The New and Daunting…

Pepsi and Wine, in progress...

Starting a new painting can be very daunting.

I can’t really start something until I have the colors worked out in my head.  If I can’t picture the main color, then I’ll leave a piece until I can see that color – and the colors that will go with it.  Since I have established my paint palette, the colors tend to move in patterns.  I’ll pick out my main color, and then the other primaries that I will use to mix for the composition.  I don’t often do color sketches, but I will test swatches out beforehand.

Sometimes when I sketch, the colors for something will be in my head from its inception, as if the color goes with the lines and the shapes.  This makes it easier for me when I get to the painting, since the intended mood has always been with the piece from the beginning.

I am starting the paintings for the main part of the Chaos show this week.  They are a series of four connecting paintings, that will total over six feet in length when they are finished.  They will be under the title of Chaos, Decadence and Damnation, and will have individual titles for each painting.  The one I have started is called Pepsi and Wine, and it is the first complicated landscape that I have done since 2010.

I never know how much trouble a painting will give me until I get into it.  Sometimes there is something wrong with the paper, which I don’t figure out until the very involved trace off and the stretching is done.  When the paper is messed up, the paint will not absorb properly, or there will be funny streaks in the washes.  Other times, I will have a horrible feeling about the choices I have made, and everything will feel off – so I usually start over.  On the rare occasion, I will end up hating the drawing as I start to paint it, so I have to go back and fix it….  I never know if it will work out, so it’s like a kamikaze run every time.

As the Chaos sketches came together, I started to eliminate parts of the sketch as I went along.  Here is the fire spouting whale that I cut out – it didn’t really fit the composition the way that I wanted, so I added a new element to the sketch.  I was watching a lot of Whale Wars  awhile ago, so I drew the whale so it could be bursting out of a poppy field.

The whales are being hunted, and they are angry!

Tags: new painting, sketches, water colors, Whale Wars

The All Seeing Eye…

It’s all around us.

It sees everything we do.

As the grid that surrounds us becomes more detailed,  our lives become even more surveilled. As the space between us and the people we supposedly voted for as our caretakers becomes wider and wider, we are left with the foundation for a society that seems to use Orwell’s fiction as a blueprint.

This week Halton region decided to keep fluoride in its water supply despite the demand from the constituents to take it out.  Councillors who had spearheaded the campaign to take the chemical out of the water caved in from Federal pressure, allowing the vote to pass: 11 for keeping it, and 9 against.

(we are constantly being told what to think about fluoride; it’s important that we hear the other side and then decide for ourselves:  http://www.fluoridealert.org/ )

Will we let the Federal government swallow the country whole, or will we start to demand more of those who have been chosen as caretakers?   Will we let the likes of Stephen Harper become overlords, or will we demand a return to balance?

The All Seeing Eye is a motif that keeps popping up in my work, since about 2008.  It’s that feeling of being watched all the time, compounded with the feeling that society is becoming unravelled in the process. Since the symbol of the Eye is much more than just a symbol of the New World Order, it holds multiple meanings at once, however…when you see an eye in a pyramid in my work – it always means that something evil is afoot.

Tags: all seeing eye, fluoride, new world order, stephen harper

In Two Weeks….

I have been having a strange month.

Nothing is really happening to me, but I have a lot of things on my mind.

The result has been a bunch of drawings that I have been channeling my strange feelings into.  I’ll share one with you now…

This drawing is about the Soul...

I’m getting a sabbatical from work in February to work on my drawing and painting, and I only have two weeks left to go!

Tags: sketch, the soul

The Way It Goes…

This drawing was for a painting that I never finished....

When I wrote the post – “The Truth About Topless Mermaids,” I never knew how popular it would be.

Since I posted that entry, I have gotten almost one hit per day or more for “topless mermaids.”  It comes up in the search terms recordings for my blog’s stats. Who knew topless mermaids would be on the mind of so many people?  Obviously Google searching “mermaid” simply wouldn’t give someone what they really wanted to see.

