Birth of a New Art Series

I wanted to stay on track with posting to this blog, but then life happened and I had to reconsider my priorities. With a baby on the way I've had to try to work more, exercise more, make music and vacation with my husband before life changes forever. So I did all the other things to prepare, but now I'm in my final stretch, just under three weeks left before the due date, and my will power to be active has depleted. I just stay home as much as I can, move as little as I can get away with, leaving me with some time to write a blog entry.

So the most recent new series I've come up with is actually not that new. The concept was born in 2008. I was doing stop motion animation internships in LA for that summer and I can't remember why, but for some reason I started drawing these creatures that I called the gipsy pirate octopi. Most of them were musicians wearing pirate and gipsy attire holding instruments, pirate flags, dancing with tambourines and other such nonsense. I ended up painting a couple of my friends as the creatures and doing one banner painting that I used to use for my blog. I've lost most of the old sketches I did but I do still have a few so here's how it began:

The image above was the very first, original gipsy pirate octopus. The story started with him. 

After some sketches, I used markers and some minimal painting to create pictures like the one above. Sadly I have lost them all, this image of one of my friends as an octopus is the only one that survives, and only as a low-rez file. In 2008 I had visions of painting entire cityscapes with these creatures and I imagined animations of them and day dreamt about them following me around in LA as I travelled through the metropolitan area daily to find my way to the studios I worked at using the public transportation system. But then life took a sharp turn in a different direction and my day dreams came to a halt.

Around 2012 I was already in UC Davis studying for my Master in Education and for Valentine's day I made the guy above using Adobe Illustrator and handed out the cards to the children in the classroom where I student taught.

Finally, in 2017, Tony and I started our band which was the name sake of my original branding concept (in fact I never did relinquish that title and have used it for my art related internet presence rather consistently). Above is the first sketch I did for our very first gig, using pencil and marker.

In 2018 we planned and executed our very last gig before the coming of the new baby. For that event I painted the above image.

Next I decided I needed to do a sister painting for our very favorite friend and fan of the band, Heather Guido. In her honor I did the piece above. 

I think the progression of these images shows a growth in the development of this concept as a series. I'm envisioning a series of paintings along the lines of my matryoshkas, where I'd use people I know as inspiration for the character development of individual octopi paintings.