Musings, my muse.

Hello to my vast artistic fan-club and followers…

This should probably be about 4 different posts, but I am going to try to coherently jam it into one.

A couple of days ago I was stretching canvases in my dad’s high school art classroom.  We actually decided to use linen, because Mom had some really fun sepia floral patterned sheets set aside for an art-project – gotta love my family.  With a little research and two coats of gesso, I am really pleased with the decision.  I saved about $300 and think that the new process goes very well with my organic/recycling aspect of my work.  Plus, it makes the process a lot more important too.  Dad was telling me about his theory that stretching/preparing a canvas is a right of passage that an artist has to go through in order to earn the right to create.  This coupled with a meditation that I recently picked up from my friend who is currently visiting India (I’ll let you read it), it was a really zen experience.

I gave a copy of Fr. John Dear’s “A Persistent Peace” to Dad for Christmas, so he’s on this giant peace & social justice kick, which is really fun to watch.  Thus, as we were listening to the Peter Gabriel station on Pandora, I got a pretty good synopsis of Genesis’s (the band, not the book in the Bible) history of protest songs.  Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers” is actually pretty much about Wild Children.  Its interesting how I forget that lots of people before me have transposed an anti-war, anti-social-injustice ideology to a vision of wild-ish children.  I was thinking about redemption stories, utopian worlds where children save the day, live happily with each other… of course, my favorites drift to the top.  The Lost Boys in Peter Pan, the poacher children in Robin Hood, lands of pure imagination like Where the Wild Things Are.  Also, for those of you who don’t know Henry Kelly by Kimya Dawson, look it up!

My mom and I were recently reading “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins, and the idea of the Mockingjay is particularly appealing to me as well, sort of that rebellious and ferociously loving spirit that the Wild Children need to be infused with.  While Mom was reading aloud, I compiled some ideas on a series of old envelopes, etc.

One thing I specifically discovered is that this needs to come out of a place of childlike thinking.  If I start getting to a more practical, grown-up mental state, I start to wonder if my children have a purpose, or if they are going to get bored.  But, if I shift into being ten again…remembering those summers of playing in trees…it quickly becomes evident that imagination is endless and that really the limits of what these children can do is non-existant.  And that is an exciting discovery.

I needed to further explore specifically facial expressions and body language and settled on an attitude of slight vulnerability (these are tender, feeling creatures) yet filled with bravery, daring, competence, wonder, joy and BEWILDERMENT (my favorite word, my favorite world).  They will be dancing, discovering, magic sewing, endlessly playing.

I want them to have black eyes, windows to the universe, with tiny white flecks of depth.

I played with gender a little bit.  I kind of want it to be amorphous, like it doesn’t really matter, and therefore rid the implications of one or the other.  If all the children have long, straggly hair, or short choppy haircuts, and are young, it shouldn’t be too hard to achieve this.

Other notes-

Role of animals?  (Like the Peaceable Kingdom series)

Particular focus on clothes- torn, wrinkly, costumes?

Different religious symbols of God.

(Haha, this is a direct quote from my notes) Jewelery? NO! Gold=Blood.

Instead- cloth and natural ornaments. berries & sticks & feathers.  (very Native American- not wasteful.  Use every part of the buffalo (;)

Flower dolls! (Did anyone else use to make these out of hollyhocks?)

Big emphasis on hands and feet.  Running, interacting, creating. Graffiti.

I had a whole series of kids in crude headdresses carrying pots on their heads drawn up and then decided that they shouldn’t have pots.  They would just drink out of the river.  I still flip-flop on that though.  We’ll see.

Some artist research/illustrations of the idea/a photo shoot with my muse:

I loved this print by Stern mostly because the Wild Children idea grew out of ruins, and it speaks to the power of imagination.  (This is currently my profile picture on facebook. (:)

Ben Duke

MY NEW VERY FAVORITE- Jackie Tileston

These are some of the winners from the photoshoot I did with my sister “pretending” to be a Wild Child.

Ha, so there you go.  Until next time…

I am part or particle of God. -Emerson

I had the most glorious morning yesterday.

I went on a run/adventure in the cool fall nearly rain, and ended up finding a bunch of glass bottles and carrying them to the studio while they marvelously clinked and squeaked together.  The rain, the squeaky glass, the everything (as my sister likes to say, “Listen to this, and think about EVERYTHING.”) got into my heart and allowed me to reach the place I needed to in the Studio…

Things have been out of control.  I’ve been hopping around frantically like a flea and then crashing like, as my friend Cassie would say, like a soggy potato chip (ie. a potato).  I was in desperate need of fall, and now that it’s here, I’m doing a lot better in its cozy, dreamy, mysterious arms.

(Balancing eggs on the equinox in honor of my mother.)

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera when I was over at the Studio, but I will share some updates and then some goofy other pictures from the weekend.

1. GOOD BRUSHES = LOVE.  I had been using this cheap set that I got for free at the Art Majors Meeting, and I finally got sick of them and got out some of the old trusty ones and just wanted to die from relief.  Trying to paint with a crappy brush is like trying to run on smokers lungs.

2. Have really gotten into the mood of collages 2 and 3.  2 captures so many emotions, the idea of embracing the environment, stepping out and being part of the world that we are meant to be.  I got caught up in the idea of plants made out of maps- how adventure is intrinsic to nature.  3 is taking on the memory of a particularly beautiful day by the ocean where my mom and I got way behind on a walk along the beach and she talked to me about her earliest memories involving an apple tree that was in her back yard.

Getting pretty excited… artist research/work updates coming soon!  Until then…

Here’s an abstract that I did, oh jeez, two years ago at this point.  One of my favorite things that I’ve ever painted.  It currently hangs in my living room.  I like to rotate it once in a while.

Here’s the clover in my living room window from the angle that I was looking at it while doing Yoga on Saturday- I thought it and the abstract made an interesting duo.

This was an extremely silly part of my weekend.  (Which was entirely made up of extremely silly elements.  Lots of jazz and dancing and windows were involved.)  This is a picture of a shoe, my roommate’s keys and a spatula that some of our guy friends froze into a pitcher in our freezer.  We found it today, laughed really hard, and decided to throw it out the window.

It was awesome.

Happy Monday everyone!  Extensive art updates soon, I promiiiissssseeeee.