sketching the cat

I have recently fallen in love with sketching Pipsqueak - he is such a great model when he's sleepy, which is quite often :) I plan to work him into some paintings soon, and definitely more sketching...

soup, gardening, etc.

After months of trying to find and order the right ingredients, I finally got around to making the first recipe from my Williams Sonoma Asian cook book that H gave me years ago. Yes years. I tell you though, the wait was worth it - this udon noodle soup is to die for. One of the things we miss most about NYC is our local Japanese restaurant where we always got udon noodle soup. This involves boiling konbu (seaweed), then adding bonito flakes (fish flakes), then straining, then adding a bunch of flavors like rice vinegar and soy sauce, then pouring over scallions and noodles. Yum!

A couple of weeks ago, H and I planted a rain garden with his leadership group, which was so much fun!!! I can't believe how much I miss gardening. What thrilled me most was how much H enjoyed it. We have lots gardening in our future...

You can read our little local article about it here. This is really the first time I had ever heard of rain gardens, so I'm just now learning all about them. I'm excited to learn more and someday plant my own :)

This is another gorgeous quilt from H's grandmother. She made it using free fabric samples from Sherwin Williams way back in the day. To me it looks like something from anthropologie - I love it! It's also very light, making it the perfect blanket for the coming summer months.

In other news, I'm still working on that painting for my mom...as you can see in the picture above I've put strips of fabric in and around the crevices of broken glass - genius! Mom actually thought of it which was just a stroke of brilliance. I plan to use this technique again in future paintings. It is so much more interesting a solution than grout or modeling paste.

And take a look at this mess:

What a cutie! I had this purring monster waking me up all morning today. I've got to remember to play with him more before bed...

Painting Again

This painting was fun from first inspiration to final glaze. I got sudden inspiration to sew a funnel in a canvas and tack it to the back of the frame - this way I would get a mysterious receding hole. Then somehow I felt like I had to have something funky growing out of this orifice. Then I thought about how I needed a Christmas gift for my brother and his wife - bingo!

I knew based on their tastes that the colors had to be dark and rich, plus I had gotten my SIL to give me her defective pottery to smash up for paintings - enter the lovely shards you see in the painting.

They are glued down, which was not my first pick on how to attach them. I had first tried "sewing" them down with some nylon thread, but it kept snapping against the sharp edges. I do want to try sewing chunky things to paintings in the future, but I have to make sure they're not sharp. I've been thinking about doing something like this since 2001 when I saw the huge chunks of colored glass (grapefruit sized) wrapped up in wire to form the garden gate at Peggy Guggenheim's museum in Venice. I really must figure out a way to wrap up cool treasures in ropes to form a loose painting surface...

I made the frame for this little painting out of the top bar of the bead curtain my sister gave me in college (I love having power tools handy). It gives a funky shape to the edges which adds to the assemblage feel.

I even signed this one. I usually don't like signing for some reason. I know a lot of artists have a problem viewing their work as a commodity to be sold, and that somehow money is unwelcome in the true creative process. I feel somewhat this way about signing my paintings. In a way, I feel like they are independent creations that transcend the need to be claimed. It seems to me that it would detract from thet piece - tie it down somehow to slap my name on them. What do you think? Does it lessen a work of contemporary art to have a signature? I get a self conscious feeling when I imagine people in museums looking at my painting and noticing my signature on the piece. I would MUCH rather have my name on a little white card next to it on the wall. Perhaps I'm still flenching after seeing so many cathedrals in Italy plastered names of the sponsors and artists. Doesn't the greatest art go beyond all that? But I digress.

The reason I signed this one is because it felt right and special when giving to my brother and SIL. I might feel more like signing my work generally if I can come up with a really cool way to do it. Albrecht Durer's signature is very cool - same initials as me...mmm....

The tree in this painting was really fun to sketch out and paint. I really allowed myself not to care so much about how this painting came together. When I allow myself to incorporate chance as part of the process, and to not worry so much that I overly control the work as it progresses, I find that the result is more satisfying and usually more visually stimulating. I like being surprised as I go - for example, I first painted in the tree with raw sienna because it was the first tube of paint I reached. Once I did the over painting with a dark mixture of blues and reds, I left a few slivers of the sienna to show giving an interesting detail when you look closely. I have some progress shots somewhere that I might post soon so you can see how it looked at various stages.

As much as I love oil paint, it is difficult to beat the instant gratification of acrylic. This is painted entirely with acrylic. It's fun to play with thinned down layers of color over texture. It was especially important to use in this piece because I had to travel with it very soon after I finished it :)

I like to think of this as a collaboration of sorts with my SIL. The pottery is so integral that it would be hard to imagine without it. I never thought of a title for this painting - that's another weakness of mine. I always feel REALLY self conscious about my titles. They either sound way too corny or they don't actually communicate anything important. I hope I can improve on this.

