the kitty: mostly photos, a painting and some drawings

Did you know I recently acquired a cute baby cat?  I did.  Her name is Pyewacket, but we pretty much only ever call her 'kitty'.  And even then it's usually 'kitty stop that!! no biting! KITTY!'

 Look at those claws!  Fierce!  Ferocious!

Here she is in action, trying to eat the buttons off my shirt.

Button consumption causes sleepiness.

So this weekend, when I was asked last minute to do a painting demonstration at Nucleus during the It's a Small World show opening, the little squirt became my muse.  What's a painting demonstration, you ask?  It's when you paint with a bunch of people watching you.  It was actually pretty stressful.  I was sweating like crazy, but you can't tell, thank goooooodness!

There were two other artists doing demos: to my left was Israel Sanchez, who whipped up a flawless gouache sailboat, and to my right is Patrick Awa, who made this totally lovely piece appear out of nowhere.  We had about 45 minutes, I think.  

Here's what I ended up with:

Except kitty never really brings me pretty flowers.  In fact I think she hates plants (she destroyed the potted plant in our living room by shredding it, the booger).   When I finished it was raffled away to a lucky winner.  I hope they like cats!

I didn't have a sketch or anything for this, I just did it on the fly!  It was very small, only 5"x5", and you can tell from my giant paint tubes that I used acrylic.  I did, however, have a little practice drawing the kitty:

She is hard to capture.  Like most cats, she has a very serious, and often psychotic expression, yet she is also stupidly cute.  

A got a couple good Lila drawings in there, too!

In case you were wondering if my household was turned upside down by the arrival of kitty, let the following photos assure you that she is fitting in quite nicely with Lila the dog.  

She's much bigger in this second photo...Lila likes to look out the window into the courtyard and then bark like a crazed banshee when anyone gets close.  

Yay for pets!  Furry little muses.  

tigers + galleries

I've been busy doing freelance stuff all week (and probably will be for the next while), so I had to dig around in the crusty archives of my tiny little computer to find something half way decent to show you. I found you some tigers and puppies. You love tigers and puppies!



I love tigers. Somewhere in the great gobs of stuff from my childhood that are gathering dust in my mom's garage there is a collection of stuffed tigers that I curated. I touched a baby tiger once. It wasn't soft...it was close in texture to dog hair. Not very baby-like at all.



I had to do these really fast, so they're not super immaculate in their presentation or anything. They're marker and colored pencil on animation paper.



Also, for everyone or anyone who has asked me when will you/have you ever/are you going to have your work in a gallery, I can finally say "Why yes, yes I will!"

I'm going to have a little show at the Occidental College Library this coming fall! A few quick facts about Occidental College, if you're curious: it's in Eagle Rock, Barack Obama went there for a while before transferring to Smart People Who Will Be President Someday College, and LOTS of movies and TV shows have been filmed there, including your secret favorite movies, Don't Be A Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood and Clueless. I realize having a show in a library may seem a little hokey-pokey but I almost can't think of a place more appropriate for me to display my stuff. I really, really love libraries and books and my second best job ever was working in the library at CalArts because I got to look at cool stuff in books all day and smell that paper-slowly-decaying scent. It's nice that it's so far in advance too, since I have time really get together a big body of new work for it (plus more time to procrastinate).

But that's not for quite a while. In the mean time:

I'll be in participating in a gallery show and weekend sale at the Partow Gallery here in LA on January 31st-February 2nd. More details to come!

I've been asked to contribute to Kevin Dart's forthcoming book "Seductive Espionage: The Art of Yuki 7", which is like the biggest compliment ever. There's going to be a show at Gallery Nucleus in July when the book is released, too. I'm really determined to do a super good job on my piece so I've already started sketching stuff and gathering my ideas together.

So yeah, not too shabby a start to the New Year, I don't think.

I'll have some new drawings for you next week. Really!