Dream On

Dream On, gouache & acrylic on paper on board, 12” x 12”

My, it's been almost 3 weeks since I've documented. I have been busy, but one of the reasons why I haven't documented is that my camera is in the shop. It's been a while since I noticed that the focus was a little soft, but a few weeks ago (when I was shooting And Along Came a Cloud), half the time the problem was way beyond 'soft focus.' I finally took it to the shop, expecting to get it back in a couple of weeks, but they called yesterday and apparently they have to send the lens back to the manufacturer. So we'll see how it all works out.

So besides not having a camera (the image above was taken with my cell phone), I've also been busy with Portland Open Studios application period (through March 15), and then of course jurying. We'll finish jurying this week, and then the fun part of preparing for the tour itself!

Wait a minute, didn't we JUST do this...?

Anyhow, Dream On is part of the on-going collaboration with Artist X and is in response to her piece called Party On.

The piece started with my initial reaction that I'm typically the wall flower at the party and the lawn mower at the bbq. Then it devolved into this nightmarish scenario (parties do strike some fear in my heart).

While I was working on this, my friend Steve was also documenting it's evolution. Poor guy, all he wanted to do was to come over and make some portraits of me while I was painting, and I went, "say...how about..."

So the camera, lights, computer and disk were set up, a little script was written to remind me to run the camera every two minutes or so. Steve also took some videos. It will be a while before we get to see the end results, but whatever it is, it's been an interesting experiment.

And since this piece was part of the collaboration with Artist X, we've also talked to Artist X about making a little video about her part of the collaboration.

Cosmic Laundry

Cosmic Laundry, 2010, gouache on paper on board

What can be more familiar than having your laundry commingle? I can eat with a stranger at a communal table, I can sit next to a stranger on public transportation, but having my dirty clothes washed with another's dirty clothes implies some kind of a familiarity, intimacy, and friendship.

This is the 6th piece of my collaboration with Artist X. And although she has given me permission to use her name, I rather like the sound of Artist X. You can go to my website though, and see her name, right there in black & white.

I'm responding to her piece in which she had painted two faces. Two faces that can be interpreted either as merging into one, or that one is obscuring the other. The first thought that came to my mind was the Rumi poem—

I, you, she, we.
In the garden of mystic lovers
these are not true distinctions.

There are various translations of this poem, mostly in the first line—some versions go on quite extensively listing all pronouns.

I wanted to follow the composition of Artist X's piece, and here's how it started. You can see the two faces. This is a fairly faithful copy of her composition in terms of locations of features.



From there, I went on to a garden-like space in the clouds. But this failed to get across what I had in mind, which was something that implied the intimacy of “these are not true distinctions”, which then brought us to cosmic laundry.



Although there are details in the finished painting that aren't showing up in the image (there are lots of 'stitching' and 'patches' in the laundry on the line), I actually think this is kind of an ugly painting. But I'm fine with that.

What is rather scary though, is how similar this painting is to Trip, which is documented here. The same curvy line down the middle; the two panels of fabric attached at a single point; the way the space is divided up into clouds and landscape, although the two are reversed; the similar plant shape, although the plant shape in Trip was definitely meant as 'wheat'—both a symbol of the wheat-growing west and a symbol of prosperity and abundance—and the plant shape here was more dictated by following the shapes of lips.

The scary part was that I thought I was trying something different, but turns out, not.

Shut up, sit down, paint!

Turquoise and Lime Green Fight to the Death, gouache on paper on board. Although I might call it Woman and Cat. Or maybe After Our Conversation.

The stars have been aligning for me to come to this point.

As a 49th birthday present to myself, I bought 30 panels (7"x7"...) to do whatever I want with. No agendas, no themes, no influences, no worries. Just me and paint. And I can do whatever I darn wish. And make a mess, if I just can't help myself.

And when Artist X and I met to exchange our last pieces, we had a conversation about whether it was necessary for paintings (and art in general) to have any meaning at all.

