Reversal

I finished this piece today- it's called Reversal, and it is the last in a series I've been working on since last spring. The full series includes these other three pieces.


Pull


Fight/Flight


Episode


You can see them all on my website, but I'm also going to show them in August at Firecat Gallery in Chicago. I'm loving how they all look together- they are each quite large, and together they make a nice monumental narrative. I have no doubt that they go in the order that they are above, with Reversal being the last piece, but I don't really think that the ending is conclusive- either the third or fourth pieces could end the narrative, so the swan or the otter could win.

But it's not looking good for the otter in this piece.








The main text on this piece is on the right. It says, "It can turn on a dime."



On the left, a chorus of flowers and bugs say, "She gave us something, too. The springtime..."



"with its blooming (bleeding) hope. But we knew..."



"She also brought the winter... "



"What were we supposed to do with that??"

Morning glories wind around the swan, and below its mangy neck, bugs gather peony petals as tokens in the way that they collected feathers in an earlier piece.



I really liked the turtle I made in the last piece, and in this one it reappears to snark at a sanctimonious dragonly.



Now that I've finished this series, I'm going to do a series of smaller pieces with these crazy flower faces I've been working with. Or some tigers. Or caribou. Stay tuned!



And if you haven't seen or can't get to the Morgan Library's In the Company of Animals exhibition, check it out online- some of the best pieces from the show are nicely catalogued on their website.

Episode

I recently finished another large piece in this crazy epic battle series I'm making. This one is called Episode, and you can see it much larger on my website here.



These flowers are a chorus of sorts...





The main text starts below the otter's feet...





"He cloaked himself in her defeat..."



"Wrapping her discredited beauty around his neck..."



And then, in the small balloons and the blue text, "Claiming moral victory/ Over her seductive frivolousness / As he hid his/ Powerful blandness/ In her perfect, useless wings."



The fish says, "He was our champion. He wanted something for all of us, something we could share. Something we could deserve."

The bug adds, "Not like she did, tarting all over town."



On the other side of the piece the bug says, "It is nice to have it in a more manageable size. This beauty will fit right in, no hogging all the attention, no biting..."



He continues...



And then, in the feather boat, it says, "I cant look! I can't stop looking!"



The otter fur has darkened in this piece, and the swan has switched genders. The otter may molt again in another piece, and their genders might switch again- in the last one, Fight/Flight, the swan and the otter were brothers. It doesn't matter. They are containers for ideas, and in this case the ideas about beauty I was talking about worked well with ideas about the control of femininity, so it made sense to have the swan be female in this one.

Anyway, gender-flexible animals have been around for a long time..



I'm pretty happy with this turtle. I did a lot of turtle research: I went to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences to draw their turtle and worked from a number of pictorial sources- but in the end, as usual, I made the animal up. This is a very long fingernailed version of a red-eared box turtle.

I'm asking my students to make drawings based on maps, and in the process of researching images to show them online I came across some amazing stuff. Like this blog post about old caricature maps, which has these wonderful images, among many...

Fight/ Flight

I just finished this piece, which I see as the second in a series I started with Pull, the last piece I did in this vein.



This one is called Fight/Flight, and you can see large images of it on my website.

There are lots of funny things on this piece, particularly this whole subplot featuring a megalomaniac ladybug who disses a bunch of poetry spouting guppies. The plot is circular: the lady bug flies across the center of the piece, meets various bugs who tell her about the art world, goes in to a crazy rant, reaches a peak of confidence, gets eaten by a frog, and resurfaces to fly again...

Here is part of the conversation about the art world.



The thing about having an edge is an allusion to an experience I had in Chelsea once. I was visiting New York from Florida, and a curator who liked my work sent me to see a famous gallerist, who told me, in what I truly remember as a Transylvanian accent, that I was doomed to failure because "here in New York we like our work with an edge. We like it to cut like a knife. "

The ladybug gets more and more worked up then goes in to an egotistical little song:



If you can't read that rant, the ladybug sings, "I am the cure for what ails you, the modern con-dition! Queeen of the kittycat, protector of puppies! Saving ass-thetics from the ignrnt guppies!"

The guppies, however, are very wise. They are quoting a favorite poem of mine, Danse Russe, by William Carlos Williams. The fish give credit where credit is due and then continue quoting the poem along the bottom of the piece.

Danse Russe

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
again the yellow drawn shades,--
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

The guppies say the lines of the poem along the bottom of the piece until the last line, when they are interrupted.



The frog attempts to eat the ladybug, but she lives to fly across the painting and begin again.

The piece is also bracketed by two more pieces of text. This text, in the upper right, is talking about the swan and the otter. "They were both so ambitious, so fond. Raised as brothers, they had developed wildly different adaptations in order to survive. The swan garnered orderly adoration, the otter's critical teeth longed for the new. What could be done but fight?"



In the upper right quadrant of the painting there's a little island where the inhabitants have built a tower from which they are launching a zeppelin.



Drawing otter fur makes me want to rename my blog.