Paterson painting again

I photographed a few more of these to send to Kerfe. She offered to photoshop these pieces into one page, like her talismans. Kerfe is way more advanced than I am technologically. I guess it’s because she is younger than I am!

African Penguin

Who knew there were penguins in Africa?

Oil spills and overfishing of food sources have reduced the penguin population in South Africa and Namibia from three million to 50,000 in the last century.

Another Paterson painting

I found this one in my portfolio, done in the same series as previously posted. I really like the simplicity of the composition. It’s made of my Grandfather’s old textiles with some ads from a 1950 Paterson Morning Call in which the textiles were wrapped.

Barbie

I just finished this collage which I titled “Divine Embrace”, after the Tibetan sculpture that inspired it.  When I went to pick a head from my collection of cut out faces, Barbie just seemed to fit the best.  She is a cultural goddess I suppose, much more than the anonymous humans I had to choose from.

I also used Barbie in this one, “Birth of the Hero”, that I did awhile ago.  The butterflies reminded me that I’ve been seeing a lot of butterflies here in the city this year.  Everything is really green because of all the rain we’ve been having, so maybe that’s part of the reason why.

These are for sale in my etsy shop:  https://www.etsy.com/shop/handandeyeand

Textile Design

Another oldie from the Fashion Institute of Technology. My style stayed very similar to my painting style which is probably why I did not succeed in the field. I will always remember and respect the Asian women in my class who had the ability to paint for hours without ever looking up from the piece. I am way too antsy to do that.

Communication

Hands, not faces:
don’t look at each other.  Smile
parenthetically.

Faces

I’ve always liked to draw faces.  These are painted, but really more like drawing-with-a-paintbrush, which I like to do too.

Over the past 30 years or so I’ve been trying to get back to doing art on a regular basis.  I found this woman in a sketch book that reflects the stops and starts:  I would hopefully write down the year and begin and then lose the thread.
1989  7 pages done in various media
1992  4 pages, mostly drawn with brush as this one is
2010  4 drawings

And now in 2014, so far I’ve done 9 drawings.  My goal is to fill the sketchbook this time, before 2015 rolls around.

I did the painting of the man above last week, and I think it complements the woman from 1992.

And I like to draw hands too.

 

The Dreamers

I knocked this out yesterday. It is just a stream of consciousness kind of little painting. My love of silver gouache knows no bounds and I wanted to try scribbling on the silver tree branches with pencil as in the plaid design from the day before. When you start painting again you realize how much fun it is so even if what is coming out is basically crap, it doesn’t matter. That is what I forgot during the years of no painting.

I Was Born

I wanted to talk about my collage that melts into Nina’s painting on the Home page of this blog.  When Nina sent me a photo of her painting, I was startled:  it was so close to a vivid dream I had just had that she might have been painting directly from my mind.  So I definitely thought we should use it on our Home page, and it seemed to fit with a collage I had done that I titled “I Was Born”.

This is another of my comments on an artist’s work, the artist here being Yayoi Kusama.  I knew the book I had worked from, but didn’t remember the name of the painting, so I took the book out of the library again, along with another about Kusama.  Turns out the watercolor I referred to doesn’t have a title, but it still looks inspirational to me.

I added embroidery to this collage, which I thought was appropriate to the quality of Kusama’s lines.  Which will make me digress again (always layers of thought with me).

I began stitching on paper after taking an embroidery class at the Textile Arts Center in Manhattan taught by Joetta Maue.  Joetta did teach us a few different stitches–I already knew and used chain stitch and blanket stitch–but mostly what I learned from her class was to expand my ideas of what stitching could mean and where it could go.  I had never considered embroidering on paper, but it certainly works well with collage.  For one class project I also did embroidery on a plastic bag; looking at it now, it seems to work so well beside Kusama’s painting that I feel I must try another one soon.

Yayoi Kusama was a child in Japan during World War II; she came to the United States in the 1950’s and then returned to Japan in the 1970’s.  She has suffered from hallucinatory visions since childhood, and voluntarily lives in a psychiatric hospital in Japan, with a studio for working nearby.  Her art can be seen as a way to keep her inner and outer selves from losing their hold on the world.  She has always worked obsessively, sometimes doing 50+ watercolors in one day: “I make them and make them and keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process.”

I especially love not only her watercolors but also the Joseph Cornell-inspired painting/collages.  This one reminds me of Nina’s work.

my reviews on Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/471719440
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/974875228

Joetta Maue’s blog:  http://littleyellowbirds.blogspot.com/

Textile Arts Center:  http://www.textileartscenter.com/

Some inspiration from Kerfe

Kerfe sent me a photo of a dress with an out-of-the-box plaid design. I ran with it and this little design came out. The interesting thing about painting is that something new will appear to you. In this case it was scribbling on the silver paint with a pencil: it gave me an idea for another piece. These little paintings are not serious work, by the way. They are my entry back into doing art–a process, if you will. Kerfe started this blog for that purpose and I think it may be working. Thank you, Kerfe!