Tag Archives: art life

wtf 2025?

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this year has started out weirder than any other year i can remember. first new orleans starts 2025 in literally the first hours of the first day by having a domestic terrorist attack in the french quarter. many people killed, even more injured, by a radicalized military vet from houston driving his truck onto bourbon street full speed at 3 in the morning while new year’s eve revelers were still partying, running people over. thankfully the bombs he planted didn’t go off or there would have been a lot more casualties. it was an awful way to wring in the new year and we all woke up so stunned and saddened that morning.

then of course the inauguration of a fascist president, which thankfully was overshadowed here in new orleans by a once in a lifetime weather event – a blizzard across the gulf coast. we got 11 inches of light fluffy snow at my house and many places around the city measured 12-13″ even though the official count out at the airport was only 8″. the city was shut down for 3 full days – no work, no driving cuz we don’t have the infrastructure to clear roads quickly, just playing in the snow, being vigilant about our pipes and water pressure, trying to stay warm, and watching all the local meteorologists have the best days of their life. it was magical and cold and nerve wracking all at the same time.

the snow has melted and the rhythm of the city has gone back to normal. the last few days have been about digesting the flurry of awful coming from the tyrant in the white house. i’m not going to give much space to talking about him or his administration, but the reality of what this country has voted for is starting to settle in now sadly.

as for me? well i smartly made a choice to go on a break with one of my afternoon clients while the other one was in puppy training camp so i could have my afternoons free to be in the studio. it’s worked well in general though i didn’t get much done with all my extra free time during the blizzard cuz the snow was just so distracting. but for the most part i have maintained several hours of working on various art projects each day. well except for the week that i decided to switch phone carriers and had a clusterfuck of issues that required me to be on the phone with customer service every single afternoon for almost a week. and then there were the few days right before the pussyfooters blush ball – the mardi gras ball i attend every year that always has a theme which requires some crafty accessorizing – when i was working on pink-and-orange-ing shoes and belt buckles and cowboy hats for this year’s western theme. but still, i’ve done well this month with art.

is anything finished? no. but i do have many new pieces in process which i hope to finish soon. i took bibby gignilliat’s mixed media online course as it was a self-paced, low $ investment offering that i hoped would give me some tips and tricks for dealing with collage as the basis for mixed media painting. and it did! honestly there wasn’t a whole lot more info than one can glean from her instagram reels but the lessons were more fleshed out and you get to see her make some pieces from start to finish. i just love her style and energy and while i don’t want to be “copying” her i do want to use some of her techniques and build upon them for my own interests.

above are two of my mixed media pieces on wood panels that are in process. i kinda like where they are now in a minimalist way but i think they need more to make them interesting but i haven’t figured out what exactly. i thought sitting with them for a few days would help but honestly i now wish i’d just kept going as i think this kinda mixed media work is intuitive and all about energy and i clearly had some good energy flowing the day i made these. now i’m a little stuck in that don’t-want-to-mess-it-up place but i need to just do something to get back into these.

simultaneous to working on about 7 different mixed media pieces like these i also started playing around with some small 6″x6″ collage pieces, since i had all my scraps out. i was covering up old canvas board tiles i call them, ones that didn’t work or i just didn’t like. and i had an early success or two so i thought i was onto something… but similarly, i seem to have lost the energy for them as i went on to try to make several more and they aren’t coming out as good as the ones that i just did spontaneously.

above are the first two spontaneous ones that i really like. i kept it to a limited palette of black, white, red, kraft paper/brown bag and newspaper print. the black and white really pop in contrast to the muted browns and beiges and the red adds some interest/energy. hopefully i’ll be able to salvage the other 3 i have going so there’s a little set of them. they are good exercises in composition.

the month is almost over and i’m not sure how i’m feeling about possibly losing my afternoon studio time, or some of it. i have some pet sits coming up which will eat into that time as well. i welcome these warmer days post-blizzard though because it’s very hard to motivate myself to get in there to work when it’s 30-40 degrees outside cuz it’s not much warmer in the studio, even with the space heater on. so hopefully this will be a productive week.

this is already a very long post so i’ll stop for now. more later. i have more on my mind to share beyond this little catch-up session.

week 2 FYJ class

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i am having a good time with the find your joy course. we are only in week 2 but i have managed to keep up with assignments and weekly calls and journal entries so far. (we are encouraged to keep a studio journal about what we are learning in this class and are given weekly journal prompts about our coursework.) i am trying very hard to not get ahead of myself, not overthink where this class is leading me, and just trying to be open-hearted and -minded about everything louise is teaching.

