Three Daughters 36x48" Oil on Canvas 

Affinity
36x48" Oil on Canvas 

Comfort: The Church House
24x36" Oil on Canvas

Portrait, First Draft 

Close your mouth

Thank you, Takamori

18x24"
Oil/Acrylic on Canvas

in the gut

oil/alkyd
18x24" 

 

 

Helmet II 36"x48" Oil 

 

 

Still dont feel safe, even with a helmet. Oil on canvas, 36"x48" 

Rooms in the mind of a precocious little girl. Underpainting, Oil on canvas, 36"x48" 

Beginning of the album cover painting for Three Rivers. 36"x48" Oil on canvas 

Mother and Child
36"x48" Alkyd, Oil 

Figure Painting I started this past week. The color is dazzling and thick, I want to eat it like Pez!

After adding the blue, I hesitated. I think the painting may have lost the feeling of crawling into the corner. I will probably paint it out.

Seeing the Takamori show in Scottsdale had a profound effect on me.

If you scroll down, you can see one of his prints in yellow and black.

Daddy
"Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you."


Sylvia Plath

Burgundy Boutique Dream 

Boutique II
This dream had to be painted at 5 am Saturday morning.

The Burgundy Boutique is full of luxurious fabrics and entryways that lead to room after room of beautiful things that women love. Textures swirl and there is a box of chocolates hidden behind every velvet curtain.

Wouldn't you love to shop there?

Nathan's self-portraits:
Practicing facial expressions.

My Art Opening

So this is what the gallery space looks like with my work hanging in it. The lighting is enchanting. This photo was taken by Tamiyo, a fellow photo history student. She said that she saw a girl sleeping on this couch one day and wished she had a camera as the images of the figures are almost all lying down.

Thank you so much Tamiyo. We will get to study together soon.

Drawing and Automaticality

The following works are my latest attempt at letting loose and allowing myself to explore what drawing has to offer my free hand. I am using the time spent in the studio to practice a type of automatic writing. I want the words and lines to spill out of me unedited in order to get to the unconscious things that I have been working on. There is tension and beauty in each of the drawings. The work has offered me my own inkblot tests with which to create and experience my own stories. This practice of allowing the work to come rather than forcing it has crept into most everything else I have done. I find it extremely challenging not to drive the outcome. This has pushed me beyond what I believed with my conscious mind to be possible.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I grew up in the South, a fact I tried to run from, hide from others and deny. I was embarrassed by the limited way I felt some of “my people” looked at the rest of the world. I felt that I too would be associated with the bigotry, “family values” and prejudice that were around me. I have since learned that I have a responsibility to answer to the things that I was taught. I also feel it necessary, like a calling—to quote my Baptist preaching grandfather—to respond the questions that the world around me refused to answer: questions about ethnicity, gender, sexuality and god.

Drawing, printmaking and painting allow my hand the freedom that my words were not allowed to have. As a woman, I was taught to be demure, graceful and charming…all things I fought vehemently, much to my mother’s dismay. Words were never what they meant on the surface, but had many hidden meanings. (“Oh, Bless her heart” sounds really kind but is actually derogatory, meaning that someone usually doesn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain.) My work reflects the concept of layering meanings both literally and figuratively.

My work is a response to and a celebration of situation and location and how these things can affect the way one views the world. I use the figure as a metaphor for humankind and the sadness and beauty of living.

This is one of the prints I am including in the show. "Gathering the Quiet" includes several different types of printmaking including intaglio, lithography and inkjet techniques. There is a dialogue between the varied works that encourages reflection. Gathering can be defined as harvesting, gathering people together or bunching material together for sewing. Quiet can be defined as calm, without sound, serene, untroubled. The process of making and viewing art is often a quiet, thoughtful process. Creating art requires restraint, concentration and a certain amount of tranquility. Art engages the viewer, takes them away from chaos for a time, and requests a sort of quiet reflection.

The following are recent works. I am focusing most of my time on the figure with special emphasis on line and accuracy of form.