West Botani-Hammer

Despite the fact that I've lived in Los Angeles for about 14 years now, I still find that there are  plenty of new places to explore locally. Yesterday we took a trip down near UCLA and spent the afternoon in Westwood Village. The Hammer Museum recently received some money which is allowing them to have free admission for the next 4 years.We spent a few hours wandering around taking in all of the exhibits although we spent the most time in the permanent collection, a modern art type section and a special exhibit called Tea and Morphine. The permanent collection was enjoyable - it included an awesome dog painting from Toulouse-Lautrec, a surprisingly dark Van Gogh painting and a pretty Renoir among other art of all sorts. The modern art exhibit was a bit overwhelming (some areas seemed like they were trying to shove as much as possible into the space they had), but had some interesting highlights, including a 20 minute film/performance called "Total Recall" by Gretchen Bender. The viewing included 24 tvs and a few extra screens playing different videos. Although it was overwhelming at times when viewed as a whole, the fact that different screens were showing the same things at different times, it also allowed you to watch the same thing over and over again in a somewhat more relaxed fashion. It's kinda interesting to watch now especially since the video consisted of many tv sequences that were familar in the 80's and graphics that were new at the time. 25 years later and 10 years after Bender died, I'm sure it already has a much different impact in some ways. The "Tea and Morphine" exhibit focused on art about women in Paris in the last 1800's/early 1900's who were drug addicts (morphine in particular) & prostitutes  as well as high class and the art depicting the women in their lives. Some of it was a little boring, but there was plenty of interesting pieces to make the exhibit worthwhile. It reminded me of a burlesque performance we saw a few years ago at the CIA in North Hollywood.... I'm wouldn't be surprised if this time period was inspiration for the act.

After the museum, we headed over to the nearby botanical gardens.  I always enjoy walking through naturey areas, so I had a fun time wandering around and looking at the plants and animals for a little while and smelling lemon scented plants. I easily could have spent way more time there taking all sorts of pictures, but it's only open until 4pm on Saturdays. Later we headed back to the main village area where we wandered around and eventually stopped at Native Foods for some yummy vegan Sesame Kale Macro bowels for dinner.

shamrock!.. but on a stem

 

 

I really liked the non-symmetrical petals on these flowers

Overall it was a pretty enjoyable and rather cheap day considering some of the art we got to see. We had free parking, which helped, but besides that we only paid for dinner! I definitely recommend it as a whole outing if you have a free afternoon.

29 faces...7th!

1 more left after this group! I can definitely tell I've been wanting to go more off into abstract territory, which is coming through in the faces, but they are still faces none the less!

25 - pencil on printer paper, using the frottage technique

26 - pen on drawing paper... made from circle-type shapes

27 - colorless oil pastel on watercolor paper with watercolor then applied on top. This is a tricky technique since you can't really see what you're drawing without tilting the paper at an angle, but that's part of the fun. It was kinda exciting to see what I drew appear as I applied the watercolor. This technique has a great deal of potential though and I'll probably play with it more.

28 - watercolor on watercolor paper

29 faces, group 6!

29 Faces! February is over, but I have to admit that I've been really inspired to work on faces the last couple days, especially with all the rain we've been having. Once I first thought of doing rain paintings, I'm always eager to get home and play when it's raining. Considering we've been lacking rain this year in Los Angeles, the opportunities have been few and far between. Just a few more faces left!!!

18- playing with food, making faces. yogurt, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries and granola!

20 - rain painting with watercolors on watercolor paper. Rain painting deserves it own post, but yup, glad we got some rain to be able to do this!

21 - gelatos on watercolor paper. I hadn't played with gelatos and water yet, so I thought maybe I'd try them out with the rain. I drew a rough faces and then took it out into the rain. I was expected they would move more, but after 5 or 6 wettings/drying cycles, this is pretty much as much as I got out of it. Oh well! That's how experiments go sometimes!

22 - finger painting with acrylic paint on cardstock!

23 - Rubbing on vellum with a ballpointed/embossing stylus clay tool thingy. I wanted to try this out for a while and was really happy with the results. It looks better against a back lit surface, but here it's against a black piece of cardstock.

24 - another attempt with the Gelatos, watercolor paper and rain. This time I took the paper out into the rain and let a few drops fall on it before drawing, using only 4 colors. I really like the resulting effect where some areas are a little more blended/soft looking than others.

Faces (x5)

Yay! More faces. I'm still behind as well as just behind on posting, but I do hope/plan to get through the 29. It just won't be by the end of Feb....

16 - black China marker on a paper bag. I'm somewhat irritated with this one. I wouldn't have done the line on the cheek the same way and I seem to reliably make eyes too large. The shape of the face was pretty accurate.

17 -  pen doodles on a scrap piece of paper at work....

19 -  Single line sewing face on single piece of muslin. I had been wanting to do this one for a while, but then I dropped super hot water on my foot and couldn't use my sewing machine for a while. Yay!

29 face, the fourth

Woo! With these 4, I'm officially over halfway through the 29 faces!

12 - blind contour drawing (this was actually the second... the first is kinda visible on the other side), pencil on printer paper

13- and a non-blind non-single line contour drawing of the same subject..... amazing what looking at the paper does and does not change! Same pencil on printer paper

14- face only version of Exquisite corpse that my boyfriend and I worked on on the same printer paper with pencil

15- inkblotish/fold paper in half painting technique. I used a paintbrush and sloped the paint on. I went over some areas a couple of times, but only painting on the left side and then folding to fill in on the right. Acrylic paint on printer paper

29 faces, group 3!

