My art is on a flyer! Art walk season is kicking off so in addition to the wonderful people at www.gotgotartart.com putting my name out there on these flyers I am going to actually leave the house sometimes and make appearances at art walks and show openings. Like the one tomorrow night at Happy Delusions!| Time | Friday, April 1 · 5:00pm - 8:00pm |
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| Location | happy delusions 924 S. 3rd St. Renton, WA, 98057 |
My son has been illustrating an activity book filled with terrible puns and fill-in-the-blank monsters. He asked me to paint some of them, and Gumble was my favorite so far.
No matter what the situation is that has stranded this nude and fingerless freak in the wilderness, I think we should be happy for Gumble. It's a beautiful day, and he's getting some fresh air. That's more than I can say for myself right now.
I'm listed here now: http://www.maggieschneider.com/#1101218/Seattle-Visual-Artist-Directory
Special thanks to my parents for having a last name that starts with "A" so that I'm at the top of the list.
On a marginally related note, I wish I had someone to tear my art apart. Granted, I’m pretty much a hermit, but one of my hopes in putting my art up on the Internet is that I could get genuine criticism. The only thing I’ve ever gotten out of praise is embarrassment – critique is key to artistic growth. So I am officially giving any of my readers license to say mean things.
“That yellow doesn’t look any better just because you put sparkles in it.”
“Change the direction of your lighting once in a while.”
“Why does that creature’s body eclipse both its legs if I’m looking at it from the side?”
You don’t have to be able to draw or paint to criticize me (I’ve always hated the “don’t say anything if you couldn’t do it better yourself” argument) and I will appreciate anything you have to say as a chance to understand what other people see when they look at my art.
Anyway…I’ve been reading and sleeping a lot and that 12-painting auction project took a lot of time so I haven’t made a much progress on my own work the last few days. I have big painting plans for this afternoon and evening though. In the meantime, I’d like to share some graffiti I saw on Seattle’s public graffiti wall (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/georgetown-graffiti-wall/Location?oid=447646). The face on the wall was very reminiscent of a series of “Catrina” paintings and drawings by Rebekah Joy Plett. I don’t know if the graffiti artist was familiar with Rebekah’s work or if it was a coincidental transfer of ideas across some artistic hive mind. I’d like to think it was the latter. One of the original drawings is below – you can see more in the archives of Rebekah’s blog at http://rebekahjoyplett.blogspot.com/.
http://gotgotartart.com/?p=340
The 2nd grade self-portraits I transferred to canvas a few weeks ago were painted by the class in teams of two. As we all know, children are terrible at everything so once they were done I had to go in and touch up the paint on some of them and then add a colored border to each. They're going up for some public school auction so for all you public school auction enthusiasts out there...you should probably look it up and figure out when it is because I have no idea.
I read in Harper's recently that original art is cool for both cats AND kittens. If you consider yourself to be either of these (you know you do), you owe it to yourself to get one heck of a great price on some original art. The piece of mine that's up today (BUYBUYBUY http://gotgotartart.com/?p=344 BUYBUYBUY) is actually one of my favorites that I've done because it captures the simple serenity I feel whenever I go in the water. Which, fun fact, even cats and kittens can appreciate.
I have a lot of black paint coming my way and wanted to practice with what I already had before I got it since black watercolor is a lot harder to work with than other colors. This was supposed to be a quick doodle that somehow ended up taking me all night, and I didn't even finish. At least it has a cupcake so I can use it to cash in on the cupcake fad. Unless that's been supplanted by something new. Maybe I should be painting dueling piano bar monsters instead.
So here I made this big bid for new fans and then I fell off the map for a few days. Sick kids, science fairs, and nice weather really take away from painting time. I got a little work done though, including these bubbles. I don't know if I'll finish this (it's part of a larger painting), but I've been wanting to paint bubbles for a while so this was a good chance to play with a few ideas and decide how I wanted to represent bubbles.
The station agent knows his place in the world of the movie, and he quickly transforms from an attempt at authority to complete subservience in the face of potential violence. The actor is fantastic in the few seconds he gets onscreen, conveying a pleading desperation...but his part is so small that he doesn't even get billed in the credits. In fact, there's a discussion on imdb just trying to discover his name (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064116/board/nest/170242011?d=171519400&p=1). I was especially taken with the lines and shapes in the actor's face - deep wrinkles are fantastic.
I started the afternoon planning to work on a couple of happy paintings. I really did. But within minutes of working on them I was pulled away by this image that had been pulsing in my brain for most of the day. A couple of years ago I heard The Antlers' "Hospice" album for the first time and was completely drawn in. I'm a sucker for a cohesive concept album, and this was one of the best I had ever heard. It sets a mood and tells a story, and not a very happy one. I like my fiction to confront me and tear my guts out, and this album did that.
This painting is a very literal interpretation of the song that I think of as the turning point of the album - "Bear". I highly recommend listening to the entire album, but if you'd like to hear the song in question you can do so here:
I don't know if the paper will withstand my abuse, but it's buckling under the 5-6 layers of paint and water I've already applied.
Today I met with the owners of the new site www.gotgotartart.com. The site has only been up for a few days so there's not a lot of content yet, but it is a "deal a day" site (kind of like Groupon or Living Social) for original works of art. I was especially drawn to their goal of providing emerging artists with sales and exposure. I've signed on to be one of their artists and hope to be one of the daily features soon. I just need to finish some paperwork, which is much less fun than doodling slug dinosaurs (they were totally a real thing and it's not my fault you slept through third grade and missed the lesson on slug dinosaurs) shouting GOT GOT and holding ART ART signs.
Turns out I paint a lot faster when there is a kid lecturing me, "Dad, that is NOT how Pikachu looks."
Apparently the time changed tonight, which is bad news because I stayed up late painting this ridiculous evil Pikachu for my son. The good news is that I don't believe in time.
I was going to write a proper review of this book, but I decided that anything I could say would detract from the beautifully casual writing. I wanted to post it though, because in addition to being one of the best things I've read in years it is also a fantastic insight into what it feels like to be an unrealized artist. Plus, you get to learn a lot about poetry.
Every time my daughter sees my pearlescent paints she asks me to paint something pink that sparkles. I remember before I had children thinking that I was going to be so careful not to assign gender roles and other similarly idealistic and ambitious ventures. What I know now that I didn't know then is that my child lives and breathes pink sparkles, no matter what. And since I live and breathe for my kids, pink sparkles it is!
The other night, I spent over an hour trying to get ink to come out of my pen nib. I tried three different pens, bending the nibs, tilting the ink...I was getting a little frustrated. I finally gave up in frustration after almost destroying a painting with scratchy, desperate lines. Then on a whim I tried a different kind of ink. A kind that was in a full container. A container full enough to actually get enough ink on the pen for it to work. Which it did. Just fine. I wish I could say I had learned something, but the sad fact is that I've learned this lesson once every few months for the last 15 years.
This painting doesn't even have any ink on it, but it does have a lot of fun zig-zaggy lines that I really enjoyed painting.
I was watching a Care Bears movie with my sick daughter today and was really taken by the first 20 minutes or so since it seemed like something I would write. The idea was that everything in the floating cloud city of Careington (or whatever the heck it's called) was going well and everyone was happy and content. Funshine, the Supreme Leader of the Care Bears whose tummy power seems to be WHATEVER HE WANTS, ends up in a horrible funk because no one needs his help. Here is the Überbär in a world of already exceptional bears and the only thing that makes him happy is when other people are suffering. Without someone to depend on him, he loses his whole identity. Of course, in the end everyone finds a way to fail so that his furry little life can have a purpose again.
