New Drawing

So I started working on another drawing.  So far it is ballpoint ink on vintage paper with some watercolor.  It is roughly 5" x 5".  The original pencil sketch still shows through.  I am testing a new crackle medium in the meantime.  Hopefully this will yield quicker and better results.  Anyway, this piece is called, "Into thy hands, I commend my spirit."  I offer this innocent black child as an offering.  I ask, into whose hands?  Into the hands of the same God worshiped by the men who kidnapped her?  Into the hands of the same God worshiped by the men who would rape her? Into the hands of the same God worshiped by the men that would continually enslave, both physically and mentally, the fruits of her womb for generations to come?  Or is it into her own hands, by her own power?  We speak of her spirit, what of her soul?  This is going to be an interesting piece to work on.  Forgive the camera phone pictures---I will post a scanned version later.

In other news, today was the first day of school for my munchkins!  The two older ones are veterans in the second and fourth grade.  The younger ones...it was hard.  My husband and I spent a lot of time teaching them at home.  Letting them go just isn't easy.  My kindergarten baby was super excited to be in school finally.  She was all decked out in her pretty pink.  I sent her off with her school supplies and list of allergens (she's my sensitive baby) and a hug.  This school thing is going to take some getting used to.  She's really shy and sweet with gentle and humble ways.  Her teacher is great so I don't feel as uptight as I was feeling.

My pre-K baby was upset.  She saw all her siblings off to class and as we were heading out, she looked at my husband and me tearfully and asked "What about me?"  Bout near broke my heart.  We consoled her and told her that she would be there later today.  Today she had to be tested for eligibility into the pre-K program at the school.  My husband called me and said that she came bounding out of the classroom exclaiming that she told the teacher what the earth was and that she did really good. My husband said they passed my kindergarten baby on the playground and she was having a blast.  I'm happy to hear it.

Current pieces and ACEOs

I decided to work on a larger piece that's about 4" x 6" roughly.  I named it "Difficult Journey Home."  It is ballpoint ink on a torn vintage page. This is a present work in progress as it will become a watercolor piece and an experiment with the crackle texture.

I completed this ACEO over the course of Monday.  Since I actually have to work, the original pencil and ballpoint ink portions above were done on breaks and taken as best as they could be with my camera phone.  I love the crisp lines of the ballpoint ink and believe it or not they blend really well when other mediums are added.  I start all of my drawings in pencil with basic shapes to make sort of a skeleton and approximation of where the features would fall.  In my larger work I let them stay as they only add to the final piece.  I built up a foundation with colored pencil on the face and watercolor on the veil.  I then layered on more applications, alternating between colored pencil and watercolor.  Then I overlayed portions of it with crackle glaze.  Below is the completed piece and a close up of the texture.  The challenge with the scan is that it whites out some areas due to the reflective nature of the glaze so the darks aren't as dark as they are in real life.  I am going to experiment taking photographs with my 10 mp camera to see if I can get a better rendition.  This is the first in an exploratory series I have tentatively named Exotic Symbolism.  It will feature close ups of ethnic women throughout the world and feature a sort of visual commentary on their different struggles.  This obviously is a Muslim woman.  Notice how her lower face is veiled but her hair is not.  I came across this article Joan Smith:  The veil is a feminist issue and was inspired to do a portrait based on this quote from the article:

"Women don't wear the burqa in Afghanistan because they like it; they wear it because they are afraid of being killed if they don't. Women haven't suddenly gone back to wearing the veil in Iraq because they're pious; they do it because women who refuse have been murdered. I loathe the niqab and the burqa when I see them there. And I can't pretend I don't find them equally offensive on my local high street." 

The eyes were once confrontational.  The glaze took the edge off of them and yet they are still confident.  I named this piece "Without a Voice (But Still a Choice)."

I came across a sketch in an old sketchbook from 2003, the start of my natural journey.  I had drawn a shattered glass with my image in it and had titled it "Missing pieces of my identity."  Seems I still haven't gotten away from identity issues or depicting fragmentation in regards to women's issues.  I have an old print I did of a woman from India wearing a burqa back from high school and another piece of a woman wearing one in college.  That image of being covered and having no voice sticks with me and creeps into my work every couple of years or so.

This is presently up for auction on ebay!  See the auction HERE!

More small pieces...

