A quick visit to my older art.

I wish I could go back and put this at the beginning of the blog, but I can't. While it seemed appropriate to start this as a showcase of my more recent art it does seem strange to not show what a break this was from the work I formerly did. I have been thinking that I would like to bring back the cool distance of some of the work I did a few years ago, but am not sure that is possible at this point.

No matter the outcome it is always worth looking back occasionally and seeing where you have been. This is a chronological trip through my short art career.

Early prints and drawings:

Probably my first successful art idea was doing a series of prints based upon one of my favorite albums: Dusty in Memphis. My images are pretty literal visual interpretations of certain songs. This series remains the favorite of many of the people who know me and my art well. I've been told that it is partially due to the sense of my happiness in what I was doing that they see in the images. Which seems strange to me because while I was happy to be doing these the images are mainly about isolation.

Figure Drawing:

I LOVE FIGURE DRAWING!!!! I love to lose myself in the pull of the model's body. I never learned to love figure painting as much, I think because I enjoy the immediacy of drawing and following the light around the figure. I wish I could do more figure drawing at this point in my life, but time doesn't allow for it now. I'll go back to it as soon as I finish up with school.

Vespa's and Ape's:

I did this series while studying in Rome for a quarter. I have always loved the organic grace of Vespas, but had never seen the little Ape trucks before visiting Italy. This was such a nice series to work on, I would wander around Rome with my parchment taped onto a board drawing all the pretty vehicles. I met so many nice Romans while doing this, they love these vehicles and all seemed to get a real kick out of my doing portraits of them. I finished off the drawings with shoe polish, iron oxide paint, and silver leaf.

More early prints:

Post Apocolyptic visions where all that remains are toppled sky scrapers and flocks of birds. And my angst birds - an early incarnation of these characters who have stayed a constant in my artistic vernacular. Plus some with nice feelings about people paired up.

Early random drawings and prints:

The Tree series of paintings:

The darkness was starting to seep into my work at this point. I felt I needed to find a way to control the images I was making both formally and emotionally so I decided that everything would be okay if I did them all 1:1 scale with the trees I was depicting. I spent day after day wandering around the UW campus measuring tree branches and making diagrams and drawings of them. Yet even with my attempts to subdue the dark it came roaring back in with my Looming Figure. With this painting I drew upon my sewing skills and created a quilt of a 1:1 scale drawing of some trees. I then stretched it and started painting. I stuck with it as trees for a few days then flipped it and worked on it for a couple months with these figures gradually emerging. Bleeding Tree was another one that just sort of made itself. This is what I feel like often when I am hurt, a hard skin with holes punched in it that ooze and ooze pain.

Tree collage prints:

These are less directly ominous, but are still about blocks and uncertainty. I made them by layering printing with collaged wood veneer and paper. I think these are among my very favorite things I have done. And they are HUGE which is always sort of satisfying to me.

Boxed In collage prints:

These were all about my constant claustrophobia and isolation of oneself. They are also about trying to break out of this and back into the world. I continued working at a 1:1 scale only this time the subject was myself. I cut a variety of plexiglass plates and built wooden frames with the same inside dimensions as the plate edges. I then smooshed myself into the frames and took timed photos of myself in these positions. I then layered collage and print until I was satisfied with the claustrophobic effect. This was the last group of work I did before starting my MFA. Although very different in appearance, I see a continuation of context in the work I have done since.