Then of course, on Saturday, I spent all day trying to gain some control over the letterpress and not getting very good results at that.

Came Saturday night, I was ready to throw all cautions to the wind and just do whatever I wanted. No agendas, no themes, no influences, no worries. No meanings.

This is done on a 12"x12" panel. (I'm not finished prepping the 7"x7" panels yet. Most of them have been gesso'ed, but none have paper mounted.) I'm not quite sure if I'm finished or not. Time will tell.

(Credits: the wonderful panels come from Art Substrates; the 7x7=49 is inspired by gl's 6x6=36 birthday pastry last year...)

Thoughts on the DNA piece

I think I'm finished:



Again, this piece is a response to an exchange with Artist X's piece, titled "Pacific Rim."

Stop reading if you prefer to interpret things for yourself.

It started with a color coded DNA sequence (mine). My mitochondrial DNA puts me in Haplogroup D, which is shown crossing over the Bering Strait into the Americas. Nothing surprising there, but I was surprised that the map did not show the group going into China/Japan/Korea as well, which of course it did.

Over the DNA sequence, I layered a fish that was half Northwest Coastal Indian salmon and half Chinese carp (with a lotus fan tail) with a map of the Pacific Rim. After that, I put down some waves, which I did not like and backed out (at least insofar as it is possible when you work in gouache).

Today, in went two figures—one of a coast Indian and one of a Chinese, holding what looks like a net but really is a very long umbilical cord. (That it also looks somewhat like a bridge is intentional.) The text is the letter my mother wrote to my American mom prior to sending me to the US. The circular space between the tail and the body of the fish is meant to evoke earth.

DNA

Remember this piece that many people thought was a quilt?

Over the last couple of days, it's gone from that to this:



To this:



And now finally to this big mess:



Even the cat thinks I should quit now before it gets any worse.

A self portrait?

I've started on my next trade piece with Artist X. The piece I'm responding to was titled 'Pacific Rim,' and here's how my response is starting:



It's a self portrait of sorts (hey, you can't get much more 'Pacific Rim' than me)—it's my mitochondrial HVR I sequence (whatever that means!). It came as a very long string of letters broken up into ten & half lines, using a variable width font which made counting the sequence rather frustrating. I did not realize that some lines were 1 letter short, which made my count 3 off. I had originally thought the number was a rather beautiful 24x24-4, which made the 12"x12" square panel just perfect. But alas, not quite. [And oops, now I see a few mistakes...fix tomorrow.]

In any case, I had this done through the Genographic Project a few years back and found out that my DNA puts me in Haplogroup D, which on their map is shown as the group that comes out of Africa, travels through the Middle East, Central Asia (no wonder I feel such affinities for both), up into Siberia, and then crosses the Bering Strait into the Americas. The map shows the group fanning out across the Americas but it does not show that the group goes south into China/Korea/ Japan at all, although their audio presentation says that they do. See what I mean (I hope I don't get into trouble for using this image):



The piece was very hard to get started—trying to follow this very long string of letters and coloring in the squares to match. The first color was particularly difficult and as you can see, I made lots of mistakes. Here I've already added the 2nd color:



In real life, the first two colors were alizarin red and turquoise and looks much more red, white, and blue than the picture here shows, although that was NOT what I was aiming for. It was a complete accident, but the colors are a bit off in the photo anyhow and doesn't look quite so July Fourth anymore.

It's a long ways from being completed, and I probably won't finish it before I leave for The Dalles for the week. I have some preparations to do tomorrow.

On my July 2 (last Thursday) trip to The Dalles

I went out to visit my senior on Thursday, trying to squeeze in a bit more 'familiarizing' time before I show up for a whole week next week. I took a bunch of the old family photos as well as some more recent photos. I was very surprised that he recalled as little as he did. But maybe he was not having a good day. We'll see how he does next week. He was excited when I told him it was the Fourth of July weekend coming up.

