Red Onions on YUPO paper. I should probably retake this picture in better light...

old drawings

I was just looking through some old life drawing exercises in my flickr account and decided to post some here. These are from 2005 - 2007, enjoy!

SOLD

9x15 Watercolor, swans on a cranberry bog, concept/composition credit Tara Sullivan

waterfall

SOLD

Watercolor of a waterfall in New England. 18 x 24 Original photo credit Tara Sullivan at Lazybones Photography

Utah

Available for Sale
18 x 24 Landscape of the Utah desert, May 2010

backyard

SOLD
18x24 watercolor painting of the mountains in Colorado, my friend Teresa's backyard. No wonder they say Colorado is the only state Californians happily move to!

Two different models, one very traditional and one forces you to let go of your ideas of symbols and draw what's really there.



These are both in red and black contee crayon on 18"x24" bond paper

Seven Strokes

This was an assignment for a class I am wrapping up from the Spring 2010 semester at LAVC. The task was to create a painting in 7 strokes or less. Here's what I came up with:

Judith Linhares

Just wanted to give a shout out to one of my favorite female artists of our time. Judith Linhares had an exhibit at the museum at the University at Albany during the summer of 2007 while I was taking watercolor with Emily Rauch. Linhares' work seemed so effortless and simple that I decided it would be fun to try to copy one of them as an exercise in working with gouache. Famous last words! Her work is totally complex, I assume she learned "the rules" very well before breaking them, which she does beautifully.
Here is the piece I chose to work with:

My copy needs a lot more work before I would ever show it. For now I have abandoned that project and am working on an appropriation of this painting.

How many times have you heard that one must really understand "the rules" of drawing before you can play with them, test them, and break them successfully in paintings? The closest thing in Linhares' earliest archives that even resembles any typical life drawing assignment are the two skeletons in the piece entitled Love Letters from San Jose, 1971.

I am imagining that somewhere there is a stack of classroom work with Linhares' signature in the bottom corner - surely no one can just become so talented without studying and working diligently... right? Her figures are layers of colors in geometric shapes, not apologizing for their basic forms because even though they look effortless they are well thought out and strategically placed to create these vivid dream like realities. None of the subjects are so outrageous that we can't connect with them and what they are, and at the same time they are something I've never really seen before. Cheers Judith, thanks for the inspiration!

Watercolor on Newsprint

Sure, newsprint is probably the worst possible canvas for any kind of paint. It doesn't work well with watercolor and is known to deteriorate very quickly. So what?



After a quick warm up with my young friend, who does not care if we paint on canvas or newsprint, I did a quick sketch of the succulents in his backyard. It feels like handwriting to me, something that only I could have done.



It could be ironed and then photographed in better light, but hey, it's only on newsprint anyways!

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." - Newton

Check out the aliases used by The Guerrilla Girls . Their interview is totally inspiring, and where I found the names on this list.


Kathe Kollwitz
Meta Fuller
Frida Kahlo
Lee Krasner
Gertrude Stein
Georgia O'Keeffe
Eva Hesse
Emily Carr
Paula Modersohn-Becker
Anais Nin
Romaine Brooks
Rosalba Carriera
Alice Neel
Tina Modotti
Alma Thomas
Violette LeDuc
Ana Mendieta
Zora Neale Hurston
Liubov Popova
Diane Arbus
Vanessa Bell

I tried to use their official websites, as it would have been boring to just link to all their wiki pages. Did I miss a good link that you'd like to suggest? Let me know!

Lemon

Eventually I'm going to have to cut that thing open and takes some pictures of what it looks like on the inside, but in the meantime, check out this working paper It Is Okay for Artists to Make Money…No, Really, It's Okay Robert D. Austin and Lee Devin at Harvard made some really good points, and I am especially interested in the idea of the three fallacies regarding art and business, and to find out that this is a universal "hot spot" among artists.

Commence!

My friend suggested that I join the artists in the Blogospehere and begin to document my creative work. Here's a self portrait from a while ago, to get started and for an introduction.



This is one watercolor I did a while ago while sitting on a bench in a mall. I always thought it would be fun to do the sketches on the packages for patterns, or something like that.



I'm currently building a portfolio, so selecting work to share in the next few weeks should be very easy. Enjoy the show :D