Russian Christmas

Today Tony and I are performing at the Dusty Monk in order to celebrate Russian Christmas here, in HOT Tucson, Arizona. I called my grandmother, who is in COLD St. Petersburg, Russia, to wish her a Merry Christmas and talk to her a little, since that is all we can do with an ocean between us. I realized a few days ago that when I left Russia this summer I bought my tickets in a great rush because I missed my husband so much after being away for almost two months that I didn't even realize that in only one more month it was going to be her birthday.

Knowing that I missed her birthday by a month in a situation that was not in all actuality a matter of emergency made me feel like I missed out on an opportunity in life to celebrate with her for the first time in 20 years. There were many things I did this summer with her that were magical and helped me reconnect with my country and my grandmother, but I still feel like I should not have rushed. She is 84 years old now and ever opportunity I get to see her may be my last. With the coming of my baby son I have been thinking a lot of a wish I have.

I want to be able to take him to Russia so she can meet him. My grandma may live to be a 100 years old or more for all I know, but I wouldn't like to find myself wishing I didn't miss out on an opportunity to connect with her if it does turn out to be too late. So as soon as it is feasible, I plan on taking the trip. For now, I'd like to post two of the many wonderful photos I took on this trip. I love these especially because of the festive table and scarves. This was taking in the last few weeks before my departure. We were splurging on the best caviar in town that we could possibly afford. After eating twice, though, we had enough.

This is probably what we would be doing today if I was in Russia with my grandmother, celebrating Christmas.

These photos remind me of on of my favorite Russian artists, Kustodiev. Below is one of his beautiful paintings. I'm working my way up to a series of paintings I'd like to do inspired by his themes and some of the photos I've taken in Russia with my grandmother at the table in the past as well as some of my beautiful Tucson lady friends. Something that's been in the works on my mind for a while now.

Спасибо Чибурашка (Thank You, Cheburashka)

As promised, I am posting one of my hand painted ornaments that I completed this gifting season. I was planning on only painting 5 by Christmas day because there were five different family members/couples that would all get one ornament that day. When I was working on this particular one, though, my husband came home and fell in love with it. It's a scene from the cartoon Cheburashka, where Crocodile Gena sings a song called the Blue Train. 

My husband and I started learning/playing that song about a month or two ago and whenever he would watch the video of it on YouTube he would repeat the words "Спасибо Чибурашка" because the recording begins with Crocodile Gena thanking Cheburashka for joining him during his song (I think, I don't remember for sure). Tony always says that's his first complete sentence in Russian. 

I decided to work really hard on making a sixth ornament so that I could give this one to Tony. Each ornament took me an entire day to complete so it was very difficult to manage this during the busy season of buying gifts, baking cup cakes and going to Tony's multiple musical gigs. But I am very happy that I managed it. And I'm posting it today in honor of our upcoming performance at the Dusty Monk where we will be performing this very song in two days.

Thoughts

As I follow other artists on Instagram whose art I find similar in style to mine own it's inspiring to see them succeed and talk of their achievements in the new years posts where they thank the last year for all the good fortunes it brought to their lives and careers. Today I read the post of an artists who goes by @melissa.castrillon on instagram and she mentioned how this year she got married and her first three books got published.

So I looked back on my year. I got married to a man I love a lot who is very supportive of my artistic endeavors and all my interests in life. I am also now with child and expecting to have a baby boy in May of 2018. I have painted many paintings this year and sold quite a few. Tony and I had our first gig as our brand new band The Gypsy Pirate Octopi and soon will have another performance on January 6th, 2018.

Below is my favorite picture from our wedding. I love it because it reminds me of a Soviet Era film I love a lot called Табр Уходит в Небо (Gypsies are Found in Heaven is a loose translation of the title). The film itself has a very tragic ending, but it's full of free spirit and passion and I feel like this photo has some of that in it, also it has a Soviet sort of aesthetic to it. Zoey, Tony's daughter, found some toy handcuffs at our host's house and cuffed us after the ceremony, hence the photo.

Progress of an Artist

Okay, so before the year is over I do have some art to share. Today I went back over the entries I've done in this blog and I noticed that I skip many pieces of art that I do without ever posting them on here. I've never had a New Year's resolution before, but I'll make an exception this year and hope that next year I will do a better job at keeping my blog updated with my art as I continue to create new pieces.