Home-owner duty calls

Our house & yard are getting dangerously close to looking like the town dump (notice how I carefully said 'our house...') so I really had to do something about it today. Remember all the storms we had over the winter? The snow, the winds? That left a giant pile of Douglas Fir branches on our deck, and now that it's the middle of April, I finally just got around to sweeping that all up. (The driveway got done a few days ago.)

We also lost quite a few plants, and several died way back although didn't die-die. So I pruned back a lot of the dead stuff—And whose idea was it to plant so many thorny things anyhow?—although there's still a lot more to go.

We did even more home-owner type stuff today, if you can believe it—we replaced a window screen! Like we bought tools and a roll of screen, and took out the old window screen onto which the kitty has made her mark over the years, and installed the new screen. Following directions and everything!

Lets see, what's happening in the studio—trimmed paper for the fundraising print, had a really long meeting about the 2009 Portland Open Studios tour guide, met with the critique group for our new collaborative book project. I was planning to start working on the fundraising print today, but now I'm quickly running out of steam.

And also about the latest painting—when I looked at it again the next morning, it felt really finished, so I decided to just stare at it for a few more days before I did anything else. And now it really does feel finished, and I'm also going to stay with the title 'Two.' It was part of the original intent, and also the piece from Artist X that I was responding to was titled 'WTO...,' and although the anagram was a complete coincidence, I like it too much to pass it up.

I'm not sure what happened, but here we are

So here's how the painting ended up today (last seen here):



I'm not quite sure what this is all about, it was one of those "one thing leads to another" deals — "oh, I think I'll do this...," "hmmm, this looks like this-something-or-other, so I guess I'll do this next."

I'm not quite finished yet, but finished enough that I can still meet tomorrow morning with Artist X. We'll see what she says...

Two (temporary title)

I finally started working on my exchange with Artist X. So this is in response to her piece that she did in response to my Prosperity Soup to be Eaten in the Dark, which I finally finished. (It's not too different from where I last left it, but some of the details are brought out a bit more.)

This was where it started yesterday. As always, I love ambiguity in interpretation—is the braid menacingly wrapping itself around the obelisk and about to rip it out of the ground, or is the sword about to cut the braid off? I'm carrying forward the idea I used in Trip, in addition to responding to her piece.



The idea that you don't really have the two choices listed above as the two are quite connected to each other is starting to take shape. The egg shapes are forming too, and no, it's not because it's Easter weekend, it's an actual response to her piece. She used egg forms in her piece, although they were without the shells, just yokes floating in egg whites. Here I've put them back together again. But I'm not liking the curliques.



Where I left it for tonight: the curliques are backed out (as much as that's possible in this medium), and the peony is in place. Right now I'm thinking that all four of the eggs need to be whole eggs, but I'll sleep on it.



Although now that I'm looking at it again, I'm liking the curliques better...

A rich experience

I'm finding that I'm constantly thinking about my exchange pieces with Artist X. There are so many directions I can go, so many possibilities. In fact, the process has been so engaging that I'm thinking of making myself an assignment of picking out a piece from the monthly showings and doing a response to that piece. (Although, it's not like I have a lot of extra time on my hands at the moment. Had to turn down a logo job yesterday too.)

And this is likely to be the last picture of me with long(ish) hair:

Trip

"Trip" is the title of my 2nd piece for the exchange, which is my response to Artist X's first piece in the exchange.

When we met in early Feb for our 1st exchange (during which I gave her a printout of Prosperity Soup to be Eaten in the Dark), my initial response to her piece was "oh, wheat!"

So there I go again, it's always about food, isn't it? (Yes, I do spend an extraordinary amount of time thinking about, consuming, and then trying to burn up food.)

As we chatted about her piece, her intentions became more clear and it was so NOT about food (although she said she was happy to hear that my first reaction was "wheat"). The idea of the zipper came to me at the time and I stuck with it. Part of the thing with the zipper is that I have been having trouble with my winter coat which has a broken zipper that needs to be repaired. It's sometimes very frustrating trying to put on my coat, trying to zip up the darn thing.

