I haven't posted lately because I'm in the middle of a whole bunch of experiments. I've done lots of new watercolors, some very elaborate drawings and I have started messing with some new ideas with the airbrush. The biggest experiment is this one: I'm trying to airbrush people. I almost always use animals AS people in my paintings, but I do draw people all the time, so I'm experimenting with doing it in paint. I'm liking the idea of developing a formal cast of characters that includes figures I use all the time: the badger, the Prevost's Squirrel, a pumpkin head...But adding a human in there causes problems. I stopped using human figures in the first place because they feel too specific, especially compared to an animal. A person in a painting doesn't look like a generalized actor in a play, they look like the artist, or that model the artist used, or that person. I used to make paintings of women. People always saw those characters as me, and weirdly enough they do NOT do that when I use a badger. It's not just that I want to avoid autobiography, it's more that I want to achieve a unversality- I want to verr towards the mythic rather than the specific. Using animals also allows me to make paintings that talk about gender without any sense of essentialism: a badger in a dress is always in drag, even if it's a girl badger.
Anyways, I'm trying to see if I can pull of a useable person character, and I'm working on a series of portrait studies. I'm hoping to come up with a set of faces that work as generalities somehow, but I'm running afoul of other stereotypes: I really want to use a skeleton figure, but I'm thinking I'll get accused of ripping off Day of the Dead characters. I also want to single-handedly dissociate the pumpkin head from Halloween. We'll see. I've started working on a drawing for a new large piece and I'm going to spend next week looking at art in NY with my mom and her partner Thom, who are really great artists if I do say so myself. Which I do.

Speaking of which, I went to see Shazia Sikander talk on Friday at the Fabric Workshop- she was amazing. Her work is great, she's a densely intelligent speaker, and she's unbelievably gorgeous. It's really insane.

I likes what I likes

A huge part of the development of my current body of work has been a process of stripping away layers of affectation that got stuck to my art as I learned to present myself as a sophisticated person. Part of appearing sophisticated was embodied, it seemed to me, by restraining or negating the visual pleasures that I had always had, and that everybody else had had (at least before they got an art education). The result of all this stripping away is that I make art that I'm pretty sure I would have liked as a kid and that I still like as an adult. I may be wrong about everyone else having the same taste for bright colors that I had right out of the womb, but I tell you what, I sure did.

I liked bright colors and funk, which is another taste that I secretly feel that all people have to make an effort to overcome. People who don't like funk had better have a good excuse, if you ask me (which they don't). Anyways, I found this video clip today. I loved this thing when I was five, and I love it now. I think a version of this, drawn by Marcel Dzama and colored by me, would be about the best art ever. The soundtrack would stay, of course.

In other news, my Senior Seminar students gave their artist's talks today, and I'm so proud of them. They were smart and honest and brave and engaged- awesome. They're having a show soon, and will be sending out invitations any minute now, so if you get one, go!

Today is Saint George's Day. I have a fascination with Saint George that is nothing to do with religion or any person named George- it's all about the bones of that dragon laying at his feet. Saint George is a great saint for the irreligious. The catholic church desanctified him a while ago, which makes him, to my mind, the Saint of Suspension of Disbelief. He was sainted for killing a dragon, and there are lots of other reasons to like Saint George For instance, after cutting the dragon up a little bit in the shape of a cross, he put the princess' girdle around its head and took it into the town, docile as a puppy dog.

That's where I stop liking the story. He killed the dragon after that, which seems unfair (although it had been chewing up children for years) and everybody got baptised all over the place, yadda yadda yadda.

But he seems also to be the saint of gardening, wrestlers and pilgrims. I weeded my garden this morning, so I've got the pilgrimage and the wrestling left. I am going to spend the rest of the day thinking about what dragon I'm going to kill next. I haven't painted any snakes lately, although I did a huge series of them for several years, but I'm thinking I may do something about Saint George's dragon and disbelief. I love the idea of killing a fiction.

I'm cutting paper for another huge piece today, and I'll eventually get what I've been up to posted on the website. I finished the small painting, decided that I CAN paint small but it irritates me beyond belief, and I've done some nice drawings and a decent watercolor that's got me thinking I should do more of them with the time I don't have.

Equal and opposite reaction

Today I started work on a tiny, tiny piece. I'm cutting all kinds of miniature stencils and trying to figure out if I can stand working small. If it aint one thing it's another.