This is a new one I've just finished...



 It's  Spring Idyll and you can see it larger on my website here.

Slithering in the studio

 I've made a bunch of huge new pieces that I finally managed to get on the website today. This is a snake from my last show:


Samantha Simpson, Innocent Snake #1

The new pieces have snakes too.


Samantha Simpson, The Thing Is, The Thing Is

 
Samantha Simpson, Evolution Aside

In this piece the snake says, "But we are so alike" and the swan replies, "That's hardly the issue." Tiny text in the background says,"These beauties have always been hard on their admirers." The title refers to the fact that some dinosaurs had feathers. I think of the snake and the swan as relatives whose ancestors made different choices, on some level, long ago.

 
Samantha Simpson, Spring Wind

Around the time I made this piece I had a great studio visit with Adelina Vlas, who suggested that I try a larger piece without text. Below is the quietest piece I've been happy with in some time.

 
Samantha Simpson, Mortal Coils

Langurs, Maps, The Female Gaze and Excuses..

I am the lamest blogger ever. I've been doing exciting things, though, and I'm going to try to get back to this more regularly. Today I went to go see The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It's an incredibly lush, wonderfully varied show, and it's full of people I've never heard of who are making knockout work, as well as great pieces from the great old standards. There are several really incredible Judith Scheacter pieces, but that's just a fraction of what there is- there are so many great paintings and prints in this show that I can't begin to talk about them all. Just go see it. It's great. It was curated by the amazing Robert Cozzolino, who is one of the few men I'd trust to curate a show with this title. The work is so varied that the "Female Gaze" part seems ironic almost immediately, but as you move through the show it contradicts that feeling of irony because the work does address themes that are particularly relevant to women artists. It's a rich world in there, and the number of people who obviously should be getting more attention than they've gotten is huge.

There's also a fabulous painting by Patricia Traub called "A Steward of the Douc Langur." I can't find an image of it online, but her website has lots of great stuff including this one, The Caregivers, which shows a langur on the right side.

Patricia Traub teaches at PAFA, as does Judith Schaecter, but I've never met her. Philadelphia is small enough that this seems odd to me, especially because I am absolutely sure I've met the douc langur that's in the painting. His name, I think, is Duke, and he lives at the Philadelphia zoo, where he seduces every single person who looks at him with his beautiful languid langur eyes. Or, well, maybe all douc langurs do that. Could be.

This piece below is based on a map called The Map of Tenderness that you can read more about in this excellent article in the Atlantic about mapping the self. It's got a ton of fabulous images of old weird maps of unmappable things, which I always love.

Joyce Koslof, Knowledge #51: The Map of Tenderness, 1678

PAFA has a pretty good website filled with images from the show, but I think we all need to get the catalog. There was so much great stuff that I was running around the show with my camera, taking pictures of work I loved and names I wanted to find out more about. All of which I want to write about...but this is why I don't blog regularly. I'm too complete. I want to put in all the details of everything, just like I do in my paintings, and I don't have the time to do that in more than one medium. So let me just say- go see the show!

Also, my last post was written just before I went out to Firecat Projects to hang my show last summer. It was a wonderful show. Stan Klein, who runs the gallery with the help of his dog crew Ella, Bella and the Other Fella, is a wonderful, generous guy, and the whole trip was incredibly inspiring and nice. My show was sponsored by a very shy, sweet art supporter named Stewart Wagner, and everyone I met at Firecat was amazing and delightful. The  Chicago art scene- at least the art scene at Firecat, seemed extraordinarily supportive. I met so many people I'd love to see more of, and I reconnected with people I hadn't seen in ages who made me think that if I do nothing else well in life I'm at least good at picking excellent friends.

I've made some new pieces that I will post soon. I'm making breakthroughs in the studio that I'm really excited about, which is part of why I haven't stopped to blog, but I will be posting those new images any minute now...I'm working bigger, better and stripey-er than ever before...

Upcoming show at Firecat Projects!

I keep wandering in to my studio just to look at the huge pile of framed work that is leaning against the wall. There's something about seeing work in frames that's like dressing up kids for a wedding. I'm so proud.

