Future Dead Artists

Just Checking

2012-01-29T08:47:00.003-05:00

Junk email we almost opened this morning based on brilliant title--

Writing: The Ultimate Gateway Drug

Happy Cross

2012-01-27T20:16:00.006-05:00

I had to post these again. They look so nice just floating there on the gray background. I finally figured out how to get rid of that black box around the photos.

At first I tried to convince myself that it was like the black box around an obituary but that's carrying things a little too far. If I want a black box I can add it to the photo.

The Hundred-Headless Woman

2012-01-27T09:00:00.010-05:00

Last night I consulted my favorite oracle, my Osho Zen Tarot deck, on a particular issue. Now, I am not looking for quick and easy answers (like the "bible-dipping" daughter in Running with Scissors). But the first card I drew, representing me, really shed some light on recent events and gave me a fresh perspective from which to examine them. I would go so far to say that it got me thinking of an answer to a question I had not even asked!

Healing - King of Water (Mastery of Emotions): Deeply buried wounds of the past are coming to the surface, ready and available to be healed. (No longer hiding from myself and others.) Adopt attitude of openness and acceptance. The less the head, the more the wound will heal. Live a headless life. Move as a total being and accept things for 24 hours--total acceptance whatever happens. If someone insults you, accept it. Don't react. Suddenly you will feel an energy flowing in you that you have not felt before.

Henceforth I will strive to achieve acceptance every day--the Hundred-Headless Woman.

When I expand the photo on my computer screen and sit back a bit I can see a figure behind my right shoulder.

Somewhere is a print I made on canvas, special canvas which can be fed through my Epson printer. Add to list of things to find.

Me and V.M.S.

2012-01-26T10:31:00.004-05:00

I'm like a
third sex
looking
for a mirror
that I may
complete
myself.

A New Year for the Phoenix

2012-01-14T14:39:00.006-05:00

It has been a while since I have posted. This blog is not wildly popular, although I seem to have one reader in the Netherlands (hi there, and thank you) so I will keep my fingers away from the Delete button and ramble on a bit further here.

My astrological outlook for the year is most promising. It starts out: "New beginnings have indeed arrived in your favor with the onset of 2012--although the biggest changes in the love realm won't arrive until autumn, romance will return as a central theme for you in 2012." It seems that Saturn will move into my love and creativity sector in November, that my chances of meeting someone are multiplied by the amount of time I spend out with friends. That could be a bit of a problem unless I am destined to meet an early morning shopper at Market Basket!

Here's more: "Pluto continues to rock the very foundation of your significant relationships. . . you've been to hell and back so often in recent times that you've grown accustomed to picking up the pieces and starting over. The redeeming factor is that each time you go through a personal cataclysm, you emerge that much stronger. Your ability to regenerate is astonishing at this point. You've weeded out the toxic relationship patterns and--more importantly--the negative people from your life. When it comes to love, you are the Phoenix."

Career-wise there was this: "Remain open to the big picture and be willing to put yourself out there in a rebellious way. Experimenting, taking risks and being a pioneer in your chosen field are all requirements in 2012. Use the first few months of 2012 to reflect on where you've been and what you've learned; then, apply those lessons to your future goals. The new moon solar eclipse in May creates a domino effect of long-lasting changes. This is your breakout year."

Conflict of Interest Cross

2011-12-14T12:06:00.007-05:00

This is from my sketchbook from late October, early November.

On November 23rd I noted a few lines from a book I found at the library on the $1 Shelf: Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I saw myself in the first one.

I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.

This one I attributed to someone else:

I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness.

And then this one was me in spades!

I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage.

I checked into the exact meaning of "conciliatory" and read "bringing about harmony; propitiating." And when I checked into "propitiating" I read "gain favor by appeasement; atoning sacrifice."

Holy cow--the story of my life!!

