New Artwork
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.
As I've mentioned before, I'm teaching an extra course this semester - Honors Seminar: Interdisciplinary Art. The course is structured into a few different sections, with the first exploring my own interdisciplinary interests (science and art, particularly involving the fields of ecology, biology, anatomy, botany, and my collaborative work in chemistry with Dr. John Pojman developing 3P QuickCure Clay).
For this segment, the students must use QCC and make at least one piece of artwork that explores the fields listed above that are interdisciplinary interests of mine. Since it's such a personal-to-me assignment, I decided I'd join in on the project. I'd considered doing a sloth for a while - I met and got to directly interact with one named Peregrina in Peru during my 2014 residency there - but I didn't want the piece to be too cutesy so I kept dismissing the subject matter until I felt ready to tackle it with a somewhat more complex take on the animal. I decided the time is now, mostly due to finding this elongated panel (its dimensions are 6x12") which felt like a perfect match to the gangly nature of the sloth.
I plan to paint it, so the end piece will look considerably different than this, but here's a sneak peek at the relief work before adding any paint.
My seventh piece at La Maison Verte was my intervention in the garden - my conversion of the water-pump door into a piece of artwork. The door is 41x31x6" and is a mixed media installation including the original door materials, a poplar plank and back braces to replace the rotting base, 3P Quick Cure Clay, acrylics, screws, epoxy, and satin polyurethane. It's titled Genius loci. The piece is meant to be permanent, but of course the eye stalks and tentacles of the snail are relatively fragile so they may break if visitors to the garden are not gentle with it; that's in keeping with my overall message about the environment. Nature provides us with so many rewards but in turn requires some human consideration and restraint.
Below is documentation of the project from start to finish!
And finally, a panoramic view to finish the post off:
I was bound and determined to finish a sixth piece in time for the exhibition in the Jardin Botanique de Marnay-sur-Seine, and I did it just in time! This is 3P Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on an 8x8" birch panel. I'm calling it Climber.
Here's my fifth piece! It's 3P Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on a 8x6" birch panel. It features one of two indistinguishable (apart from dissection) species - either Arion ater, the black slug, or Arion rufus, the red slug - enjoying one of the many rainy days we've had here in France. I'm titling it As Right as Rain.
Here's my fourth piece! It's titled Floating and is 3P Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on a 16x12" birch panel. The whole thing is super shiny because I used a gloss varnish to seal and protect it, but I managed to get some images that aren't quite so glare-filled. I also ended up gloss varnishing The Slightest Disturbance as well.
I was much better about taking progress photos for this piece! Here are some images documenting my process on Under the Bonnets.
My third piece is pretty much done! It's titled Under the Bonnets and it's 3P Quick Cure Clay, balsa wood, and acrylic on a 6x6" birch panel.
Sometimes I get asked about how I went about making a piece, and I've been trying (and mostly forgetting!) to document my processes a little more. I did remember to take this photo of the frog prior to painting the piece but after curing the 3P Quick Cure Clay onto the birch panel. As you can see, I sculpted very light bas relief for the parts of the frog rising up out from the water apart from the eyes, which are in a comparatively higher relief, though both are dwarfed by the grass protrusions.
And my second piece - again, I may tweak it further, but it's taking longer and longer between tweaks...
The Slightest Disturbance features a Rana ridibunda or the synonymous Pelophylax ridibundus and is a mixed media relief piece made out of 3P Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on a 6x8" birch panel.
I'm not certain this is completely finished yet, but it's close.
This piece is tentatively titled Every Side is North. It is 3P Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on a 6x6" birch panel.
I finished the third puffin painting! It's acrylic and watercolor on a 12x12" birch panel. The title, Little Brother of the North, is a direct translation of the Latin name of the Atlantic puffin, Fratercula arctica.
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.
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.
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!
Recently, I was hired to do another commissioned painting of an amphiuma - an aquatic salamander with vestigial legs that looks like an otherworldly sea serpent or eel. My patron saw my first commissioned amphiuma painting done for Dr. John Pojman (it hangs in his office above his amphiuma Chrissy's aquarium) and wanted an original piece for herself.
The new amphiuma commission.
The previously commissioned portrait of John's amphiuma Chrissy.
Unfortunately, after mailing the new piece off to my customer and tracking it through delivery, there was radio silence. I worried that she didn't like the piece but also considered that she may have just been waiting to open it on a specific date (an upcoming birthday, for instance) so I made a mental note to send her an email in a week or two to check in. Before I could, she emailed me, and it transpired that the package was, in fact, not delivered (or possibly, not delivered properly and stolen off communal property).
Queue multiple weeks of back-and-forth with UPS, but finally the insurance paid out such that I had been paid to make the commission and my client received a refund on never having received the commission, so we were both made mostly whole again. Even though it's possible it's now lurking in a box in a UPS subbasement or was pawned for the value of the frame, I like to imagine the painting is hanging in a place of pride over a drug lord's couch somewhere. Since I do have the digital image, though, I can at least run off reproductions, so it's not completely lost to the world.
I just redesigned my business cards and ordered a new set from Moo. Since Moo allows printing of multiple back designs with a fixed front, I printed two different options. I was concerned that the one with the Balancing Act snails detail might be too much, as it can look it when you see both sides at once, but in person it works quite well. I'm liking both types enough that I may continue to order the mix... until I decide to redesign the card all over again, of course!
Here's the final painting I did while at the residency - I may well do more at home, but these five were completed while abroad. This one is acrylic and watercolor on aquabord and it's titled Darker Side.
This is acrylic on pastelbord which is a clay ground textured with marble dust granules. Due to the high heat here, most of the time the snails spend sealed inside their shells to conserve moisture, but on the summer solstice the rain brought several of them out and one explored my left thumb for quite some time.
Titling this one Balancing Act.
Here's an acrylic and watercolor on aquabord. This one is titled Spirit.
In the first donkey painting, I used acrylic for the donkeys and watercolor for the background/foreground atmosphere. In this piece, I used both acrylic and watercolor in the body of the donkey in order to achieve the various levels of opacity and translucency as well as watercolor for background/foreground layering.