In a few days I'm taking the pile to Chicago for my show at Firecat Projects. I've been working on getting this show together for two years, but it feels like this is the culmination of something that started two years before that. When I got back from Rome in 2008 I entered a messy transitional period that drove me crazy very single day that I was in the studio. Somewhere around the middle of the last four years I caught a current, and I like the work I'm making now a lot. It's very satisfying.


Firecat Projects is an amazing space. The gallery is Tony Fitzpatrick and Stan Klein's wild idea- it's a nonprofit space that supports underecognized artists. They match sponsors with artists, and the sponsors pay for the gallery overhead for artists who show there so that they are able to produce shows without taking a commission on sales. It's a crazily generous plan, and I'm so grateful to them and my sponsor that I can't begin to say..

It's been a long time since I last posted, so there's lots of new work on my website, and while I'd normally write about each piece, I haven't got time to do that now. This piece, however, needs some explanation...


Contemplation of the Skull of the Turtle Emporer Nero, 22"x30", 2012


While this was hanging in my studio I asked everyone what the object in the center of the picture was, and I got some really funny answers- mushroom? Fungus? It's a turtle skull with seaweed on its nose and head, and it's drawn from one at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.


The premise of the piece is that the small turtles have found the old dead skull of a sea turtle and are eulogizing it in a totally clueless fashion when it is actually the skull of the turtle emperor Nero. The pointy text around the skull of the turtle reflects some reading I've been doing about Nero, who, it turns out, did not fiddle when Rome burned, but who was a pretty amazingly crazy man by all accounts. Sort of like Kim Jong Il, actually- he thought his singing could quell riots and that he was the world's greatest poet and that he'd win any contest he entered, and when he was finally going to be killed by a mob he asked some random stranger to demonstrate how to commit suicide so he would know how to do it. He also, in case you're interested, built an amazing palace with lattice-work ceilings through which slaves could throw flower petals and pump rose water mist down on his guests. It had a marble staircase with a waterfall on it, too, but unfortunately this was not exactly the kind of investment the Romans needed after Rome burnt- thus the mob.


Another piece in a similar vein is called Ornament, (below) and it's a companion to the four swan pieces I mentioned in the last post. Many of these pieces fit together for me...The swans and the turtles and the snakes and flowers I've made for this show all exist in the same landscape, and they are all grappling with issues of power and aesthetics and mortality. In this piece, the swan's feathers have been made into a more controllable, democratic form of a wing, something shareable and manageable that not coincidentally is something people can hide behind. Each feather holds a triumphant little bug who is holding a flag that spouts a different reason to triumph. You can see details on the website by clicking the link on the title.




Ornament, Ink and Watercolor on paper, 22"x30", 2012


These are the snakes I mentioned. There are three innocent snakes:



Innocent Snake 1, Ink and watercolor on paper 11"x15", 2012



Innocent Snake 2, Ink and watercolor on paper 11"x15", 2012



Innocent Snake 3, Ink and watercolor on paper 11"x15", 2012

I've also started making some pieces on panels, which is very fun. Panels make it impossible to use my .005 mm pens, which has to be a good thing since I always work with serious magnification when I use those pens- panels force me to make marks that are visible to the naked eye. 


I'm sort of in love with these pieces. When I'm not staggering backwards away from them wondering what in the hell I'm doing. Thus this piece, Love Song, below. Note the bug on the left, saying, "How embarrassing!"



Love Song, Ink and watercolor on panel, 12"x9", 2012




Oh No!, Ink and watercolor on panel, 12"x9", 2012

 
Bad Feeling, Ink and watercolor on panel, 12"x9", 2012


This one kills me, because I've been spending time in the gym lately searching for my elusive core muscles. It's based on a drawing of  frog by J.I.I.Grandville that I love. The drawing shows a very sleepy looking frog, and the caption is "l'auteur se presente." Grandville was a big fan of bug commentary, and in this piece the bug is saying "A good plank works wonders."


There will probably be more frogs in my future- this is my most recent panel.



Seductive Geometry, Ink and Watercolor on panel, 12"x12", 2012


If you click the link on the title the image will be embiggened so that the text is readable. That link will take you to the website, where there are even more pieces, but that's all for now. If anyone knows good places to visit in Chicago, let me know!