I was missing Brando who moved back to Michigan right around this time (Early April 2008). I had found his ticket stup to the Seattle Aquarium and I was inspired to make these. I added sand that I’ve been keeping with me from my trip to Hawaii back in 2004.
My first living space in Seattle was pretty sketchy. I had a room to myself in a run down part of the U-district with disreputable housemates I never saw. However, I thought the room was gorgeous. It had a faux fireplace and red carpeting and red curtains. I bought red blankets and red pillows to match. I left the neighborhood, but wanted to maintain the redness of my new apartment so I painted these. My exploration with painting tape took off in these. The lease of my new apartment and the span of creating these: 2/11/08-8/11/08
INCOMPLETE work. On my birthday, Nicole gave me a bright yellow Chrysantemum. Most people know that I love the color purple and I take any other gesture that is unpurple to be an indication the giver doesn’t know me well. However, new friends are given mercy. It is actually quite a beautiful flower and I wanted to remember how special the gift was and how warm I felt as the recipient. In this hot looking landscape, the flowers dwell over head, menacing or not, I am not sure.
I’ve been interior decorating around the apartment. I just love themed rooms. When I was little I would imagine really great interior designs based around themes. My friend Andromeda had a really great Rainforest themed room and I just thought that was the coolest. I’ve been working on something for the bathroom. There’s a dragonfly shower curtain and a Japanese Bamboo scroll hanging that I wanted to bring together with a painting. What I came up with, Japanese Pond. I did this painting right before guests came over so it would be right. The painting was made right in the same week as the Nicole paintings (mid april) with what I call the “butterfly wing effect.” And that stylistic point translated quite nicely.
This was a couple of weeks after Bumbershoot, where I saw Daniel Danger’s Screenprints. I took a postcard from his booth, the one shown here with the rising skeletons from a tumultuous sea. I wanted to have that similar dark palate with a little light objects for contrast. When coming up with the actuall setting, I wanted to work with architecture, something meaningful and a little obscure. Not present day New York or anything quite recognizable. I really like the Star Wars episodes with Natalie Portman and so you get Naboo.
One night I asked Dan an idea for a painting. He said squid and do my blotchy backgrounds. I looked online for pictures, and found this really great octopus picture. This was the week after I graduated college. March 25ish.
This was my first attempt at what has been referred to as a “Bocretion.” Coined by Stephen and his artsy friend, this is a collage process, where in the cut-up style of Bill Burroughs, one takes phrases, jumbles it up into a “poem” and then is further inspired by it to create a surreal cut-up beast of mixed media. It was my mistake to take the poem so literally and use whole lines, rather than phrases. The corresponding poem, originally written by W.E. Yeats, and still retaining most of its original poetic structure refers to the story of Leda, which involves a god posing as a giant swan and assaulting her. This work was completed sometime March. The canvas used to be a painting of a geometric pattern of red and yellow with a black silhouette of a tree, but I disliked its simplicity and lack of originality so I painted over it.
This series was completed the day after Christmas with all the snow-hubbaloo. I painted the backgrounds without knowing what the subject was going to be. I really enjoyed the colors and the yellow happy I felt. I started the fishes first. All the glasses were drawn from life, really every type of glass I have in my apartment (except the perfectly cylidrical one, for some reason). The fish and birds were found on the internets. I think I just wanted to do something whimsical. The birds are specifically titmice and I’ve been drawn to them due to the word’s appearance in my Contemporary Novel assignment Out Stealing Horses. Before reading that book, I didn’t know that a titmouse was a type of bird. I love misleading names like that. It’s cute. I think the fish are more successful because of how the sillouette adds interest to the composition. I wanted to convey a quiet suffering. At first it’s just whimsy, but at some point the viewer realizes they are doomed little things.
