New Projects

Lady Monsters! so i've been working on a painting project. a series in oils that i hope will help improve my technique, there is something about oils that just fascinates me, the way they blend, the smoothness and the texture. i wish i had more time for it.

i'm working in a series i call "Lady Monsters", an idea i've had since working on my masters thesis. i developed a museum exhibit about fashion, specifically the corset and its role in creating shapes/silhouettes that were fashionable during that time. for this i drew a series of illustrations depicting the different silhouettes, i spent a lot of time and research looking at fashion plates to getting just the right look for each decade and they started to invade my mind. the shapes are so strange when they are abstracted. a thesis is such a stressful thing, something that tends to take over your life, i started to dream these images, and these ladies i was drawing began to take on a monstrousness that was hard to define. the facade that these images covered, the insidious nature that "high society" can take on, all culminated in my mind in the form of Lady Monsters.

the first that i have started is "Lady Siren in Green" she is an early 20th century shape, 1903, but the S-curve seemed to lend itself so well to the image i wanted to create, she is a take on the mythological Siren who lured ships onto the rocks with her song. (Picture above, work in progress)

Once i finish it i will put it up on my etsy site, and start the next one, Lady Wasp.

Polished for Daily Wear is a new blog i have started. i recently rediscovered an old love of crazy nail polish. when i was in middle school and high school i was polish obsessed, spending lots of time (with very little technique) mixing my own polish colors both in the bottle and on my nails. the other night i spent about 6 hours watching nail art tutorials on youtube and realized... i still love nail polish and there is so many fun products out there now to help make amazing designs. so i've taken up yet another hobby, heh, i like to think of it as art you carry around with you everyday, which makes me happy :)

and it begins...

as all things in my life seem to, this begins out of frustration.

i, like many many other people, cannot get hired for a job that i want, or that i'm qualified for.

right now i have two jobs, both retail, one at a clothing store and the other at a craft store. the craft store is by far my favorite. i work in the custom frame shop of this particular craft store, and my inner decorator revels in it. today i had a customer who was looking to have a family portrait framed, it was a cute collage pic with kids and father, and the kids were both wearing red and the background was done in white and black. so i pull out a nice muted gray for the top mat, a bright red underneath that perfectly matched the kids' sweaters, and a back for the third mat. it really looked nice, just the right pop of color to accent the pic. but no, she hated it "there is no red in the room, its painted grey and grey-blue, lets try to match that". sounds like the most boring room i can imagine, so we spent the next half an hour looking at different shades of grey to go with this picture that would also "match" the room, cause you just have to match the room. gag. and then she still couldn't decide so her son is going to paint a swatch with the wall color to bring in so we can match it, i mean come on, its not Sherwin Williams, we only have so many mat colors to work with... this after i explained the concept of contrasting colors, and accent colors. sigh.

but that was put to right later by another, more spunky lady, who wanted to order the most colorful things she could, ended up with orange and purple for one and red and purple for another, those are the fun ones, the people who are willing to take a chance and have something that really becomes art on their walls :)

the other thing about the craft store, i have the most awful time not just buying everything. from soap making to knit and crochet, oil painting to glass etching. i want to do it all. i've knitted, tatted, and crocheted for years, there is just something about string, yarn things like that, it just makes sense to me. my grandmother taught me how to knit before i was in school, i picked up tatting while doing living history at a local historic site in high school, and i picked up crochet in college as a quicker alternative to both when one needed an emergency gift. i got to a point where i could sit down and watch a movie and have a scarf at the end of it. so needless to say all of my friends have scarves now and its time to move on. i really need to get back to knitting, you can do so much more with it.

i had some great ideas in grad school (where i studied museology, or museum studies), a whole clothing line designed and never made, i still want to learn bobbin lace, tapestry weaving, spinning, Victorian hair wreaths, and basically anything fiber i can get my hands on, but right now, my current distraction/obsession is oil painting. i have decided to learn. i have some little drawing background, a single class in fashion illustration in undergrad (where i studied fashion design some 8 years ago now...) but i have always wanted to paint, never thought i really could, but after having access to all the art supplies i could ever want i have decided to try. i have one painting almost complete, will post when its done.

my other pursuit is writing, much encouraged by my constant companion and sounding board- b, who is a writer in his own right. i have outlined a story, well a book really.

as i pass my days manning a register or matting and framing art, i am constantly shifting between painting: how to make a field of dead sunflowers in a slightly snowy, hilly great plains setting look interesting, and writing: how to move my characters from distrust and fear to love all without speaking... this is me, right now.