My husband Ben suggested other tag lines to bring more traffic to my blog, but I wasn’t thinking that the offer of something slightly pornographic would bring traffic in the first place.

To go further into the subject of using nudity in my work, I’m well aware that the culture I live in tends to automatically associate nudity with pornography, and I know that some of the images that I use exploits typical North American paranoia about nudity.  Maybe on some level I’m taking advantage of people – because art can get away with heaps and heaps of nudity – even pornographic nudity – and hey, it’s art – so it’s okay.  I often like how those lines get blurred, because the ideas that you encounter in art can sometimes expose the messages that are thrust at us by the big corporate media.

On a similar note, I’m using a certain postal outlet in a mall to do some of the mailing for my Etsy shop, and I have encountered the same clerk twice.  The first time I dealt with the young man, he was wearing a pink rubber bracelet that said “I HEART BOOBIES.”  Last night when I was there, his rubber bracelet wasn’t on his wrist…

Tags: topless mermaids

The Unnaturals…

This is drawing two from "The Unnaturals" series.

Lately,  I  feel as if I have awakened from a hazy dream, where everything had the potential for a positive outcome…no matter how bad things could get.  As I learn more about the world around me, I realize that I don’t have the right to keep myself in such an escapist posture, and that I need to expose myself to the harsh light of reality – no matter how uncomfortable it makes me feel.  We are constantly surrounded by things that can numb us to learning, and we are constantly bathed in peer pressure soaked, spun out information from the mainstream media – so I think it’s easy today to be fearful of having an opposing opinion.  It’s easy to crave your steel belted radials and your toaster and want to be left alone…but I don’t know if that is the right thing to do anymore.

A large part of the inspiration for my Chaos paintings is how we are altering our world with depleted uranium (DU), and genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

For the sake of full disclosure – I’m not fond of DU and GMOs.

I don’t understand why more people aren’t up in arms about these two issues – and I don’t understand why the media won’t help by going further to expose this information more fully.  The governments in North America seem to love GMO’s and DU, and I think that we should be upset about that.

I made sketches for three paintings in 2009 about these things, and now have decided to rework them into one piece.  One of the parts that won’t be in the final piece is the deformed women with the freaky goat chimera.  I can tell that I was upset when I drew this, because now I think that the women look very gross.  The final piece will still be a little gross because I think that it’s important to try to be as informed as we can about these two issues, and I hope that I can help inspire people to look into it and decide what they think.  Beware of a government who blames all of the environmental issues on people who use their clothes dryer before 9pm… They need to be held accountable for their collusion with big-agra and the military industrial complex.

We are free.  We just need to start acting like it.

Tags: Depleted Uranium, Genetically Modified Organism

Narwhals are Here!

In my last post I lamented about my Canada Post problems, and I think that I have my mailing issues under control now!

Please visit my Etsy shop to see my Narwhal brooches!

These brooches are swimmingly stylish!

http://www.etsy.com/shop/LittleDecadence

Get them before they swim away forever!

Tags: brooches, Esty, narwhal

canada post vs. brown paper packages…

Canada Post Will Break Your Heart...

My new nemesis is Canada Post.

This summer I spent countless hours making shrink art brooches with my designs on them to take to Fan Expo.  It’s a difficult process with an incredible spoil rate, but when they turn out – they look very nice.  Even with the high destruction rate I loved the process, and I became like a plastic jewelry factory.  I had mermaids and bunnies and narwhals that were ready to spice up the wardrobes of the fashion conscious fellow fans at the Expo.

I had some of these brooches left over from Fan Expo, so I thought I would sell them on Etsy – I thought it would be the perfect venue for them…

Everything was going well, until I found out how much it would cost to ship my brooches in Canada.

I never thought about how expensive it was to send packages inside of the country, but it turns out that it is VERY expensive.  It’s so expensive that I can’t justify the shipping costs – or absorb the shipping cost into the price of the brooch.  A letter is kind of pricey, but a package can cost you your firstborn.  Ship something to the United States though, and it’s a lot cheaper.

