Remember this post? Wherein I fawned over all things crystal and skull?  While I did not receive a Will Yackulic drawing in my stocking, I DID receive some lovelies of the crystal and skull variety from my favorite people (among scads of other wonderful giftses).  Here they be.

From my bro, a bottle of Crystal Head Vodka (the bottle is uber sweet!)

From ma mere, a sweet quartz crystal candle holder:

And from Mark, a ceramic skull with glazed teeth and a gold tooth!  I have been wanting this skull from Mudpuppy’s Etsy shop for a long time now.

Thanks to my amazing family for indulging my strange fascinations!

Here’s the new one for The Beautiful Ones.  It will be in the Gallery Project show coming up, along with several other drawings (some of which haven’t been shown before) and the new big painting…which isn’t exactly finished yet.  Guess what I’ll be doing tomorrow…

School has been very stressful lately.  S-T-R-E-S-S-F-U-L.  When all of my time seems dictated by meetings, appointments, grading, committee work, etc. I often forget to take care of myself.  Unless Mark puts a sandwich in front of me, I forget to eat.  I make my tea for the day in the morning and forget in on the shelf at home.  Yoga, studio, reading books, all of the things I love to do that define my happiness, fall to the wayside.  I am trying to remember, amidst all of the stress, to live with more intentionality, to summon the energy to do these things instead of functioning on autopilot.  Yesterday was great for that.  I got my grading done during the day, and thus was able to spend my afternoon and evening cleaning up the house from a week’s worth of neglect, and was able to draw and listen to music for the whole night.  Man, it rocked.  You know it’s a good studio experience you find yourself drawing in silence with headphones still in your ears, long after the music has stopped, and you didn’t even notice.  This morning, I jumped out of bed and ran straight into house studio to check on last night’s work.  I love that feeling!

unicorn girl drawing in progress for The Beautiful Ones series

"the fates" drawing in progress for Afterlife series

I’d love to hear the things you do to “remember yourself.”

life:

and death…

In a way it makes me a little sad to throw flowers on the compost pile.  It seems somehow funereal.  But since they will eventually feed future flowers and vegetables, it is all part of the cycle.

Can you tell that I was listening to Belle and Sebastian yesterday?

I am settling into my studio space nicely:

Here are some pieces I have made so far.  I am pretty interested in the image of the skull, and am exploring it in my work.  This interest was sparked by an addiction I have of looking at the selby, photographer Todd Selby’s website.  He goes into creative people’s spaces and photographs them and their stuff.  I am captivated by people’s sort of universal shrine, or still life arrangements that they create just for themselves.  Todd Selby does a fantastic job of capturing that.  I am struck by the number of skulls on the site–as though these artists, musicians, etc., want to keep a reminder of mortality close at hand.  So I set out to make portraits of the skulls on his site.  I have done two so far:

a crystal skull

a skull with gold leaf

So recently, as demonstrated by the skulls, I have been interested in engaging and embracing mortality in my work.  I have been reading biographies of and memoirs by Virginia Woolf, Amelia Earhart and Emily Dickinson.  I chose three iconic, passionate women who died by different means: suicide, possibly a plane crash or related death, and illness respectively.  So I am making weird little pieces involving these women, their lives, last words and deaths.

I found an image online of Amelia Earhart's palm print, so I decided to make a piece about her lifeline

two small panels--images of Howland Island, Amelia Earheart's destination on her final flight, which she never reached

Also here is a piece that traces pattern of patina on a statue from Buda Castle:

These are just snapshots of what I am working on.  The photos are certainly not documentation-quality.  Here is another image that relays a sense of scale of some of the work.  The paintings are on birch panels mostly in gouache.

I think the smaller panels are about four inches wide, maybe five.