I've been posting from my phone lately, which means I haven't been able to write much to go along with the pictures. Thank you to everyone who came to see me at the Mercer Island summer festival last weekend. The weather was perfect and I had a lot of fun hanging out with my co-artist Alexandria Sandlin and seeing the response to some of my newer pieces.
There were some slow moments, which is when I did the ink drawings from this post and the previous one (http://spiralsinlove.blogspot.com/2011/07/i-made-these-for-you-because-you-werent.html). It's been a while since I drew in just ink and it felt great to get back to it. For all the different mediums I've worked in, ink has been a constant for me since I was old enough to realize there was life outside of the world of crayons. While I do rough out my paintings in pencil, I prefer drawing in ink because the finality of it forces me to make decisions and run with them. I had a drawing teacher in college who would rush over and snap at anyone who tried to erase a line. I hated that teacher until a few months after her class, when I realized how much more confident I was in my drawing ability and how much easier it was to visualize an end result before committing a line to paper.
As far as the drawings I posted go, I'm happy with three out of four of them. The face pieces are something I've been wanting to try for a while. Jumping from surface to surface in connected works of art has always felt a little gimmicky to me (or at least like dentist office art), but now having played with it a few times I do enjoy implying the lines in between without actually drawing them. The monster with the flowers got some shiny bumps all over his head and a heart-shaped box in his other hand, but my lines were awkward and tight feeling so that's my reject of the bunch. I try not to throw anything away any more (I used to toss a lot of my finished drawings), but if I wasn't practicing art conservation this one would definitely go in the recycling.
The cats with their lower jaws dropped on the ground is my favorite by a long shot. It stemmed from a discussion Alex and I were having about dreams. Immediately following me talking about how I don't like to depict ideas from my dreams I drew the cats which are a loose depiction of an idea from a dream I had about 10 years ago. I've been forming an entire forest of rounded shapes in my head lately and feel like these cats aren't all that far away from my burrito dog (https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGAaIrBsRsZpoAVOQWosLug-ZhvodjSaf11c-LOb1r3IjCi4SQZKk9BD-HXob6XuietzYWuVa_kZ9SHZcM2di2l29XaqlfH9jbEJIlu1aJCHkEYxeUVIVvaw-kIdqtCqoxTUiyhFZ1dm8/s1600/saleprice.jpg). I feel like the cats are done as they are, but if I do end up with a forest I might paint new versions of them as the board they're drawn on won't hold up to watercolor paints.
As for the mermaid, that was cribbed from Alex. In an effort to trick people into coming into our tent and buying our art I drew spirals and arrows in the middle of the road with chalk. Since the chalk was out, Alex decided to draw a bony mermaid with webbed fingers. I was out of room on the ground and tired of the feeling of chalk, so I drew my mermaid on another backing board. I like the weight of it and especially the dangling arms, but I wish I had made her tail pass between her arms rather than behind both of them. She was spectral enough that when I was posting the picture I had these lines from Cracker's "Dr. Bernice" (http://youtu.be/b4dWh2x_4gY) running through my head:
And the ghosts of the sailors who died on the rocks
Feel not a twinge of regret
Though the wind may tangle the hair on your head
You sing like a siren to me
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