Yay! More faces! More experimentation!

9 - white grease (China) pencil on black cardstock: A birdie mentioned to me "It's February & February is black history month.. Are you going to celebrate it in your faces?" So with that seed and spotting my white China marker, I decided I'd try out the white on black sort of drawing. This is a technique I hadn't tried out myself, but remembered talking to an artist at the Hive at the downtown LA artwalk about it. I don't know if it's because I haven't done it before and therefore required relying on different points of reference, but it felt way more like sculpting than putting black pen on white paper to draw does...I really like the result!

10 - Oil Pastels on cardboard cracker box. I'm not sure if it was the material combo or the fact I was using "children's" oil pastels, but after blending them with my finger, I had way more on my finger than I had hoped.

11- slick neon tulip paints on gessoed cardboard cracker box. I bought the paint set with a 75% discount at michel's because the orange was missing. At first I tried drawing with only lines, but I  managed to smear some of the nice lines and I was a little frustrated with the lack of orange since I was only using the nozzles on the bottles to paint and therefore couldn't really mix colors, soooo that's when blending some of the paints with my finger came in. Some moments I think this face is "bleeeeh" and others I think he is awesome!

29 Faces, part 2!

Although it's not a rule, I've started a trend of trying out different approaches/materials for each face. On one hand, I think it would be interesting to do this for all 29 faces, I also have reservations about it. For now, I'll try to keep up with it, but who knows.... Some of these techniques worked out better than others, but I'm glad I tried everything that I did! I definitely want to try some of them out again at some point.

5 - nothing but layers and layers transferred from the Gelli plate on a book page with acrylic paint. This was the better of the 2 prints... it was way more challenging than I had anticipated for the result to not turn out crazy.

6 - super quick pen drawing on notebook type paper. I did this on the bus in maybe 2 minutes.

7 - painting on top of a magazine page with acrylic paint. I kinda feel like this is cheating since I painted directly on an ad, but then again, it makes me think of use of the camera obscura, which I think is in my brain after listening to a segment on Science Friday about "Tim's Vermeer" last weekend. Once you start painting on the page, you lose some of then color/lighting cheats.... Still, I'm happy how it turned out.

8 - collage made from pieces I had laying around from some things I was recently working on. I used all of the pieces as they were and didn't trim or cut any of the pieces.

29 faces, 2/14, the first

Last month I stumbled on this 29 faces challenge... essentially you create a face of some sort every day for February (+1, this year). I then proceeded to forget about it until February 4th.  I've been playing catch up as a result. Who knows if I will make it to 29, but I already have 4. I figured this wouldn't be a bad thing for me to try out since I don't really create faces all the time. As it turns out, it's much easier to make a weird face than a proportioned face, but so far it's already made me try out some new stuff, so I think that's good. We shall see if I can keep this up!

1 - acrylic painting on a gelli print on a phone book page

2 - gelli print/ stamp made from scratched mushroom container on a gelli print on a phone book page with acrylic paint

3 - first time playing with Gelatos, blended with my finger on another phone book page

4 - pen drawing on cardstock

infinite rectangles

..ok, not infinite, but I think it took me about a week to finish the first Gelli print. I'd add a layer and realize that nope, it wasn't done yet. I'm not sure how many layers of rectangles I added before I finally knew it was done, but it was worthwhile. I'm really happy with the end result. The second was an attempt at the same technique as the first, but it didn't quite work, so I took it in a different direction.....

Gelli circles and rectangles

Pacific Sailing.... Holgaish

Recently one of my friends went through a class and can now rent and take people out on a sailboat on her own! Yay! So last weekend we went along with her and some others to the Pacific ocean from Marina del Rey for the day. I'd been out on a variety of boats before, but never a sailboat, so this was a new and exciting experience for me. The winds weren't too high, the sun hid most of the day and there was a little rain, but we still saw plenty of animals including all sorts of birds, sea lions and dolphins and we all had an enjoyable time. On the radio we kept hearing reports of a baby blue whale near San Diego. The sailboat itself was a completely new experience to me, with the generous space down below the deck and plenty for all passengers to help out with up on top.

One thing that I guess became more apparent to me as I looked at these pictures is that so many things in life are these weird balances of boundaries and freedoms. In a boat, even if you can swim, the boundaries are defined by the boat. When you're done swimming, you want, or more like need, to get back on that boat eventually. And the freedom and openness feels like it's all that is around you, just not the exact spot that you are at the moment. You know there's tons of life just at the surface of the water, let alone in the 50 feet below you, although none of them live like a human, walking and requiring desalinated water. The landscape surrounding you is so monotonous, yet freeing with a giant open sky and miles of visiblity up and down the coast and away into the openness of the ocean, a deep contrast to the crowded freeways, buildings and stores on land or that bustling world within the ocean itself. You occupy a tiny space of the boat for the experience of that freedom brought by the human-life-unfriendly, yet human life sustaining, environment. For a period of time while on the boat, I leaned back, inverting the locations of the sky and ocean, letting myself get lost in the movement. And when I got home that evening, I simply had to close my eyes to see the vastness of the ocean, now confined to my head, once again.