And I looked up "wheat" as a symbol, and ta-dah, it's also a symbol of prosperity, in Christian traditions (the peony being prosperity in Chinese traditions). So of course I had to do this image—the queue being caught in the zipper that's trying to hold it together. The zipper that moves along a predefined track also references the idea of progress (or perhaps the illusion of progress in this particular case). I wanted the hourglass shape to signify time passing.







Artist X and I met on Thursday to review our images, and where I saw hourglass for time passing, she saw a female form. Which in hindsight is of course obvious, but until she said it, I saw it first as just an hourglass, and second, as a very stylized head on drooping shoulders (and a very skinny neck). Very much like some of the Chinese peasant paintings of recent years with the women depicted with large heads and skinny necks. Like this image from Boxing Dragons:



I might fuss with the mountains on the upper right some more...it's starting to look like a pyramid to me. (And now that I'm thinking about it, one of my first reactions to the piece she brought this time was "minaret"...hmmm.)

Prosperity Soup to be Eaten in the Dark

I'm catching up on some stuff. I had said that I wouldn't say anything about the collaboration for a while, and so I didn't. But now I really need to catch up, or things are going to start changing in my head and I'm going to lose track of what's going on.

This was exchange #1 with Artist X that was due early Feb. We exchanged images but each kept our originals. And as it turned out, I wasn't quite done with it...two issues—it still needed to be mounted, and I wasn't sure what was happening yet with the flower-tiger transition. And now a month later, it still needs to be mounted (which is not entirely my fault), and therefore, I've not finished it. (That the flower-tiger transition looks like a doily or a saddle is waiting to be fixed.)

Anyhow, here's how it evolved over the days that I worked on it. Freshly off my Superfoodland! game piece, I was still thinking about wealth, status, and their relationship to what we eat, and so I'm still on that topic here:







In our chat, it was interesting to hear Artist X's take on it. It was actually very similar although from a different angle—that of male dominance and power. All those things are related, and tiger's penis as aphrodisiac is directly about male power. The interesting thing is that Artist X did not know it was a tiger penis that was stabbing the tiger in the back when she saw it as about male power.

So the details—peony, a symbol of prosperity; I also wanted the stylized stamen to look like the oil that floats on top of a bowl of soup. (I love the patterns you can make playing with the oil on broth.) The tiger penis is stabbing the tiger in the back, although several people I showed it to thought I should make that more obvious.

So, that's where I am with this piece.

(Oh yeah, and on Wed, I picked up the panels I ordered, so will be able to mount this piece soon.)

The next Relay Replay book

Just a quick note to say that I had another meeting with the family of my next senior today. Had a terrific talk, made a lot of progress in terms of how we would approach the project, have a rough schedule in place. I'll be starting to work on a fundraiser print in a couple of weeks. Spent the rest of the day working on my exchange with Artist X. Another good day, although I'm pretty certain that I'm going to back out my last change from last night. But I'm going to sleep on it another night.

Hard to change gear

Having spent the last week thinking about the painting that I'll be exchanging with Artist X on Thursday (in between all the other business/admin stuff I was doing), I finally put brush to paper today. And it went REALLY well. So far. It's probably the most smoothly going piece I've ever worked on. Although I am right now thinking about backing out the last thing I did before I quit for the night.

I guess all that thinking pays off. Although quite often I find too much thinking is not necessarily good—I get it figured out to a point that I no longer feel the need to work on the piece...it's finished, in my head. Again, I can't show pictures at this point yet, but it does have a title—Trip. (The last piece from this collaboration was Prosperity Soup to Be Eaten in the Dark.)

Trip is being painting on paper already mounted on gesso'ed board, and it's behaving differently than just plain paper unmounted. I used gel medium to mount the paper to board, and the medium must've infiltrated enough of the paper to make the water-based gouache behave differently. I'm liking what it's doing though, it adds a nice texture that almost makes it look like an aquatint in places. The pigment is also lifting off much easier than when the paper is unmounted, which will take a bit of getting used to.

