Life returning to normal, sort of

Getting ready for the 4 Squared Exhibit has been a challenge, but it's actually going better than I had hoped. I was able to develop ideas for 16 little 6 x 6 paintings in a week, and after about three weeks, I have finished 12 paintings. Two are almost done, and two remain with just the backgrounds in. Hopefully I will be totally done with painting these by early next week.

So today, I finally took a day off from the studio. (partly due to a migraine and to take my cat to the vet).

Despite the time pressure, this project has been alot of fun. Combining creatures that are compatible colorwise, as well as matching up creatures that could both exist in a similar environment, was a mental challenge. For example, I combined an antelope head on an ostrich. To me, this made sense. I found an antelope with a similar color scheme to a male ostrich. They both are plains animals, and I think this helps create a kind of believability to the creature.

I might end up making larger works based on the ideas developed for these little paintings.

Tiny Paintings and Other Goings On

This has been a very eventful week. Early last week, an artist friend of mine referred me to the Bone Room in Berkeley and they would like to include me in an exhibit at their relatively new gallery/event room (next door to their retail store). It looks like I will be in a show in October 2011. This is really exciting for me - I have shopped at the Bone Room for years and find it to be very inspiring.

Then, I was invited to participate in a prestigious show at ARC Gallery and Studios in San Francisco. The title of the show is Four Squared, will feature 16 artists, who will each have 16 small square paintings no larger than 10 x 10.

And yesterday, I received an e mail from a curator friend in Australia, Jon Beinart (also a talented artist!) who invited me to participate in a group show he is curating in Santa Monica at a very well known gallery in March 2011. This group show will be all surreal/fantastic realism, and will include some very well known artists, so it will be a real honor to be included in this show.

In addition, I had already been working towards putting together a body of work for my show at Bert Green Fine Art scheduled for January 2011.

My immediate priority is to get 16 little paintings done for Four Squared by August 20 . I didn't have many small square paintings on hand, so I realized this was going to require 16 new paintings from scratch. Amazingly, the ideas just came from nowhere for little hybrid animals. I had been wanting to do something like this for quite a while, and I had on hand several half baked sketches that were going nowhere. But within two days, suddenly some rather interesting things started to come together. (see images above). I now have 13 drawings of 6 x 6 done and ready to transfer to panels and canvas. I think I will do around half on panel, reserving the panel for creatures that require more delicate details. The other half will be on stretched prime linen canvas. Afterwards, I will probably mine these ideas/images for larger paintings with more complex backgrounds and themes.

I went to Jeffrey's Toys (I love any excuse to go there!) and found some little replicas of rhinos, ostriches, etc. which will help me with light and shadow as I paint. Also used the internet and nature books to look at animal reference photos.

I know that to complete this project, I will be at the studio 7 days a week for over a month. But this is way more satisfying and fun than the type of pressure I used to be under at the Bank when I had a corporate gig!

So you are probably wondering: how is it she has time to do a blog entry? The studio building's water supply has been shut off this morning until noon. So I am doing a late day/evening stretch at the studio today.