on the first section of the 48 foot painting for WAY too long, and it's been making me crazy. Yesterday while I was painting I remembered this blog's title and started muttering bitterly . Monkey fur, as it turns out, was a prophetic blog title that forecasted my artistic doom. I have spent most of my waking hours in the last two weeks trying to paint monkeys, which I can draw perfectly well, but which turn out to be be really tricky to paint. About two weeks ago, after I'd put a whole cartload of them into the design of the piece, I discovered that they are hideously difficult, because, no joke, of the fur. First my monkeys looked like bears. Then they looked like yeti-monkeys with serious static cling. I finally got them under control early this week, but I'd put about eight of them into this piece and each one was taking me two days to do, which was putting me behind schedule. I finally I got the hang of them today, and after about ten hours in the studio the piece is pretty much done- it needs a few tiny touch ups, but the monkeys are smooth and well coiffed and easily identifiable to other primates. They look pretty good. I managed to make the first successful one-day monkey this afternoon, but I am not going to be putting many of them into the next section. Luckily for me, the monkeys are bit players in this narrative: it's all about the squirrels, which, thank God, are behaving themselves. I'll post again when I finish the next section, which I hope will be very soon.