the royal tenenbaums

This is my piece for the Spoke Art Gallery's Bad Dads show, opening this weekend in San Francisco!  Wish I could be there.  I wish it would get cold in Los Angeles already, too.  I bet it's fall in San Francisco right now, and I bet it's super nice.

The hardest part was getting likenesses for all the characters.  I do not consider myself very hand with caricature, so there were LOTS of super ugly, generic looking versions of everybody before I got to anything useful.  I think my favorite in the end is Royal.  Or Dudley.  Dudley was the only one I had no trouble drawing at all, strangely!

It's 20"x26",  acrylic on board.

I should accompany this painting with this fact: when I first saw this movie, I did not like it.  Nope.  I exited the theater thinking "What one EARTH was it that I just saw??"  I didn't understand the dryness of the tone, or what the story was supposed to mean, or anything about it really.  I understood that it looked really cool.

Post art school I gave it another try.  It IS one of my husbands favorite movies, and I usually trust his opinion when it comes to films (with the exception of his insatiable desire to watch old and obscure horror movies, which are usually indescribably, irredeemably  terrible).  

The second time around, it was like a lightbulb had been turned on in my brain.  After watching butt loads of movies and films in college, I finally had some context for the type of storytelling that Wes Anderson is going for.  Basically, I get it now!  But I also get why some people are still like "I don't like his movies".  They're the kind of movies that deserve investigation: you can watch them over and over and every time you do, you notice new things and make new connections.  They're very rich with content but they definitely don't give it up for free.  You have to spend time with them.  You probably have a buddy or two like that...at first, to a stranger, they seem unapproachable, and you find yourself saying "he's super cool once you get to know him."

(pssst I already put it on tumblr for you)

a curious poppy

This is my piece for the Curiosities show opening next weekend at Gallery Nucleus!

It's my first paper cut out piece, EVER!  

Instead of using colored paper, I cut the pieces out of plain white watercolor paper and then painted it with gouache.  It allowed me to have more fun with the colors and textures, and I had the flexibility of changing colors around if I wanted to.  Which I did.  

It's sort of hard to see, since I didn't do a really good job of photographing the piece, but I used a bit of thread wrapped floral wire for the stem.  It came ready to go in that lovely yellow green color.  There are also tiny little pins holding the flower in place!  Those especially didn't photograph well, cause they're so small.  

Little tiny flower face.  To give you an idea of the size, her face is the size of a penny (because I traced one) and the whole piece is 8 x10, which is a size I barely barely ever work in.  I'm usually trying to get myself to go BIGGER since my natural tendency is to go micro-small-tiny.

Here's a shot from mid-process.  It was messy, but pretty!