art

march miscellany

I still have tons of things to post about but some of them require photographs that I haven’t taken yet.

Also, am baffled that it’s March already. But March brings Sleep No More, and therefore I welcome it wholeheartedly, even in my skepticism about the passing of time.

I have been petting my shiny, shiny ARCs. A few have scampered off to new homes already, and the fates of the remaining ones are being pondered. I have ideas but I need to see how practical they’ll be to execute.

I spent part of the weekend painting, because I haven’t painted anything in ages and I had new old sheet music to play with.

They’re a companion series to a trio of paintings I did last year called music for the apocalypse. This bunch is music for the apocalypse part II: nocturnes. They should be up on Etsy by the end of the week.

Other than that I’m all reading, writing & waiting for the snow to melt while I slowly work my way through my ever-growing to-do list.

There are photos of shiny objects forthcoming, too.

By erin, ago

monday miscellany

Stuff accomplished during the week of no internet:

  • Finished three (3!) paintings. One is off to its recipient already, another is waiting for payment & the third is available on Etsy.
  • Got rid of my stupid summer head cold that I had hoped was allergies but was really just a head cold. I don’t get sick that often and that’s twice this year already, bah.
  • Went through two old notebooks that contained two years worth of novel notes, and pulled out several pages worth of possibly useful stuff.
  • Transcribed the possibly useful stuff into a new notebook.
  • Made strawberry frozen yogurt.
  • Sort of figured out the structure of the new draft. I think. Maybe. I have to see what it looks like when not scrawled on a spare piece of paper in magenta Sharpie.

So, not the huge dent in revisions that I’d wanted, but still productive. Am revising-o-rama this week, and I feel better about it having gotten the paintings out of the way.

Also, this weekend I bought a gigantic (2’x3′) dry erase board. I am a nerd, but I am a happy nerd. Hopefully it will help with structuring and time line and such. The kittens were disappointed that it did not come in a box. But it does have four different pens! And it’s magnetic! Oooh, I should get magnetic poetry for it.

Um, anyway.  It’s hot & humid out and the Kitten Flop Barometer is at Heavy Flop. Tessa is heavily flopped over the printer at the moment.

Back to notes and time lines and coffee for me.

By erin, ago

endings that aren’t really endings

I finished the kings for the tarot deck this afternoon. That means that beyond a bit of re-detailing and a Happy Squirrel and a book to go with it, it’s done. Which doesn’t really sound all that done typed out like that, but it is complete in some sense. The core of it is finished and the rest is extra and details.

I started it in October of 2006. I think I’d intended for it to take 2 years and it ended up being just over 3. The kings took the longest, probably because they were last and I wanted to make sure I got them right. I think I did.

The whole deck is now up in the galleries on phantomwise.com. It looks like a journey, which is probably exactly what it should look like.

Other than tarot finishing everything around here is holiday preparation and revision notes and hungry kittens. I have Beautiful Creatures waiting to be read and I should probably bake cookies at some point. The end of 2009 is shaping up to be quiet and dark and cold, in a cozy sort of way.

By erin, ago

creative messes

While I’ve been in revisionland I’ve been silently bemoaning how messy my writing process is. I’m not sure what I expect would be better, or less messy, but it seems to tend toward chaotic. I have handwritten notes scrawled sideways on paper in two different colors of pen. I have snatches of dialogue scrawled in between. I have a Scrivener file open with bits of potential new scenes written in no particular order and odd bits highlighted so I know where I need changes. I have a hard copy of the current manuscript that I’ve started to mark up with purple gel pen.

It’s messy.

But when I was working on the bastet postcard (already sold!) yesterday, I realized my art process is just as messy, particularly toward the end stages.

This is a picture of my workbench, taken right after I finished:

creative mess

There are several things in this photo that I didn’t even end up using (the gold metallic worked better than the copper, for example) and yes that’s my hand covered in Mod Podge. There was an incident. I promise my camera hand was clean. Comparatively.

So I thought, looking at this mess, why should I expect my writing process to be different? Just because it’s words and not paint doesn’t mean the process is all that different, I make writing/painting analogies all the time. Of course my writing process is going to involve weird notes and seemingly disorganized bits and pieces. Clearly, I am the type of artist that needs to put paint I’m not going to use on the table and get my hands dirty.

I used to have this complex about working messy with my art. I thought all the paint should actually end up on the painting and not on the table, on me, occasionally on the cats. I got over that somewhere around the time I started splattering things. It’s difficult to splatter things and keep paint properly contained. But I liked the finished product, I liked the way it looked and it’s become something of a signature technique now.

Time to apply the same train of thought to writing, methinks. At least writing messily doesn’t involve as much cleanup.

By erin, ago

menagerie

Yesterday, for my birthday extravaganza, the boy and I went to the Peabody Essex Museum. We hadn’t been in awhile, so all the special exhibits were new to us, but by far our favorite was the Trash Menagerie, an exhibit teeming with creatures made from recycled materials.

(Sulphur Blue Smeck, 2005, Michelle Stitzlein, mixed junk, 62 x 84 x 11 inches)

This butterfly is even more impressive in person. The stripes on the bottom of the wings are piano keys and the circles at the top are pots. It was impossible to pick a favorite, between the cardboard monkeys and the clam made of cigarette butts and the bunny with cigarette filter fur (bunny was even more adorable in person) and the glowing centipede comprised of bundt cake pans and bicycle brakes.

I love art made from repurposed stuff, and something about repurposing junk into animals is entirely enchanting. I can’t precisely put my finger on why, but the whole exhibit made me very happy. Finding new and exciting things, especially on my birthday, is a happy-making sort of thing.

After museuming we went out to dinner and managed to not get rained on, though it is the second coldest birthday that I can remember having.

We are still munching on funfetti cupcakes and I have a beautiful new necklace, my very first piece from Parrish Relics after years of coveting. Will be posting the first flax-golden tale tomorrow morning, and so far being thirty-one is very nice, indeed.

By erin, ago

randomness for the 29th day of june

I finished the pages for the tarot deck today. They’re over here on LJ and in the tarot minors gallery on phantomwise.com. I have the sketches for the knights finished but I likely won’t start painting them until next week.

I am working on the aforementioned unexpected YA novel idea and it’s going pretty well. I think I want to do a relatively fast first draft over the next couple of months and see where it wants to go.

Query-wise I am playing the waiting game, and I seem to be getting better at it. Or better at distracting myself by baking cookies and drinking lots of wine.

I can’t believe it’s almost July.

That’s about it. Apropos of nothing, here is a photo I took on Saturday as we were driving off into the sunset.

By erin, ago