Jess' Bridal Box, and another step on Still-Not-Officially-Christened...

Jess's bachelorette party is coming up next month... we've had a running joke about how one of my main duties as a bridesmaid will be to reel her in when she gets inevitably overwhelmed and cranky. This has always theoretically involved lots of pictures of kittens and candy shoved indiscriminately into the blushing bride's face. To make this dream a reality, I'm making her an official Bridal Survival Kit, complete with AWESOME CARRYING BOX. Here's 2 photos of it's progress... I'll keep you posted on the final product and its goodies.

sketchy...

painted, awaiting glitter!

The Unchristened Painting living currently under the working title of Colonization, got a bit of attention this week. It's slow going. Dealing with those buildings should have been fairly simple but for some reason took me a lot of half-aware tedium time. In any case, acrylics are done and I started in on the oils today, which was also a half-aware process as I seem to have a cold or allergies or swine flu or whatever and was pretty dopey. And to make that even more fun, yesterday I inhaled at the wrong moment during fire spinning and singed out most of my nose hairs... turns out that those are important in keeping one's nose from running...

the city today...

The castro being charming in the 80-degree april heat.

um. yep. this has "oscar" written all over it.

George the club-foot pigeon hoping i'll share my gelato. pigeons, in my world, are usually named george, unless of course they're named ethel.

blurry west portal doing the warm twilight thing. west portal feels like a remnant that got forgotten in the 50's. Buildings are short and there's diners, barbershops, shoe and vacuum-repair places lining the tiny main drag. i wish photos could capture the sense of space better. and the feel of air on skin, while i'm wishing.

jewel-toned dinner!

...good night...

city love...

recently i've been trying to remember to take my camera along for the ride... i'm by no means a photographer, but GODDAMN i love this city. it's amazing. and the more i take time to notice the small beauties around me, the scraps of life lying all over the place, the happier and calmer i am. and having the camera reminds me to look. i think i came full circle there.

sharing is fun!

colorful scrolly cafe. everything is saturated with color and glowing here.

more color. best. houses. ever.

the amazing door to nowhere.

just a great tree, really.

lost piggy...

rainy-day light and a really badass looking bar. there's some very cool stuff in SOMA that i've run across while doing my part-time personal assisting. cool in a different way than my neighborhood... new-money-revamped-warehouse-cool...

...and finally, just my city raining, looking pretty in that mussed-up running eyeliner sort of way.

5thousand almost done and my head's in a hole...

... oh look, it's trent reznor! just kidding. i'm a tad surly and giving way to bad jokes. it's the first day i've had to myself in a while and i'm celebrating by being a mopey-pants. my life is in a lot of limbo recently and i'm not sure when it might STOP... i suppose it's up to me to make it stop as well, which is, of course, not the answer i want. what? take control of my own happiness? inconceivable! of all people i trust to make decisions, i'm the last on the list! alright, enough melodrama, really now.

5thousand is almost done... i have no real process shots of this one as that's something i've just picked up as habit... apologies. Here's a couple sketches and the painting as it stands today though...

chilling in the red room...

...detail...
this one, like a lot of them, has several levels of dialogue. it's about questions, change, the pain of growth and the pain of waiting for it. the moments of poignancy that make up an experience, and the knife's edge of uncertainty we sometimes linger on; scared to jump and scared not to. it's also about a friend, so while it's a conversation with myself, it's also a conversation with someone else. I like to work with people as subjects and as symbols in my work, and it means so much more to me if i know the face i'm using... when i paint you, i'm talking to you, about you, and, finally, using you to talk about myself. i hope you don't mind.

wednesday...

Blocked in some more. Slow changes. Short on time today between gym class and a night of poi practice in San Jose (which was AWESOME). I love active days that feel like progress was made, life was lived, sandwiches were eaten, muscles were tired, flowers were sniffed, fire was spun... FULL. Wish I could live more days that way and skip the days that feel like a lot of small pockets of time wasted and leave me frustrated and exhausted in an apathetic haze. Shhhh... focus on the good stuff...

today's work; starting a new one

I used to stick to finishing one piece before starting another, but recently, particularly since getting back into playing with oils and their glacial drying times, I've loosened up into letting myself have several paintings sharing head (and room) space... both are, clearly, at a premium.

This piece, at least at its inception, is "Colonization"... unless another word floats into the magic 8-ball of my mind that suits better. I sort of hope it does. It's speaking to how love and its intense and myriad hangers-on seem to take over my mind, distracting me from myself, my work and my center to the point of draining me out. It's also a companion piece to "5 thousand", which is floating about the Red Room, not done yet. It needed a friend.

The Room with its shiny new canvas.

The Project Manager is, as usual, concerned.
Some initial sketches.
GAH!
First pencils...
Hacking out some first background in acrylics...I'm always tempted to leave it like this and call it good. I love the liveliness of the pencil sketches; it often seems like some of that is lost in the finicking of finalizing.
Some first base-layering with acrylics... it looks like a horrorshow. And apologies for the odd angles and crops; I have 4 feet of depth to get away from my work, it makes for difficult photographing.
...and now it's almost 3 am.

the state of the room...

...half-finished bits everywhere....
...and the resident project manager, shown here demonstrating "life imitating art"...

the red room...

... is an approximately 4' x 8' storage closet, an odd appendage of my living room, tucked under the upstairs neighbor's stairs. It's also my new favorite place. I should have taken before pictures, but alas, no. Several days and several Home Depot (meh) trips later...i like it in here.