I've been doing a lot of writing over the past few days.  I can see a series developing out of this group and I have tentatively named it Awakening.  I love textures on a page.  It adds another level of visual interest to a piece and one of my favorite textures is the crackle effect.  Even in my earlier works from my late teens I incorporated these types of textures from torn edges to burnt edges.  My art professor from college still chuckles at some pieces I made my junior year he called the "burning women."  A great idea also that I may explore again....maybe.  The crackle effect isn't too easy to replicate and took quite a bit of running around to different craft stores and experimentation.  It is an ongoing process.

Anywho, I went in and messed around with the drawing from the previous post.

 I darkened it over all and messed around with the texture.  The nuances that occur with the crackle effect are much more noticeable and appreciated in person than through digital media.  Even the close up doesn't do it justice. 















I worked on several other pieces...it's just a matter of getting them all scanned in and resized.  This next piece was the second one that I worked on.  I tentatively named it, Closest to God. 

I really liked how it came out.  I remember this portion of the book.  It talked about how the wealthiest members of the congregation were important for the priests to stay close to because the parishioners with the most money were the "closest to God" and felt that God would be closest to them.  Obviously my subject doesn't fall into that category so it is an interesting juxtaposition.  Once again unintentional but  interesting to note.  I managed to get more of a crackle effect with this piece...I used a two part crackle glaze.  After it was finished crackling I overlayed it with a brown wash to make the cracks show. The close up shows the texture more.  It is a beautiful effect.  I am excited about where this is heading.

I'm Baaaccckkkkk....

After a rather long hiatus from this blog, I have returned to the world of ACEOs.  The past year has been a rather eventful one.  I have immersed myself into the craft of crochet which I explore in my blog HERE and I have been pursuing my venture with my store, Moya Arts.  I have moved into more local avenues of selling.  I haven't been selling on ebay in a good little bit but with the new promotion of free auction style listings through 9/3, I have a reason to get back into the swing of things.  I have a bunch of prints I will place for sale sometime this week.

Also I had been neglecting the great art of ACEOs and miniature drawing.  I participated in an art exhibition back in April in which most of my pieces were 17 x 21 -24 x 30 inches and in charcoal.  I love that body of work and I hope to continue to exhibit in the future.  See my larger format work HERE. 

What brings me back to ACEOs?  The exploration of the same ideas of my larger format work.  I love cats and all; however, the messages I want to convey with my art cry out to me much stronger than my niche commercial market.  My more recent work evokes contemplation and thoughtful meditation beyond what's on the paper.  I've had all sorts of reactions from discomfort (most common), to shock (more to come on that), to marvel.  The different interpretations I have been given by others has surprised me.  My work does convey a lot of pain and it is interpreted in many different ways.  On one of the pieces (Among Our Dreams), a viewer likened it to a domestic abuse victim because of the anonymity of the image (that was intentional on my part) and the unknown.  The eyes aren't shown so the depth of the pain cannot be measured.  Out of everyone I've ever spoken to only one person actually understood the meaning of my work as a whole.  It goes beyond my artist statement...there's only so much I could say there.  I am content with people developing their own interpretations.  The subjectivity of art is what makes it a worthwhile venture.

The works are large and unavoidable.  I am now going to play with that same concept on a smaller format which is more intimate.  I am going to explore the dynamics between having the viewer's space invaded to the viewer becoming the invader. 

I look forward to this new turn in my work.  Now there will still be cats and anything else I get the fancy to draw.  My primary focus will be on my new series.

This is the piece that has sparked my curiosity once again.  

I have this old book that's pretty much falling apart.  It has been read eons ago and had lost a few pages already.  The pages are slightly yellowed and a great backdrop to draw on.  The drawing is done in ballpoint ink, watercolor and goauche.  I do not know the archival quality of the ballpoint ink but it is much cleaner than pencil and shows really well through the letters without completely obliterating them.

It is roughly ACEO sized (2.5" x 3.5") but it goes over some because of the torn edges.  Working title: "...had invaded the inner citadels of her completely. There were no secrets the...barrier to throw up to protect herself...always naked, always open to pain." The wording wasn't intentional.  I noticed it after the drawing was done.  The child's withdrawn expression gives a lot of weight to the words.  This is very similar to the larger format work I have done that deals a lot with psychological effects of events, mostly past and ancestral events on a modern subject.   I went back in and made some areas darker like around the lips and the lower left.  That white area was competing too heavily with the details of her face and took away from the effect her eyes were intended to make.  I'll probably post the update later as an edit to this post. This was only a preliminary study.