Studio Monday: Reworking the Past

I'm happy to report I finished two pieces this weekend - one small study for fun and one I've been working on for almost six months. I plan to do a special blog about the latter once I have decent pics and it's uploaded to the site. Part of my goal is to finish paintings so I can start new ones. This goal involves a piece from my senior year of college. 

At the some point in the fall semester of 2010, I started working on a self portrait - this is back when I would paint on the raw canvas, no gesso, no stretcher bars - just me and paint usually on the floor. I miss painting this way. Low and behold while writing this, I found how this piece started:

Sometimes I wish I would just stop working a piece or leave them unfinished like this. There's so much beauty in development. 

I remember moving away from this style after a critique, left untouched, but knowing me, I have a hard time tossing pieces. Most of the time I try to salvage the piece, even if that means painting over. At the time of the critique it was already stretched so in theory I could remove the canvas and reuse the bars. Almost six years later, my parents brought me more stuff from home. I stared at it for a minute not sure what to do, but after posting the pic and getting feedback on Facebook (like my generation does), I figured, let's see where she can go now. 

Here she is, still a work in progress, the before and current, hopefully to be completed in the next few months:

Clearly I'm having a reinvention tour. 

Today's motivation music brought to you by Dark Tranquility's album "Fiction".

Thoughtful Tuesday - I'm a Painter, but I Don't Paint Like That

I didn't paint much at all this weekend, and sometimes that will happen. To make up for no Studio Monday post (I was busy baking, cleaning and errands), I decided to create Thoughtful Tuesday where I simply blog about... thoughts... related to art. Yeah........ let's go with that. *excuses*

For the longest time, I struggled with my art to the point that I felt like an failure. I even remember one studio day in college, mentally freaking out, trying to decide what I should switch my major to if it wasn't too late. Part of this is my tendency to a perfectionist nature. When you say you want to be an artist as a kid, people like to say, "Oh, you'll be the next Picasso!" When you're older, people hear you're an artist, and think you should be John Singer Sargent. Likely, this is the culture I was surrounded by - the expectation you can paint realistically or you're just putting blobs on canvas. The truth is I wanted to paint like Vermeer or Van Gogh, but fell in love with O'Keefe and Kahlo. I try to paint realistically, I'd love to do a realistic portrait someday... but it's just not me. At the end of the day and the part of the point of this blog, is to be me. I paint what I paint, I do what I do.... and slowly, I get better and better at doing what I do. 

Studio Monday: Intro

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." - Pablo Picasso

Or to add, graduate from college with an art degree and not in an art related field. The solution to the problem is find time and space to make art especially if it helps to maintain sanity. This leads me to this blog/website.

Hi everyone - if you are reading this first blog entry, it's likely because you're a friend on social media or I told you, "HEY I HAVE A BLOG! WITH A REAL DOMAIN NAME!" - seriously, this is exciting for me. This site is still as work in progress as I find the best way to organize my artwork, which you may check out in the Paintings and Prints links. 

My goal with this site is to give myself an outlet in the corner of the internet to post my work and my thoughts about my work. That may sound a bit selfish (probably is), but more than one person has expressed interest in the stories/thoughts that go along with my work. Most may say, "let the art speak for itself." There is a point to that, but I also love to hear the stories of why something was created - where does the inspiration come from? So here it is - my Studio Monday blog, the day off when I try to get as much artwork done as possible. My goal is to post SOMETHING every Monday, even if it's not done that day. I hope this site will help to hold me accountable and help motivate me to keep doing what I love. 

So, for the first Studio Monday, here's a pic of what I worked on this past week: 

View fullsize

Apologies for the awful lighting - the bottom left piece was finished last week as an FYI.

I have several works in progress that I hope to finish by the end of the month/beginning of April. Once I get a few more done, I can move on to the multiple series of ideas I have that will hopefully become part of large bodies of work. That wraps up today's first Studio Monday post. NOTE: My eyes are hurting likely due to allergies so please excuse any typos or grammar errors. 

Today's motivation music brought to you by Metric, albums "Fantasies" and "Pagans in Vegas".