But anyhow, now that I'm all into the painting and everything, I'm gonna have to get into book making gear for this week. I'm meeting with a family tomorrow about a Relay Replay book, I'll be meeting with my critique group about starting a collaborative book project, I'm picking up supplies for a class I'm teaching on Friday, and, of course, teaching on Friday.

"Prosperity Soup"

That's the temporary title for the piece I'm exchanging with Artist X tomorrow. Actually, we're just exchanging printouts of the images and meeting to talk. I'm still not finished. It's been 2 days of 8 hours of painting each day, my eyes have had it. Images to come, eventually.

Studio remodel, phase I complete!

In the morning, after the rug was removed:



In the evening, after the floor went in:



Several people have been surprised that I chose such a dark color. Well, most light color laminate or wood floors tend to be yellowy, and I'm just not that crazy about a yellow floor. Another corner of the room:



There were a few unexpected hiccups—many of the Pergo boards had slight defects in them! Ugh. I'm not happy about that. So there are 3 boxes of the boards that have been set aside. I'll have to see if I can exchange them. But there's no guarantee that, even if there are more boxes available for me to exchange, they won't have similar defects. Ugh again. I guess I can at least console myself that I did not pay a whole lot for them.

While the floor was being installed, I worked on the painting that I'll be trading with Artist X on Thursday. It's not going so well, and that's all I have to say about it.

Helen came over after dinner and we worked on the banner for the Food Confessional, this is for the Cedar Crest show. At least that's going pretty well. I'll need to get back to the game board really soon now.

Look at this mess

Tomorrow, the floor is going in in the 'new' half, so all the furniture is now in the old half (and the bathroom too):



And here's the big empty room where the kitty can spread out:



Fortunately, I can still find my way to the table where I'm working on my collaboration with Artist X, who shall remain nameless for now, as requested; and also as requested, no images of work in progress. This is important, being able to get to the table, because I hope to be working on it all day tomorrow while the guy's putting in the new floor.

And on the Cedar Crest show—I've been trying to figure out what containers to use to hold the blueberry chips. Finally decided that they have to be clear glass as to not obstruct the painted blueberries. I searched around on ebay for a bit but didn't see just the right things, so I checked out Value Village this afternoon (a thrift shop). And wouldn't you know it, I found 4 little glass cups and a drink 'thingie' (I don't think it's a wine glass, but I don't know what it is).

The 4 little glass cups are kind of in the way of the utensils, so maybe I won't set them on the board itself but rather put them on the sides. No, the board is not finished yet, but I have to finish the painting to trade with Artist X by Thursday, so the game board is on hold until I get the painting done.

What a crazy week

This is turning out to be the crazy week of appointments.

Yesterday, met with Ruth who wants me to work with her husband to do a Relay Replay project. We had a great chat, and I hope this will happen. More to come on this project if things do start to happen.

From there, it was to meet Artist X to finalize how we're going to do our painting collaboration. This is something we started talking about last June but put off because of Relay Replay. It also took us a while to nail down a format since she works in oil and I work in gouache, and oil and water don't mix. But I think we have a workable format, at least to get us started. First piece, due on Feb 1! Yikes, that's really tight, considering how many other deadlines I already have for Feb 1. But I'm determined to make it.

The afternoon was spent at the library, doing my volunteer gig. I find that such a nice break from work, or talking about work.

Today, met with Katy to talk about updating her website. Met with Lane to help her work through a project she wants to do. Then it was to deliver the Relay Replay books out to Hillsboro. The Cultural Arts Center is letting me add the Relay Replay books to the Intersect/Parallel show midway through the show. When I got there, I learned that several people have already been there to see the Relay Replay books, but I was told that they were happy to see what was there even though they didn't see the RR books.

And believe it or not, that pretty much took the whole day. I did manage to catch up on some emails on the critique group collaboration.

Tomorrow, just 1 appointment, but an important one. I still need to pack up the books for it. Friday, 3 more appointments. Saturday, a full-day seminar. I haven't worked on my game piece at all...and the week is more or less gone.