I try to keep this blog focused on things that are driving my artwork, but there are some times when one loses focus. When one's vocabulary shrinks to the quickest way of expressing one's emotion. When having a public forum in which one can post a picture of McCauley Culkin at six years old with his pink hands slapped to the side of his enormous open mouth and write "OMG!!!!" over and over again seems like a really good thing. When one feels that the world would understand, and in fact needs to. I'm sure this will be all over the news later, and that the rest of the world will be doing that same face soon, but I just got the news, and I feel compelled to add my useless voice to the storm of voices that will be offerring intelligent political analysis of Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal soon. Which is to say this:
Oh holy crap! Can we please, please, send this administration home?
Also. If I know you and you don't vote I'm going to hit you.
Friday, November 03, 2006
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Pumpkinhead, oh pumpkinhead
Man I love Halloween. And I love Philadelphia. And I dare you not to love the kids that came to my door this year.
I couldn't really see what I was doing because I was busy giving out goodies and it was very dark but my pictures came out really well. Some of the kids got really excited about being photographed and struck poses. They held their tough stances long enough for my interminably slow camera to flash, then they broke out and turned completely sweet and shy when they asked to see the pictures. The little badasses kill me.
When I was little I thought Halloween was the one night a year when kids took over, when we could go from house to house threatening people into giving us candy. I thought we were ripping off the Man, man. But it's a fair exchange. It's worth way more than candy to see the costumes.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Being Declarative
I finished a new piece that I'm calling Declaration.
I'm very pleased with it. Here's a detail.
I've been doing text pieces for a while now, but something snapped into place in my head when I was working on this one. I'm going to keep doing these: they allow me to answer a lot of the questions I couldn't address in the large airbrushed pieces. I've always been interested in narrative structures: my big paintings use literary devices like plots and subplots, suspense, disguises and lies. (The lie strikes me as an essentially literary form- maybe the disguise is the pictorial representation of the lie. ) Anyways, my interest has always been quite squarely in the middle of the two- between the lie told and the face of the person telling it.
But people rarely get to that level with the big work. Part of the problem is of my own making. I'm so interested in using accessible, pleasurable visual forms that a certain kind of viewer assumes that what I'm saying must be as easily accessible as how I'm saying it. It's usually not. These text pieces don't let me hide what I'm thinking at all: I'm just saying it. And rather than writing it down, which has never worked for me, I can make the text include both pictorial and literary ideas. There's no point, for me, in having a rock hyrax say something if I can't draw a picture of a rock hyrax.
This piece is about the problem of being declarative. There are bigger images of it on my website here.
There's also an interesting, twisty snake of a little article that touches on the reasons I'm interested in using the kinds of visual pleasure that we associate with simple content here, but that's not why anyone should read it. It's a good article- enraging and redeeming in turns. It's about lip gloss, camp, and irony, and it makes a person glad to live in Philadelphia, where there's no question of "living" ones "life". Philadelphia is not a place that tolerates too many quotation marks. You can get beat up for looking too ironic.
I'm very pleased with it. Here's a detail.
I've been doing text pieces for a while now, but something snapped into place in my head when I was working on this one. I'm going to keep doing these: they allow me to answer a lot of the questions I couldn't address in the large airbrushed pieces. I've always been interested in narrative structures: my big paintings use literary devices like plots and subplots, suspense, disguises and lies. (The lie strikes me as an essentially literary form- maybe the disguise is the pictorial representation of the lie. ) Anyways, my interest has always been quite squarely in the middle of the two- between the lie told and the face of the person telling it.
But people rarely get to that level with the big work. Part of the problem is of my own making. I'm so interested in using accessible, pleasurable visual forms that a certain kind of viewer assumes that what I'm saying must be as easily accessible as how I'm saying it. It's usually not. These text pieces don't let me hide what I'm thinking at all: I'm just saying it. And rather than writing it down, which has never worked for me, I can make the text include both pictorial and literary ideas. There's no point, for me, in having a rock hyrax say something if I can't draw a picture of a rock hyrax.
This piece is about the problem of being declarative. There are bigger images of it on my website here.
There's also an interesting, twisty snake of a little article that touches on the reasons I'm interested in using the kinds of visual pleasure that we associate with simple content here, but that's not why anyone should read it. It's a good article- enraging and redeeming in turns. It's about lip gloss, camp, and irony, and it makes a person glad to live in Philadelphia, where there's no question of "living" ones "life". Philadelphia is not a place that tolerates too many quotation marks. You can get beat up for looking too ironic.
Cleveland Coincidence
My virtual life is lagging about a week behind my real life. I've got things to say about yesterday and today, but I haven't finished writing about last weekend yet, much less last Wednesday. I'm not sure I'll ever catch up. I blame my processor.
I could just skip last weekend, but that would be depriving myself of the ability to relate one of the coolest coincidences ever to befall a woman with a blog.
Here's the story. I went to Cleveland to celebrate a friend's wedding. We had about three hours to kill before the party, so I decided we should visit the zoo. Visiting zoos in strange cities is one of my favorite things to do when I don't have time to see a museum. Two hours in a new museum would make me feel like I'd been ripped off- two hours in a new zoo is always a bonus.
So off we went, through the hinterlands of detour-ridden Cleveland to the zoo, which was so close to closing by the time we got there that the ticket takers ignored us. We raced in, wanting to see as much as we could in the 45 minutes before the place closed.
First thing we came upon?
Rock Hyraxes! My favorite animal.
Rock hyraxes, besides having the best faces ever, are related to elephants by way of the wooly mammoth.
They're fantastic.
If you don't believe me about their claims to mammoth relatives, you can read about that here.
Or you can just look at their badassed little tusks.
I could just skip last weekend, but that would be depriving myself of the ability to relate one of the coolest coincidences ever to befall a woman with a blog.
Here's the story. I went to Cleveland to celebrate a friend's wedding. We had about three hours to kill before the party, so I decided we should visit the zoo. Visiting zoos in strange cities is one of my favorite things to do when I don't have time to see a museum. Two hours in a new museum would make me feel like I'd been ripped off- two hours in a new zoo is always a bonus.
So off we went, through the hinterlands of detour-ridden Cleveland to the zoo, which was so close to closing by the time we got there that the ticket takers ignored us. We raced in, wanting to see as much as we could in the 45 minutes before the place closed.
First thing we came upon?
Rock Hyraxes! My favorite animal.
Rock hyraxes, besides having the best faces ever, are related to elephants by way of the wooly mammoth.
They're fantastic.
If you don't believe me about their claims to mammoth relatives, you can read about that here.
Or you can just look at their badassed little tusks.
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