(even though we’re only in week 2 i feel it’s a major accomplishment to be keeping up, as last week i was overnight dogsitting and my cat got diagnosed with throat cancer and i’m volunteering for a political campaign delivering yard signs which has gotten quite busy as the election is very soon, in addition to just my normal daily work schedule, so i’ve had a lot going on. so yes, i am patting myself on the back a bit for keeping up and showing up and doing the work.)

last week – the first week – our assignment was to paint to music. pick a song or piece of music and just paint to it, only in the time it takes to play it once. and then to go back and do a second piece where you spend more time with the same song, as much time as you want/need. and to notice the difference between the two pieces you made and how you felt making them. i chose lucinda williams’ “joy,” and an earthy color palette that felt like it fit her and the song. below are my two pieces – the 4 minute version on the left, the longer one on the right.

i learned that i was more pleased with my output with the first piece that i only spent 4 minutes on. it was more spontaneous, more free, had more energy, felt more real. the second piece ended up with more structure, as i couldn’t ignore those impulses when given more time. i didn’t hate the second piece but it didn’t feel as alive as the first to me. (we aren’t supposed to be attached to outcomes or trying to create specific compositions or results, but it’s hard not to have a feeling about it after it’s done.)

this week, our assignment is similar to one we did in the free taster course which preceded the paid course. it’s all about mark-making, experimenting with various media and tools to make as many different kinds of marks on a page as we can. aside from various sizes of paint brushes, scrapers, palette knives and color shapers, i also played with a silicone basting brush from the kitchen, a glass window squeegee, a square notch tool (usually used with grout), a plastic comb, and a cardboard toilet paper roll to make interesting marks (among other things), as well as added regular pencil, colored pencil, oil pastels, and various sized acrylic markers to the acrylic paint as media. there was no time limit on this, just an open-ended exploratory playtime to learn what kinds of marks we enjoy making.

it’s amazing how much better it looks when you take the tape off! if you zoom in on each one separately as it’s own piece, some of them are kinda cool. i like seeing all the layers and marks but it all feels way too busy to me. but again, trying not to be attached to outcomes. i think i did the assignment as it was meant to be done and i learned i like to make marks with all kinds of things!

the second part of the assignment was to choose the marks and methods we liked the most and use those to do a second piece. (and by “piece,” we are using 30×22” sheets of heavy duty watercolor paper with gesso on them, taped off into 6 squares.) i considered just continuing on top of the first assignment sheet but then decided to start fresh on a new one.

i retained mostly the same color palette – we were to use black, white, and one red (i chose alizarin crimson), one blue (cobalt blue) and one yellow (i switched from lemon yellow that i used on the first one to naples yellow this time, which altered all the colors i mixed and i think made for a more subdued look). i feel like the 2nd piece looks a lot like the first even though i used far fewer tools to make marks. but still i used a lot. and i treated each of the squares as their own piece, instead of thinking of the whole piece of paper as one piece, as some folks did.

regardless i think i learned that i enjoy using weird tools to make marks and i should be incorporating them more into what i do. i particularly enjoy using small swaths of pattern stencils as well as well as the small square notch tool, for scraping lines into wet paint.

you can follow along with what i’m doing each week on my instagram, as i’m more likely to keep updating regularly there than i am here. but i like writing here about it too as you never know what could happen with instagram.

i’m looking forward to having a weekend with no work on my schedule, which doesn’t happen very often. i had some sits scheduled but they all ended up canceling. i scheduled my covid/flu vaxes for late this afternoon though so i might be spending the day tomorrow in bed, as the covid boosters usually wipe me out the next day. but i guess we’ll see. i’m happy to not have any responsibilities other than taking care of myself and my poor sick cat.