LSU Vet Med Artist Residency Artwork 5

This is actually the first piece I began here at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine! I never know how to properly answer people as to how long a piece of artwork takes to finish, as my optimal process involves working on several different pieces simultaneously. If you count start to finish, I worked on it for a month and five days - however, there were a number of days in there that I didn’t touch this piece or only worked on it for a couple of hours…

The subject in this piece is a three-day-old baby Nubian goat; she was fully healthy but was brought in to accompany her brother who was failing to thrive and unfortunately didn’t make it.

Singularity, mixed media including Clinical Pathology’s Diff-Quik Eosin Y stain, Clinical Skills' fluorescein, Histology’s light green stain, and acrylic on basswood panel, 12x24x1.5”, 2022.

New Artwork: Emerging

An overhead shot of a Humphrey in the garden.

Since I don’t get to do an artist residency this summer due to the pandemic, I’m planning on producing from home! Sioux City is rabbit central - the Eastern cottontail, to be specific. Sometimes on neighborhood walks here I see just as many rabbits as I do squirrels. In my former town of Leavenworth, seeing a rabbit was notable and relatively rare. Earlier this spring, I noticed a juvenile rabbit made a home partially in my backyard (he also hops through the fence to my neighbors’ garden as well).

I named him Humphrey and began to try to acclimate him to my presence, so that I could take some nice reference photos for paintings. I talked about him to family and friends, and at one point joked with my parents that I supposed there might be several rabbits all being called Humphrey… and wouldn’t you know it, the very next day I saw two simultaneously! Since I can’t really distinguish them individually, giving them more names seemed unhelpful, so they’re now the Humphreys, plural. It appears there’s a nest/burrow under my deck, and I have now seen three Humphreys at the same time so there are at least that many but probably more. There do appear to be two different sizes of Humphrey, both juvenile but one small and one even tinier. My neighbor says she’s seen the parents, but I don’t know if I have; I’ve not seen an adult rabbit in my backyard at all this spring but I have seen one in my front yard once. And again, rabbits are ubiquitous here.

I plan to do several rabbit paintings, but here’s the first! It’s tentatively titled Emerging, though the title Under the Deck is also in consideration. It’s a 16x12x1.5” acrylic on basswood panel.

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My New Mixed Media Relief of a Sloth

This is either finished or close to finished - I have a tendency to tweak works slightly for a number of days after the piece is "done."  

I'm naming it the closest English translation of the sloth's name: Pilgrim (Peregrina).

Pilgrim is 3P QuickCure Clay and acrylic on a 6x12" basswood panel.

Puffin Painting #1 - Byssal Bird

And here's the finished first painting!  It's a conceptual, experimental piece - those are real Atlantic blue mussel shells (Mytilus edulis) adhered to the panel; I beachcombed some while I was in Iceland and was quite interested in their coloration and form and how I might use them to break the picture plane.  I wanted to explore ideas of illusionism, perspective, shaped or irregular canvases, cast shadows, organic versus architectural form language, and intertidal zone ecosystems.

I'm titling this painting Byssal Bird, and it's a mixed media piece with acrylic, watercolor, Atlantic blue mussel shells, and epoxy on a 16x12" basswood panel.

Puffin Painting #2 - Littoral Layers

I'm almost done with the first puffin painting - the one I gave you a sneak peak of - but in the meantime I'm potentially done with the second; I've been adjusting it over the past couple days and I may go back into it again, but here's where it's at now.  If I do go back into it, it'll be for minor changes at this point.  I'm typically pretty bad about taking progress photos (particularly in taking well lit/consistent lighting source ones, so please excuse the slight lighting changes in the thumbnails) but I'm trying to make more of an effort to document my processes.  

I'm titling this one Littoral Layers.  The final piece is graphite, charcoal, and acrylic on a 16x20" basswood panel.  I typically do start with a line drawing (after preliminary sketching, of course), but then in paintings where I add to the natural support media for the background, I usually paint in the beginnings of a background before moving on to the foreground elements and then go back and forth until there's a resolution.  This painting was different in that I really developed the foreground elements before addressing the background, though after that I did my normal switching back and forth routine.

New Series Started - Puffin Paintings!

I've started a new series of paintings on the juvenile puffin, Toti, that I met at the tail end of my residency in Iceland in 2014.  Toti was a puffling that failed to launch and imprinted on humans, so he is now a permanent resident at the Saeheimar Aquarium.  I wanted to start on these pieces sooner, but better late than never.

Here's a sneak peak of progress on the first painting!