More to come soon!

student work

While I was at home last I took some pictures of some of my student paintings, and I thought it would be fun to share them with you! Needless to say, all the images in this post (and all posts for that matter) are copyright.

Fortunately for me, my parents have the necessary space to store and display my massive paintings (one of them is 10 feet long!), and they grab up as many of my paintings as they can. There is no way I could keep them all if they didn't store and display them for me! The one above was super fun - and it is one of my favorites. Few of these paintings have titles, and they're not really "about" anything specific. I think most major artists are less concerned with what a painting means as they are with how it is painted. I get high off of examining how the very best paintings are constructed, and wondering what inclined the artist to use a certain color/shape/element.

This green one took a great deal of effort - every ounce of which was fun. Even back then, before I was heavy into sewing and knitting, how interested I was in fibers. For this painting, I went to a scrap metal yard near my school and dug through piles of wet, dirty metal to find those studs you see in the bottom left corner. I also salvaged some copper wire, which I fashioned into a wide weave and glued down near the top right.

I have always been interested in the construction of fibers, and obviously in floral patterns.

Those studs were a labor of love - it took me hours to scrub the rust and mud from them with a wire brush. Yowch. I glued them down on burlap, which is such an amazing fabric.

This is a pretty special painting - during my senior year, I became increasingly interested in painting trees (as you can see in the blue painting at the top of this post). This particular tree is a weeping beech in Boston's Public Garden. My sweetie proposed to me underneath it, and we have cherished that spot and the tree ever since. I love how it became a kind of monstrous skeleton in this painting.

I constructed this painting by building a box frame of wide boards, then stretching strips of fabric and handmade ropes across it. When I can take a less blurry and better lighted picture, you can see the details much better.

This is a drawing I did in one of my earlier classes. We called it the "marks" drawing, which entailed creating a squiggle of some kind, then repeating it thousands of times to make an image. Very cool concept! I have since done a marks drawing for my sister as a wedding gift. I plan to do another for another friend's wedding gift soon.

In my third painting class, we learned a great deal about portraiture. My oldest sister offered to be a model, which is fantastic - now my parents have a portrait of her! Her nose is more like mine in that painting - my professor told me it is common for artists to accidentally paint themselves in portraits because we all spend so much time looking at our own faces.

My dad keeps a good number of my paintings in his office, which is where this yellow one, and the red one below are displayed. This yellow piece was a blast to make - I used nine layers of plywood to make a receding hole. As you can imagine, this thing was too heavy for me to lift with nine layers of plywood! To make it lighter, I cut as much of the plywood out as I could, filling the void with foam core. It is still very heavy, but as you can see, it's hanging! I spent so much time on the construction of it, I ran out of time to play with the paint - I must work on a recreation of this some time and spend longer working on the actual painting. One aspect that really worked about this was the ceramic pieces crawling out of the hole. To me, it just makes the whole painting.

I painted this red one just before the yellow - you can see how similar my construction was, and how I advanced it quite a bit with the yellow. I got mixed reactions from people on this one - when I painted it, I was feeling cathartic. And yes, I admit it, I was thinking about blood. I think I have a healthy fixation with blood - none of my paintings are particularly violent, but rather literally introspective. Ha! That's kinda funny. What can I say? My dad's a doctor (and until I took my first art class, I was on track to be a doctor too) so I've always been interested in the inner workings of the human body.

These last two are particularly special to me. The top one is a timultuous painting I did just after school when I lived in Boston (technically not a student painting, but what the heck). I was depressed about not being able to paint full time, and this painting was frustrating from start to finish. I was disatisfied with it even when it was finished until I saw it a few years later. Now I can see several passages of painting that are quite nice, and it has a dramatic sadness to it that appeals to me. I like to think of painting as an exploratory process through which you gain insight into your own psyche. Looking at it this way, you can imagine how strange it would seem for someone to ask me what a painting means. I have no idea! But it is extremely rewarding to critique it afterward and analyze the decisions made while it was created.

The white and black tree in the bottom of the picture is quite possibly my favorite painting I've ever done. It's called "The Marriage." It seems that I can remember every moment while I worked on it. I had the most fun, and the result is surprisingly sophisticated and simple. I wish I had a better photo of both the last two, but for the life of me I couldn't get a good shot. They are hung in such a way that I have to be on a stairway or balcony to get the picture, and the lighting is not particularly bright. One day I will have a better camera and vantage point.

