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.

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.