About a week or two ago I had a conversation with my friend who is very integral to the support system of my pursuit of a career as an illustrator/artist. He has been immensely encouraging and he asked me "why is it that you work on so many projects that are indirect to your attaining a job as an illustrator instead of just getting to the part where you actually just sit down and illustrate a story so you have that for your portfolio?" About two days later my mom asked me the exact same thing, only in much more urgent tones.

I had the same answer for both of them. I work on all these other projects because I feel that they will lead me to a better developed artistic style and mastery of technique. They help me practice concept development slowly. Rather than forcing myself to work on a story and be inspired by the same set of characters for an extended period of time, I am training myself to be inspired constantly but instead of being limited by a storyline, I am only limited by a set of parameters much wider so as to train my brain to create images without overloading it with too many limitations at once.

I think back on the summer I interned at some Stop Motion Animation studios. All the people that I did end up getting close to who gave me a small window into their perception of their job basically told me that because they're working on a collaborative project that is not their own, they feel constricted artistically within their job and prefer to work in lower stress studios where they have ample personal time to create their own personal projects at home so as to have artistic freedom and expression of their own.

I think that experience and knowledge has led me to almost fear being trapped in such a job. An illustration job where I feel trapped by someone else's imagination. It's like that compass in one of the Pirate of the Caribbean movies. It only takes you where you want to go, but it can only do it when you know EXACTLY where that is. Right now I'm in a state where I'm not certain of what exactly I want to achieve as an artist, and maybe I'll never find out and continue to work on my own projects occasionally selling something here and there. Which would be fine. But I hope that my vision will crystalize and take me to an end game, a new beginning of a career that I will love.

This Christmas I worked on some ornaments for my family to give as gifts. I'm going to post one a day so as to not visually overload my post. The one below is an image that I did not create myself, I must admit. I really like ships but I'm not very savvy in drawing them yet, so I looked onto the cover of a book I am currently reading, We the Drowned. This exact image is on the cover of the book and I really liked it, so I simply copied it. This is one of the baby steps I sometimes take to learn to draw something new. I copy it. After copying enough of the same thing I begin to get a better sense of my own take on the object of my art and while I may use references from photos, I still create my own image. Not this time though. Although I did use gold leaf, and that was not part of the book cover, which was black and white.

 

Pirates!

Life has had many changes in the past 5 months since I've been back from Russia. I got pregnant and found out recently that I'm going to have a son. My husband and I did our first gig together at the Dusty Monk playing as the Gipsy Pirate Octopi after planning on it basically since the month we met.    We had an art show with some of the Citizens Warehouse artists. And of course other life things happened in between those events.

About three months ago I started painting a very special painting for a friend who was gracious enough to offer to use his beautiful home to host our wedding. I promised him a matryoshka of himself in March of this year as a thank you for hosting. But as I continued to make matryoshka of other friends and family, my paintings became gradually larger and more and more complex.

Originally I started painting small pieces, just 4 x 4 inches, with only one central figure and some ornate folk designs.

This was the first first in the series, 4x4"

After doing a few more I ran out of the small scraps of watercolor paper I was working with and found a larger piece of watercolor scrap paper and immediately I added architecture because there was space for it.

This was the 6th in the series. 6.5x7"

But this was the only scrap of watercolor paper I had in that size, so the next painting I did had to be on a larger sheet from a pad. I did three at 12x16" and each time they seemed to be more time consuming.

This was 9th in the series. 12x16"

When I came around to painting the gift I promised to Chris Stamos I wanted outdo myself. Partially because I wanted to show him my gratitude because I love my husband very much and our wedding was so beautiful and all things related to it I want to be beautiful, including the gift that I give to our friend for opening up his home to our celebration. Also, after seeing what I can do in the painting above I wanted to do something even better, I want to evolve as an artist, even if I am doing Matryoshkas, I want each one to be better than the next. 

I worked intermittently because so many things were happening, I was already in my first trimester and it proved very difficult to work on anything during that time as I wanted to sleep most of the time. Also, I had to spend quite a bit of time rehearsing with Tony and practicing the accordion on my own as well. But finally I finished my latest masterpiece!

10th in the series, 15x20"

Artistic Analysis: a Farewell to an Old Painting

Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote my last post! I guess I got busy. Trying to work a side job in education and develop an artistic career at the same time makes it hard to keep up with social media. Last weekend though, I did get to stay in my brand spanking new studio during Open Studio Tours and work on my latest piece while visitors trickled in and out.

