Weekend Chicken

The weekend chicken went home yesterday. For a chicken she seemed pretty pleased to see her not-a-chicken chicken mother. I hope her little leg gets better.

Through observation I learned something really cool about daddy long legs that I never knew before. They actually take bites of bugs and sort of chew 'em up. The cabin is full of these guys and I watched one climb into another spider's web and tear little chunks off a dried out old moth and chew it up. Amazing!

GeneralFancy

My Etsy store, GeneralFancy launched last year, um, some time before I packed up and moved to Asia for 7+ months.

Anyway, it's my project to get some smaller paintings out into the world. They are all about the price of a pair of covet-able shoes or a Summer dress but they don't hurt your feet or turn out to be too small next year.

So head to Etsy and check out a slew of my tiniest and most precious paintings. Drawings coming soooooooon!

Artomatic opens tomorrow.

Yesterday

Penelope

This painting was going swimmingly, it even had a title right out of the gate. Then all of a sudden I must have been hit with the "pay attention rock" and I looked down. NO!

 It broke a major rule. Here I was thinking it was nearly complete - a rare 2 day painting, what are the odds - but NO. Nope. It completely failed to become it's own place. It's just a thing and that thing is a painting. It's a goddamn pretty painting but not a place. If someone else painted it, well I would reject it. Tomorrow I'll see if I can coax it into transcending it's own stupid objecthood. 

Encaustic Painting Workshop

It's all business these days with me: full-time employment, passport applications, and failed canvases leading only to failed supply orders. The up side is that I will be going to Thailand in just under 5 months and I just finished a productive meeting with a good friend and WPA-DC staff member. We're in the planning stages of hosting a short encaustic workshop, hopefuly in June which will be free for their members. I will be volunteering 4 hours of instruction for 15-20 memebers. WPA is a great arts organization in DC, of which I am a member and it's the least I can do to help them provide a fun event for other members to enjoy. 4 hours is not even close to enough time to get a good grasp of painting with encaustic but at least I can answer some questions they may have, get tham started and lay the ground work for a potential follow-up session with more involved instruction and advanced techniques. Plus this is a great opportunity to excerise one of by favorite and most fun skills.



Topics covered will be: What a painter needs for a basic set up of encaustic painting in the studio, including safety and ventilation, techniques to get started, plus some info on collage/works on paper, sculptural applications, and other mixed media techniques.