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LSU Vet Med Artist Residency Artwork 2

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Here’s my second finished piece from my LSU Vet Med artist residency! I’m still mulling over the title - my current tentative selection is Wild Card, but I’m open to other suggestions.

I’ve met a lot of very cool animals here already, so this is high praise indeed - this is my favorite animal I’ve met thus far. ZooMed has a superstition they observe: you cannot name a wildlife patient, or its health will go downhill. This little fellow therefore doesn’t have a name, but he’s a real character. He has charisma and attitude in spades. When I arrived, he was a nestling and still had these “Einstein” feathers he’s rocking in the below image, but he’s now a fledgling and is getting closer to release every day!

I specifically chose the elongated landscape aspect ratio of this panel as mimicking the dimensions of the pathology slides. The coloration of the background comes from my novel usage of veterinary stains and medicine as art media, and I continued that color palette into the subject as well. However, as you’ll understand more clearly in the process post I’ll make soon, there was a lot of trial and error in the creation of the background, and a cyan coloration that was produced ended up quickly going almost entirely fugitive (bleached out). I reinforced it with acrylic droplets as a final step.

This is a mixed media painting of a wild brown thrasher nestling including Clinical Pathology's Diff-Quik methylene blue counter stain, Histology's light green stain, ZooMed's chlorhexidine antiseptic, and acrylic on basswood panel, 10x20x1.5", 2022.



LSU Vet Med Artist Residency Artwork 1

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I always aim to capture a sense of place or atmosphere in my residencies, and in this artist residency at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine I have decided to incorporate medicines, pathology and histology stains, as well as veterinary chemicals, tools, and resources into each of my pieces as art media. (I have no idea how archival some will be - particularly how lightfast and stable the pigmentation of the medicines, stains, and chemicals is - but the evolution of how the artworks age will be interesting to witness and document, too!)

As you may already know, I work on multiple pieces of artwork simultaneously, so the first piece I start isn’t always the first to finish. This piece is actually the second one I began! It is of a Mississippi kite which is a beautiful raptor, and there were three here upon my arrival - two wild kites and one that has been habituated as an ambassador or resident raptor. The depicted wild bird is in a defensive stress posture, trying to look as big as possible so as to protect itself from predators.

This artwork incorporates ZooMed's PVP Prep Solution: povidone-iodine 10% topical antiseptic (also known as Betadine) and Integrative Medicine's AcuZone smokeless moxa-rolls for both the background and feet.  There’s also a bit of the Betadine on the eyes over a base of acrylic.

I have titled this piece Fortification, and it is a mixed media painting including the aforementioned veterinary materials as well as acrylic and cornstarch on basswood panel, 20x20x1.5”, 2022.

Cerdeira Village Residency Journal 5 - New Artwork!

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When I was shopping at the market across from the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, I saw a few azulejos tiles of rabbits, and I bought myself one of them - it reminded me a little of Albrecht Dürer's work.

After I finished the turtle sculpture, I decided I would do a rabbit and a bird as a partner piece to the turtle and nest mostly due to that market experience.  When I started looking at various images of rabbits in order to find one to sculpt, I decided that proportionally and structurally, a hare would be more interesting than a rabbit.  And given that I had been thinking about rabbits and hares due to this azulejos tile that reminded me of Dürer, I decided to base my sculpture off of Young Hare.

It was really quite fun sculpting a watercolor painting, as it were, and one that I highly admire.  I started off again with a styrofoam and wire base and then added QCC and began to form the body and head.  

I added the feet in three separate parts, and finally the claws and ears.  After every part was added, I detailed the fur and added some jackalope-esque branches in front of the ears.  This all took several days to come together, and obviously there were parts I had to construct myself in attempting to realize a three-dimensional animal out of a two-dimensional painting of it.

I had planned on sculpting a bird with the hare, but I liked the hare so much alone that I reconsidered.  As I was trying to decide what to do, I thought about how I would progress with the painting of the hare.  In the beginning I had thought about painting the rabbit in azulejos-inspired colors as well, but I realized when doing the turtle that the style that the shell and eggs looked quite good with it because they were fairly smooth, but when I tried to paint the turtle head and legs with various tints of blue, it got too busy and weird due to their pebbled surfaces (so I reverted them back to the clean white).  The fur of the rabbit is quite heavily textured, so I decided to paint it in a fairly realistic coloration through referencing Dürer's piece again but turning the colors just a little bit cooler in a nod to the azulejos theme and my own practice of using blue as a dominant color in my own work.

In deciding to paint it in naturalistic colors, though, I thought the two pieces wouldn't seem very related, so I figured I should do a bird - but a detachable bird, in case I ended up displaying the pieces separately as well or in case the bird didn't turn out so well.

I knew I wanted the bird to be in the azulejos color scheme, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to approximate an actual species/patterning like I did in the slider turtle shell design.  In the end, I decided the bird should be even more clearly a reference to the azulejos tiles; then there would be this strong representation in the bird and the eggs, a referential-but-also-naturalistic one in the turtle, and then an almost entirely naturalistic representation in the hare.

So here it is!  I also haven't accurately measured or titled it (though Young Hare will show up in the title somehow), but it is a mixed media ceramic sculpture including QCC, acrylic, and found branches.  Some of the photos below are of it in bright sunlight, so the cast shadows on the bird can be a little hard to parse, and all are against a brown/gray background which can make the branches difficult to differentiate too, but I will take photos of it in a white gallery space as well.