100 Squares

2011-11-30T13:25:00.007-05:00

I had no new art to put here until recently. My markers are drying out, my favorite colors in particular, and I tell myself I cannot afford the set I want to replace them. I've been thinking about putting them on a credit card and making minimum payments until spring. My train of thought went something like this:

Debt, like foreplay, is a slippery slope.

Are we aware of the event at the moment of death? Can we slow down the transition by sheer force of will? Might it be harmful to try to do so?

How has contemplation of this influenced my participation in the here and now?

Realization that exerting force of will causes disappointments and reduction of self-esteem.
Still getting over anger and resentments about my past.
Interesting the transition from debt to death.
Debt is shortening my life and diminishing my enjoyment of it.

Anyway, I started painting in acrylic on a 12x12 inch canvas ruled into 100 one-inch squares. I was hot to make use of some of my fantastic metallic colors. The work was executed in bed under poor lighting conditions. I couldn't get the cover off the jar of acrylic medium so I was feeling slightly pissed off and frustrated at the outset but I think I overcame that and created a happy-looking arrangement. Under certain light the gold details really pop.

The plan is to do 99 more the same size so they can be displayed together in a grid like Andy Warhol's portraits.

I Feel Like a Star

2011-10-04T07:53:00.007-04:00

Yesterday my friend Sharon drove me to Stoneham, Massachusetts where I was interviewed about my collage work for a cable television show called The Total Woman Show. Everyone on the staff was so wonderful that I was not nervous one bit and the producer, Cheryl Webb Scott, made me feel perfectly at ease on camera!

I spoke with my friends Karen and Yola just prior to making the trip South and they both voiced the opinion that they sensed in me a new optimism. In thinking back this morning, I think they are right. Here are a couple of cross designs from my sketchbook that seem to foreshadow that.

From the back the second drawing has a slightly softer quality. Repeated I think it would make a nice scarf.

Time Server

2011-10-01T09:54:00.004-04:00

The inscription reads: Devoid of spirituality, art carries its own tragedy within it. The true artist always serves immortality striving to immortalize the world and man within the world. An artist who doesn't try to seek out absolute truth, who ignores absolute goals for the sake of accidentals can only be a Time Server.

I wonder what prompted me to write that down? I did not include the source and cannot recall it now. How can I "immortalize the world" and why would I wish to?

I Don't Know

2011-09-29T17:57:00.003-04:00

I still don't know. I'll call this the Kirk cross because it shared a page with this quote by Ruth Kirk:

To go inside you go outside because you need to know yourself in context.

I can't remember the source of the quotation and I'm having a tough enough time understanding myself out of context these days.

Abusing the Spiral Brush

2011-09-28T09:42:00.010-04:00

Here's one I didn't expect to like so much. The purple and pink added with the bucket tool looked flat and boring so I decided to jazz it up with some spiral dots added with the brush tool. I'll admit that I tend to overuse this brush. But when I saw the finished product on my Tumblr site, I decided that I liked it after all. Below is the sketch book page with the original cross drawing.

The Perfect Square

2011-09-27T06:51:00.002-04:00

This one I call "The Perfect Square" because it is one of the few drawings where I made a pencil grid first. Little quilt below:

The Magic Carpet

2011-09-26T09:23:00.001-04:00

Funny how I don't usually like some things right after I do them, but then later I do. Today's drawing is in that category.

Darkening the background in photoshop changes the feel of it. Reminds me of batik in a way. And here it is repeated, just because I can.

Fortune Teller Cross

2011-09-25T11:54:00.001-04:00

I call this one my Fortune Teller Cross. The repeat pattern has some problems.

I like how the colors can be manipulated in photoshop. Out of all the different versions shown on the gray background, I think I like the one in the center the best.

Happy Cross

2011-09-23T21:44:00.000-04:00

It pays to de-clutter once and a while. I found this along with a few others that I will post by and by. What a happy find from back in June when my old computer died. The photoshop version on dark gray looks like a chalk drawing.

