One of my collectors sent me a link to this artist’s website and I now I am in love. Diem Chau might just be a genius, or at best one of the most original artists I’ve seen in a while. Beautiful work!
Bun With Red Thread / Porcelain plate, silk, thread / 6″ Dia
Also, I recently updated picklebird’s blog, and a posted a feature on Nikki de Saint Phalle. Check it out.
I am brand new to lomography and recently got a Holga. Here are my first photographs for you to enjoy or become bored of:
Ahhhhh! This heat is crazy! We are in the middle of a “mini” heat wave right now in Los Angeles and it is sucking butt. It’s kinda killing me. The heat is making me soooooo tired. Everything is in slow motion. You can’t take 2 steps outside without singing the bottom of your feet. Going outside is like being baked alive. If it kills me I hope to come back as a cake. Mmm.
I am still working on the big Lapland piece. Little bits at a time, and slowly but surely, it will come together. I just have to stay as focused as possible on this one, while at the same time try my best to crank out other smaller pieces. I had to bring the Lapland piece into the house because the garage is so hot, it is a kind of ancient torture chamber in there.
I have been working more on my black hole series on panels. I managed to finish one and start another. I usually make the black holes out of industrial manila pattern paper, paint it black and then stick it onto the panel with clear polymer. Then, as always these days, I make little me’s on them in pencil and oils. Why have I been doing this so much? I have no fucking clue! I wonder if I’m some kind of ego maniac. Me! me! me!
I actually really consider them girls when I’m making them. Sure they are self portraits of sorts, as all art really is to some degree or another, but I think these bitches are more about my dilemma with being female, relating to other woman, and trying to understand what sort of female identity I can’t ever decide I want to be.
Oh! I wanted to mention this great-great-great (Sorry, the heat has stolen my ability to think up better adjectives.) blog I found called My Love For You. HOURS of art, illustration, sculpture, animation, jewelry, accessories, and fun! Perhaps many of you already know about it, but Things seem to all blend together for me – there are just so many art websites these days. Once I found it, I knew I had to add it to my list for my web wasting time right away.
Meighan is the name of the babe that runs the joint, and she updates often. There are sometimes several blog posts a day. She is an art lover all right, and it shows. I love the site, and the title. You should too: My Love For You
I’m having sleeping problems again. Maybe it’s all the bad news from China, Myanmar, India, Iraq, you name it, I can only take so much. I am so sad about seeing the pictures from China. What a nightmare, but it’s no dream, it’s real. I was listening to NPR all day yesterday while trying to paint and many times I just stopped and wept.
I’ve been working on this bigger piece about Lapland. I’m no where near done, but here is a pic that Michael snapped without me knowing on Saturday.
Here’s what it looked like the day before:
Later in the evening I went to Kimberly Brooks‘ show at Taylor De Cordoba Gallery in Culver City. She created an exhibit of paintings that depicted what it was like to spend a summer of family vacations after realizing that her father was terminally ill. They are moving and organic, warm and colorful. The show is called “Technicolor Summer.” She wrote quite a nice article on the Huffington Post about the meaning behind the paintings and what it was like to work her way up to the show. I loved this piece in particular, called, “Yosemite Walk I.” Looky:
Kimberly Brooks, “Yosemite Walk I” 2008, Oil on Linen, 24″ x 18″
Kimberly Brooks, “Yosemite Walk I” (Detail), 2008.
I love the color and the loose brush strokes, all the while the people are more refined as if these family members are in ultra-focus against what a blur life has been when we forget how little time we have here on this beautiful Earth.
Technicolor Summer runs until June 14th.
I guess I had a busy week, even though my art progress has been so slow. I have also been writing for a grant, and those take forever when you’re trying to say just the right magic things that will ignite something perfect with the people who are reading it. Thursday night Baby Smith and I went to the Investing in Artists seminar at the Japanese American Cultural Center downtown to get a better perspective as to what CCI is going for. I’ve applied the last 2 rounds with no luck, but I feel I’m at least writing a better grant this time around. It is good practice to do these things. It’s a good way to define your goals, your needs and wants, and that is half the battle really. Today I feel lucky to be alive, in this country, and without catastrophe. Grant or no grant, life is beautiful. And life is sad. Seize the day, damn it.
I do not usually post political tirades on my blog. I like to keep it generally about art, and a sort of document about what I am working on in my studio. AND it is difficult to out myself about this subject when it is completely unpopular amongst every single one of my peers; I have yet to find one artist that isn’t crazy gah-gah over Obama. And for the record, I am not against him. But I am a long time supporter of Clinton. If you want to throw tomatoes at me, that’s fine.
If you think I’m against what Obama stands for, that would be incorrect. I am all for “Change.” I just think a REAL change would be Hillary Clinton as our first woman president. Don’t you think men have run this country long enough? And I’m not only for Clinton because she is a woman. I am for her because she has a long history for fighting for our civil rights, has tried to change the healthcare system when she had a little bit of power during the Clinton administration, and has not given up despite people telling her to quit. She’s specific and cares about people. She has to deal with all the media making her look bad because they are obviously pro-Obama. I love NPR, but they are HARD on Hillary. Every media outlet has been hard on her. People have been harder on her than they have been for any man — and have expected far more from her than they would from a man. When have you ever heard the media disappointed in a male candidate for not showing his “softer side?” Boy was I pissed when Hillary had to cry a little after that whole thing. She shouldn’t have! She’s tough, and so what? It’s such a double standard, and she’s putting up with a lot. She’s the underdog, not Obama. And we just may have a nominee based on 48 states instead of all 50. People seem to be forgetting about that too. How fair is that to Michigan and Florida, not to mention all of us? Shouldn’t everybody’s vote count? Is this the hijack of 2000 all over again?
Anyway, I just wanted to come out of the closet about all this. This morning I was on hillaryspeaksforme.com watching all the videos, and I was moved to type this up. So let the attacks on me begin.