fire head

This painting was inspired by my friend Brett who set fire to his forehead while spinning poi at WildFire. I was so mesmerized by the site of it, I watched in stunned silence rather then jump to help (sorry Brett). Luckily spotters noticed before too much damage was done. It was spectacular though.

Brett also knows clouds (my favourite things to paint) like nobody's business.

daybreak

This morning was my last one at the seaside retreat run by the Sisters of Mercy. I can't think the last time I saw the sun rise, and I got two rounds of it from the Tower where I spent 48 hours in solitude.

I don't think I would have chosen to do this at this point, being still something of a recovering recluse, but my friend Meg who booked the room couldn't use it, and I was interested to see what it would be like painting there.

WildFire, just a few days before, was very intimately about earth and fire, and very close community. The Mercy Center was its polar opposite in every way: being about water and wind, and apart-ness. There are other people there, but it's understood you don't intrude on the privacy they've come for, so most of the time people pass you without so much as a look.

This was very strange at first, but with nothing else to do I just painted and painted, and with no one to talk to I found myself being able to absorb all that had occurred in the last week. I got a lot of good work and meditation done.

nuns on the beach

Within just a few days I went from a fiery tribal drumming in the woods, to gritty street circus in New York City, to total seclusion with nuns on the shoreline. I don't think I've ever had such an ecclectic week.

wildfire

Sparks from Wildfire, in Deep River, CT this past weekend.

Circus Amok

Jennifer Miller, bearded lady and founder and star of Circus Amok, with her troupe in Tompkins Square Park yesterday. Fabulous.

Artifax collage

My friend Anne had no idea what she was in for when she asked me to teach a collage class at Artifax, the wonderful international hand crafts shop she owns in Milford. The mess that is forever following me in all my endeavors took over the back half of the shop on Friday night, while we made art and a few curious shoppers picked there way over buckets of water and piles of paper.

Here is Anne and her daughter Aimee very engrossed in the process of chaos-making, which is of primary importance to every kind of art I do, mostly because I simply can't avoid it.

horse phase 2

Here is the horse again, now slightly redesigned, cut from corrugated plastic, and contact cemented together, with Don Roldan (excuse me-- NOT Charlegmagne!) trying him out. The next phase is finding a way for Roldan's hands to quickly attach to reins so that his arms move with the horse's neck motion, and putting a low relief of celluclay on each side, though it is highly debated in the shop whether or not this will work. The first of the clay was administered to one side on Thursday of last week, I have not yet heard the results....

I think this horse is tired of being called Horse. Though for some reason I feel that Monkey enjoys being called Monkey.

fiery queen

Lately I've been really enjoying Mexican folk retablos painting thanks to reference books at the Wesleyan costume shop. Also early Spanish medieval manuscript illustration- their angels have some great wings. This is a bigger little piece of bad art then the previous ones.

reds

These have been all reds, oranges and pinks because it's harder for me to physically see subtleties in the warm side of the color spectrum. I hope playing like this might help overcome that irritating weakness.

cardboard horse

A cardboard sketch of a horse puppet for Master Peter, in progress. This is not the first working puppet I've made, but it's the first that's had to work properly for other people to operate, and fit the design of the rest of the show, which is hard.

The final will be about 30 inches tall, out of layered corrugated plastic with a shallow bas relief of celluclay. The head, neck and front legs pivot together at the shoulder, moved by a rod, as the rest of the body is held from a stick underneath. At least I think, but it keeps changing. The Charlemagne puppet will be riding this horse to rescue Melisande.

quick queen

Another dashed off little painting, done last night at 3am in celebration of 18 straight hours of studio cleaning and reorganizing completed. Boxes of oil pastels, guache, inks and other kinds of unused art supplies I'd forgotten about turned up, mostly inherited from my grandfather. They've always been too pretty to use, but it's time they were sacrificed to the Bad Art cause.

calendar girl

Here's something to blog about--- the 2006 Peaceable Kingdom Children's Book calendar is out, and my piazza painting from One Grain of Sand
is in there for April. Yup, hanging out there with Maurice Sendak and the Dillons. Not to shabby.

quick sky

Boy I really like just playing with color, without worrying about rendering. Another little piece of Bad Art transformed. I think that's some jungian text by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

quick fool

A result of chopping up a piece of Bad Art from Bad Art Night #1 into small bits, mounting on board, and working over. I like making chaos then reining it back in. I do that with my commissioned acrylic book work, but this is far less painful, being fast, and free of an expected outcome. I've got this silly idea in my head that I might be able to do one of these every morning...

sorcerer's book

Busy catching up on neglected business since Elm wrapped up yesterday. No interesting photos to post, but here's one of the spot sketches I'm working on for a cd of the Sorcerer's Apprentice.