I’m the type of person who will work on a problem until I’m satisfied that it’s solved, so I’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, we are getting *bilked by Canada Post.

*bilked : past participle, past tense of bilk (Verb)

Verb:

Obtain or withhold money by deceit or without justification; cheat or defraud. Obtain (money) fraudulently.

Tags: brooch, Canada Post, Etsy, narwhal

My Favorite Artists: Tim Hawkinson

If I have ever had a religious experience at an art gallery – it has been at The Power Plant in Toronto.

My religious experience occured at a Tim Hawkinson show in 2000, when I saw his giant sculpture installation Pentecost.

Tim Hawkinson's Pentecost

It’s hard to describe how I felt, but I wanted to set up a sleeping bag and stay under that thing for a while.   Even though I was with some friends, I had this moment of being transported into another dimension – I felt alone in this universe inside of the tall, white gallery walls.  It was as if I had climbed into the mind of someone else, and it was very surreal.   The life size  cardboard people were communicating to each other with clicks and clacks, and I was getting to share in their moment together.

There have been a lot of intelligent and brainy things written about Tim Hawkinson, (as the world of fine art likes to do), but I had the layman’s introduction to him.  In the liner notes of Beck’s 1998 Mutations album there is a very impressive spread of Hawkinson’s work, and when I found out that they were bringing  a lot of his pieces to Toronto at the Power Plant – I had to go and see it for myself.

The Tim Hawkinson show ignited my interest in contemporary art – and it made me fall in love with the Power Plant.  I’m not the kind of person to go to the fancy Power Plant parties, and you won’t catch me waxing deep and philosophical about the art there – I’m the blue-collar connoisseur, the community college dandy who may or may not be reading the essay that goes with the art… and I’m always waiting for the next installation that I will fall in love with.

Since that show, I have been to two other Tim Hawkinson shows – one in Los Angeles a the Getty Center, and the other in Manhattan.  Every time I see his work in person I feel as if I’m inside of that strange and fantastic dimension again…  It’s a wonderful feeling that transcends description.

I'm under the Uber Organ - at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in 2007

Tags: Pentecost, The Power Plant, Tim Hawkinson

Little Decadence on Etsy…

I have finally taken the big leap into the world of online retailing!

This summer I took a collection of prints and some other handmade things to the Fan Expo in Toronto.  I was surprised and delighted by the reaction that I got from everyone, and the prints did well – considering most of the people who I met there had never been exposed to my work.

I decided that now was a good time to  try moving some of these things online via Etsy!

I’ll be adding more objects  to the Etsy store as the days go by – including a print of Still Life With Tentacle.

And – if you visit the News!  section of this blog, then you can weigh in on the other new print that I’m going to have made!

Mosey over to:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/LittleDecadence

to see the Etsy shop that I have set up!

Plastic Bunny Brooch...available soon at my Etsy shop - Little Decadence!

Tags: brooch, bunnies, Etsy, Little Decadence

The Truth About Topless Mermaids…

I am currently working on finishing my series “Scenes from the Grotto.”  It’s going to be a collection of twelve paintings that are filled with colorful and dangerous mermaids, who want to spend some time with you.

I intend my mermaids to be the anti-Little Mermaid.  I used to love that horrible Disney movie, but there was a moment when I realized how insane it was.  The Little Mermaid is made out of the stuff of liberal mothers’ nightmares, and I think that women should strive to protect their daughters from its freaky and confusing messages.

A lot of my mermaids are naked.  I like to use nudity in my work as the alternative to having to create costumes for some of the characters in my paintings – this keeps the characters in a slight limbo, so it’s harder to date them.  I don’t consider the nudity in my paintings to be sexual, and I think that a couple of straight-up purple mermaid boobs are a lot less sexual than Princess Ariel’s seashell bra.

So, if you are in the mood for some mermaid action, please visit www.lauravegys.com - and take a look at the new additions to the gallery!

 

My mermaid collection can be seen at www.lauravegys.com

Tags: mermaids, nudity, The Little Mermaid