Moving on

For now, it's done. I am moving on to the final "impossible" painting. I can't see this picture moving in any other direction, but I feel like it was a breakthrough for me. Who knows, I may go back to it, but for right now I am going to let it sit.

For tomorrow (thursday) I am going to work on paper. I don't usually work on paper, and when I do, it's a little traumatizing. I get nervous painting on something that is somewhat foreign, but I think it will be good to try, seeing as how it is going to be part of my impossible installation/painting anyway. In the studio, I am going to start with the paper and with the ideas I have from this last painting, and I will see where it goes from there. At home, I want to start doing another stop-motion animation. I imagine painted "scenes" of three different rooms/spaces/environments. In each frame I am thinking of suspending, or hanging a different hybrid form. Fish-lady would be one of them, and I am also thinking of a half-pig half-man. I want to make a short film that can be played on a loop. I think I might start creating characters and scenes tonight.

I have also been working on writing up a new artist statement. Here is what I have so far.

The pictures I create feel uncomfortable but necessary.

In my current work, I am investigating the spirit of hybridity and what the significance of half-human forms might mean in contemporary art. In retrospect, many different cultures and artists have used hybrids in art and I think it is often used similarly, perhaps revealing something about the human experience.

Though I am making public pictures, they are private and concern my personal psyche. I am interested in creating confronting images, forcing the viewer into an understanding. I feel a certain amount of animosity towards the figures I am portraying, which at the moment is a half fish-half human form, but I also feel empathy. I am not particularly concerned with a specific hybrid, but the significance of them in general.

These hybrids are the manifestation of chaos; they “naturally” come from disorganization and do not fit inside of any category but their own.  These images allow us to confront fears about ourselves that we cannot confront in a “normal” fashion. 

fish-lady paintings, continued.

"And you're a good mummy" - 36"x48"

Current work in painting right now. I am completely loving it. Today in the studio, there were so many good vibes going around. I felt like everyone had a great painting day. This is a work that I just barely started on Tuesday night, so in just two days I feel like I have made a lot of progress. 

This fish image has been away for me to immerse myself in representational while still thinking abstract. Since I keep painting decapitated, cannibalistic, mummified fish-hybrids, my fiance keeps asking me, "Why do you hate fish??" kidding of course. I don't hate fish (I have three pet fish, actually!), it has just been an image that I have latched onto. It has opened a lot of doors for me in my paintings. I really like that I am creating an environment in this painting. I am trying to get away from using too many lassnigy colors, and so far I think it's a success (her influence still present of course). I need to work on the fish head some more, and maybe the environment. Before I mummified the fish, I felt like something needed to go on in the space around it. Now I don't feel that way so much. Conceptually I am confused/excited about the marionette/puppet theme. It kind of came out of no where, but at the same time, it's always been in me. I have been meddling in all things "controlling" for sometime. Now I am physically controlling an object in my painting. It raises questions as to who is doing the controlling,  and who or what the hybrid fish represents. Also I am wondering what good it is to play puppet show with a mummified character (hence it is not movable). These are all things I have been thinking about during this process. One more thing...I really like that the hybrid is set to look like it's dangling in front of the picture plane, and not technically inside it. Matt brought that up and I think I would like to experiment with that idea some more in later paintings. He also made a good comment today about the content of my picture. I was really fighting the "body" of the hybrid and I was saying to him, "Oh I keep having things pop in my head, like mummifying this fish..." and he says something to the affect of, "What would lassnig do? She would just make up an appendage, don't think about what should be but rather what it is." He is right, she would just do it, and that's how she gets those 'strange' images. I see paintings all the time from different artists and wonder, where do they come up with this stuff?? That's exactly how. They are just doing it, the image comes to their head and they put it down. 

This is a painting I started maybe a week or two ago. I haven't touched it since the day I started it and I'm not quite sure where I will take it, but it's an ok start. 

I went to the library the other day and got some really awesome books to read. One on Francis Bacon, R.B. Kitaj, and also a newer collection of painting abstraction. I am excited to read through them and gather some more ideas. 

Bombardment in the city

 I have been thinking all day.

This is the "egg" I am referencing

I don't really know where it began. I think maybe it all began with my Pegasus egg. Yep, that's it. If you don't remember, I made a painting back in Spring that gave birth (no pun intended) to the idea of protection in the form of a city and an egg. I call it Pegasus' egg. Again, why a mythological horse named pegasus would have an egg I have no idea, but that's not the point...

From this "battle scene," I felt bombardment in the city, and what I was creating was protection. I was working to protect this strange egg formation (sunny-side up).
Protection.

Let me back up.

I enjoy painting figures.
I want to incorporate figures into my work.
I prefer to paint woman figures.
I basically associate (in my mind) all women figures with mothers, the maternal, and fertility.
I have a certain disposition about these three things.

Do we see where this is going? For some reason today I have become extremely interested in maternalism, behaviors of mothers, and the characteristics of mothers. Not even of motherhood specifically, but what makes mothers, mothers. This is a semi-new thought process, as in I have thought about it for awhile but have never written it down. I am trying to make this idea exist by writing it out. It's not a complete thought yet. I was going to mull over this idea in my sketchbook for awhile, but I figured I might as well search for my answers publicly.

Is it feminism? Is it maternal loss? What it is, I don't know.

I do know that I have a lot of reading to do.

Here's what good ole' wikipedia has to say about Maternalism:

Maternalism refers to an attitude or a policy reminiscent of the non-hierarchic pattern of a family based on matriarchy.

In this form of system, women use society in order to protect children from unnecessary harm. This system is the opposite of paternalism; which refers to a policy that resembles θε hierarchic pattern of a family based on patriarchy. Opponents of paternalism (and proponents of maternalism), such as John Stuart Mill, claim that liberty supersedes safety in terms of actions that only affect oneself.

I also found an interesting article on Neo-Maternalism.

Fay Ku, and why I love Quaytman

Last night was the Fay Ku artist lecture at Weber State. She is amazing, and I absolutely loved her work. She does large-scale drawings with graphite, ink and some paper collage. I loved the way she talked about her work. She is very intelligent person and has a lot of knowledge of art history, greek mythology, and she is also really in-tune with world events. I really need to make myself informed of those things, especially of world news. Her work seemed so precise, but at the same time it was open to a lot of interpretation. It seemed like she had a reason for every mark and color, which was really spectacular. She made me really think about how I need to stay on top of my research. I also thought Fay was just adorable and very funny. She can admit when she was too tired to work, or just couldn't produce a new concept. I think that was good for myself and the other art students to hear. Sometimes it's ok NOT to reinvent the wheel.

Woodmen II by Fay Ku

See What You Do by Fay Ku

On a related note, In painting class yesterday, I think I realized why I finally love R.H. Quaytman's work. She and I are on polar ends of the spectrum when it comes to art making, but she is my idol. I love how archival she is, and that she is so intuitive to the context of her work and she has a meaning for everything. She is constantly diving into texts, images and filling her head with all kinds of information. She also sometimes copies images from other sources, which was kind of cool to think about. It gave me validation for copying my own small forms and enlarging them to a bigger canvas. So in all, I love the way Quaytman thinks and how that affects her work. I want to be that kind of artist. I don't just want to be skillful, I want to be a thinker like her, and like Fay Ku. Of course, I like the work Quaytman puts out as well.

Distracting Distance, Chapter 16 by R.H. Quaytman