I hope you have enjoyed seeing some of my student work. Soon, I hope I can share even more (yes there are tons more). Ciao!

labor day weekend labor

For some reason, I got the sewing bug over the weekend and managed to refashion and sew three garments! Here is the first one - a shirt modeled after one of my favorites from anthropologie:

I made it out of one of H's old undershirts - cool huh? This next one is a dress modeled after this one from american apparel:


It is very soft, and very versatile. I made it from one of those old nineties skirts with slits up both sides. And finally this puff skirt was very simple to make. I just took a loop of fabric from a dress my sister threw out and sewed a tunnel for an elastic band (from the nineties skirt which is now a dress), then hemmed the bottom edge. Easy peasy :)


I have a ton of pictures of me modeling these to post soon. It's hard to get an idea of how it's supposed to look on a hanger or laying on a bed.

I also got into framing and hanging. The picture below shows a spectacular watercolor from my painting teacher that he gave me as a wedding gift. I have finally gotten on the wall!


I used a frame which used to have a strange portrait of H and I which neither of us loved a ton, and I cut the mat using my dad's old mat-cutter. I have since moved it to hang right over our bed. It is simple and magical - I absolutely love it.


I painted these three canvases while I was studying art in Italy. They are quite unlike any of my other student work - I had to keep them small and mobile for traveling back to the U.S., and two of them were painted outside in plein air. There is a certain lightness and carelessness about them which is refreshing. My other stuff can be a bit heavy and dramatic.


This was the first time I had ever worked from a nude model. Tons of fun and thrilling! I went to a very conservative christian school that didn't allow nude models (they had to wear swimsuits - ha!)


This was a passage way I used to get to class every day. It was secluded and peaceful - perfect for setting up an easel.

And this was a closeup of that garden wall. Some of those leaves are just shameful - I ran out of steam on this one. It was a very valuable exercise though.

More pictures to come of my surprisingly productive weekend!

The Moon and Her Hair

© Moonbeam 2008

I thought I was about due to post about painting since that is my most all-consuming passion. This painting came at a tumultuous time in my life, so the style is a bit wild. My painting teacher saw it and said he thought it was joyful. One thing is certain - I was determined to use vibrant color. I had been looking at a lot of Kandinsky's work, as well as Miro's when I began painting, so their influence is somewhat obvious. The thought process began when I was in the shower enjoying the patterns created by my hair on the wall. I tend to look for skeletal supporting patterns to use in my paintings; something to hold the piece together and allow me to play with texture and color. Usually that takes the form of trees, which I love to use for their connotations of silence, stillness, growth, and the plethora of visual possibilities. What other subject is so linear, calligraphic and basic? They can be shown as thin, lyrical branches, or heavily crusted trunks with gnarly roots. This subject is my favorite, and was present in most of my paintings during my senior year in school. However, I wanted to try something different, and on a smaller scale (this painting is about 1 1/2' x 2'). The hair on the shower wall looked ghostly and playful, and presented a challenge in capturing the precise curves and lines on a canvas. One thing I love about the surrealist and abstract art of the 1930's is a preoccupation with randomness and chance. The fact that the hair on the shower wall took it's form by chance was very appealing to me. I took several pictures of the wall, then played with it on the computer until I had a clear black and white pattern.

© Moonbeam 2008

Then I proceeded with texture, my great love in painting. This time I used shredded paper...all in all not my favorite process or result, but I like trying new things to achieve a 3D element.

© Moonbeam 2008

Another element I love to use is floral pattern. I almost wish I had left the painting like the picture below. It's so simple and clean. I was a bit lost during the process though, so I kept going, hoping to feel found again.

© Moonbeam 2008

While I am glad I learned some important things throughout, this was not my favorite process. It was quite stressful trying to resolve this very new texture (usually I use some sort of fabric), the intensity of the colors, and the strange looseness of the line pattern. I love that it appears light and playful and there are certain areas which are very satisfying, but all in all I was left feeling somewhat unfulfilled. I consider it a valuable exploration.

© Moonbeam 2008

So I named this "The Moon and Her Hair." I chose this after a great deal of thought, and decided it would be best to communicate the unearthly nature of the image, and include a hint of where the line pattern came from - this Moonbeam's hair.

Valentine's Day Prep

Hello all! My sister and I were discussing hand sewing, which got me thinking about how to incorporate it into Valentine's Day crafts. Molly's star ornaments at the purl bee would make great heart ornaments, which could be strung onto a garland like this, or hung from the bottom of one of Heather's paper globes. Oh the possibilities! I'm thinking it would be great to embroider each heart ornament with a name or letter AND bead it. I'm all excited now about valentines. How are you planning to celebrate?

Here's some pink eye-candy to get everyone in the mood for Valentine's Day:


These are the gorgeous cherry trees in central park. I snapped some pictures last year when I was considering doing a big painting full of pink blossoms. Oh, if only spring were here now! It won't be long now...