Week 3

Very busy week! I don't know if I got exactly my 20 hours in the studio, but I will have more time this next week to make up for any time I missed. Spent an inordinate amount of time working on the first research paper (omniousness in David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock.) Got a rough draft finally out so on to the fun stuff. Visited the Walker with Jeffrey this week. We heard a lecture about Elizabeth Peyton. I thought I didn't like her until I walked through the retrospective and I think I do now. Well, I hate her of course because it's "easy" and she's famous, but I do like the shiny, pretty, fuzziness of the paintings. Even more excited by the exhibit of Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo. A LARGE retrospective! Radioactive penises were every where!

The two works above are from my new Pond series for which I've done a few already. Not much to say yet, it's early...

Starting 2 works for my mentor. Cutting up parts of photographs as starts in paintings. Each had to have an item and a piece of landscape. I need to paint to match that landscape. This piece had the photos placed intentionally. The other arbitrarily. 

This is the first painting in response to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. I like it a lot. Not my usual. Moved the horizon. Changed the paint a little. Out of focus. Eerie. So far, so good. I think the summation of the paper and the movies is this. There's the scene where the Crows start landing on the kids' playground. There's no music. When there are 4 or 5 and they keep landing slowly 1 by 1, it's scary. When we look and there's 500 of them on the playground I don't think it's quite as scary. The scariness/eerie part comes not knowing when exactly or if we've crossed over into the absurdity of the dream, when we ask ourselves, "is this real or am I dreaming?"

This seagull one is odd. I don't think I'm painting it.  It's sort of painting itself. I spent about 10 hours this week continuing to work on the background. I started it at the end of January. Don't know why exactly, but I had a clear idea of it in my head coming out of the residency. Hadn't even thought about my Alfred Hitchcock assignment yet. On 2/2/9 my Grandfather died. I was much closer to him than any male in my life. He was a big squawky bird, but strong and majestic. I guess this has sort of turned into an elegy for him.