I sold a painting that I did a long time ago, in 2010! I loved getting rid of it. Although it is one was of my favorites, it has been around a long time and I hoped that someday someone else would take over its care.

This piece is called Jealousy and I painted it right after the following small occurrence: I was hanging out with a friend who'd recently broke up with a girlfriend of his whom I never met. Suddenly, for the first time ever, she decided to visit unexpectedly since the break up. He never told me about her, because we'd become friends only recently, and so I had no idea who she was, but I could tell that something was wrong due to her pensive manner and her carefully observant glances of me. I just couldn't understand what the problem was. After she left, he explained to me what was happening and it all made sense.

So then I made this drawing/painting, and although I did not set out with the intention of depicting this event, it turned out that the image closely resembled the situation. On the left is a little child like spirit, representing carefree joy. Next to the child is a lady who has wild hair, and a fun polka dot dress with unusual blue lip stick, she is a symbolic representation of myself at the time. Next is a man with a long orange beard who seems awkward and lost, that's my friend, he didn't have a long beard but he did have reddish hair and large blue eyes, and he did feel awkward and trapped. Lastly there's a lady who seems very prim and proper and has a bit of a judgmental expression on her face. That's my friend's ex-girlfriend.

Some other details: there's a glass of juice labeled so in Russian, standing on the table between the child spirit and myself, I think that is representative of innocence in contrast to the bottle of vodka, labeled so in Russian, standing between my friend and his ex, which I think represents some darker, heavier emotion. Also, something you can't see in this image but is evident in the original, is there's a snake that slithers along the bottom of the entire painting, and I think this snake represents the poisonous nature of the relationship my friend described to me after his ex left.

None of this analysis was in my conscious mind while I made the image. It was only after I was done with it and showed it to my friend that we were able to analyze and come up with all the parallels.

Revisiting Old Sketches

About a year ago my husband bought me some watercolor pencils as a gift. It set me off on a large portrait spree and I used them to draw/paint 6 pieces from live subjects. I did close studies of the people I was drawing and I loved using the pencils because I haven't used pencils since I was a teenager and always thought of it as an inferior medium because it was so simple to use. But being older and wiser I realized that easier is not so bad. I like it when things are easy sometimes, it's like a bonus in life.

It is a very rare occasion for me to sketch and one day I had a brand new watercolor pad sitting in front of me, 15x20 inches and I though, what the hell, why not try to do a quick self portrait study but not worry too much about being realistic. I ended up with an expressionistic portrait of myself that I rather liked. It took me about an hour maybe a little longer to sketch it and I put it aside and never looked at it again.

A week ago I opened that pad planning to use it for the my next piece and saw the old sketch. I didn't want to waste the paper and didn't want to detach it from the pad either. It's a block pad and helps keep the paper from warping when getting it wet so I decided to finish the painting. I started off with just a blueish face. After brushing water over the pencil I added a pattern to the background imitating wall paper using a fabric pattern I have from some curtains I made a while back.

In the spirit of coming back to old things I decided to revisit gold/silver/whatever... leafing. I used this medium a lot during college. I loved the reflective texture and the meticulous process of applying the adhesive, laying the leaf and brushing off the excesses in intricate patterns. I thought this would be a visually impressive but an intellectually simple way of adding something to the piece.

While applying the silver leaf I had much time to contemplate the piece. I think perhaps this is one reason I love the tentative, time consuming mediums. While doing something that is repetitive I have plenty of time to think of things and come up with ideas that may improve either my art, or life in general. In this instance I remembered that all my portraits had unrealistic colors. I always started my portraits with a color scheme in mind and for each color in the scheme I would assign a value, so that instead of using a grey scale for shadows and highlights, or just a value scale in a similar color range I would invent my own value scale using different colors.

In this painting the scale from darkest to lightest is as follows: blue, red, yellow and white.

For the past few months I considered this practice and recognized that in many paintings this sort of approach would be defined as the underpainting. After adding various hews to create depth and represent any reflected colors an artist might add a layer of skin tones. I've been basically dreaming of the day that I could accomplish this level of complexity. This painting having taken me very little time thus far was a good candidate for experimentation. And so I took a peach colored pencil and simply went over every part of the skin and added a thick layer of what was the closest color I had in my collection of pencils to my own skin tone. I was very pleased with the results.