Today's Cross

2011-09-21T16:20:00.000-04:00

Too nice out today to spend much time at the computer. The weather is perfect to celebrate the first day of fall. I have spent most of the day trying to de-clutter my collage work area. I recently had a huge stuffed chair removed from the room so the chi is really moving. Tonight I will sit on the porch and smudge, as I found a box of my favorite incense herbs. I used to love making incense.

Thoughts of You on Gray

2011-09-20T10:25:00.000-04:00

This is from a sketchbook page dated July something, cropped and given the Photoshop treatment.

I liked this next one on just black the best until I tried it on gray.

When I went over to my Tumblr site to post it I encountered this marvelous quotation. My goal is to bear it in mind all day!

Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that the mere fact of our existence should keep us all in a state of contented dazzlement. ( - Lewis Thomas)

(So dazzled that I can't even spell.)

Frida In Words and Pictures

2011-09-19T09:19:00.000-04:00

Interesting to me the recent urge to write poetry. I always hated poetry in school because a.) you had to memorize it and b.) you had to recite it while standing in front of the class. Shelving books in my town library as a high school student I discovered the poetry of Ted Hughes. And I did an awesome "Death Poetry" anthology for Junior English, complete with morbid illustrations clipped from Psychology Today. I subscribed. And also to a graphically amazing one called Eye Magazine as well. Op art for hippies! I wish I had those back issues today. I still have the anthology somewhere. Maybe I will re-issue it with my own collage illustrations.

Another Cross to Bear

2011-09-18T12:42:00.000-04:00

I noticed the work of an artist who does lovely painterly bits with radial symmetry which remind me of the stuff I have been turning out lately. Alberto Cerriteno's work is so inspiring it makes me want to pick up a brush!

Sketchbook Cross

2011-09-17T17:50:00.000-04:00

I woke up today and thought about chucking this whole blog. But I will give it some time, give myself some time to feel my way around it. I do not want it to compete with AnitaNH: Collage & Life which is my primary art blog and my first blog and my favorite blog. This one needs to find its own identity apart from the collage activity. My hope is that it will encourage me to draw more.

Not a Literary Frill

2011-09-15T10:45:00.000-04:00

Inspired by the work of Simon Evans I made a couple of palmistry drawings of my hands. I had recently found a self-help psychology book titled The Mind Alive; How To Keep Our Emotional Level High: How To Live So Life Has Meaning.

Here's the text in the first drawing, the bulk of which was taken from the beginning of the book:

Anita's Emotional Bedrock Geology 2 September 2011 - Living through the stages of transition from Acute Mental and Emotional Disturbance to comparative health! - More experience than we want of conflict and tension - As Automata-avoiding every challenge of the Unfamiliar - The power to wait and let healing take place - Inner anxiety stirred up by objective evidence that there is something wrong with you - Crossing a Spiritual Equinox - Emotionally trapped. Can't put the problem behind you & go ahead with the positive business of living [Too Much Debt] - Reason to frame new hopes - Mechanisms of Self-Defense - Resilience, like happiness, is the manifest expression of WELL-BEING - Perplexity and Loneliness - Sea of Emotional Elasticity - A Life that is Trapped & Static - Past failures still exerting an influence over - Much is Taken Much Abides - The Quality of "Renewal & Comeback" - Coming into possession of a new kind of knowledge - develop physical symptoms through which to express emotional defeat - Glimpse a "new heaven" and a "new earth" rather than an after-image of some situation found wanting - unacknowledged feelings shape reaction to life - Astonishing power of psychic recuperation

And here is the text from the second drawing:

4 Sept. 2011 - The Mind Alone - Insight into the relationship between the power to put experience into words & the health of the mind. - Our capacity to build a life that is whole and sound is inextricably tied up with our capacity to make adequate use of words. - Left outside the frame of language. - Both forgotten and unforgettable. - Vulnerable to the dangerous pied-piper music of the demagogue's voice. - Inadequate experiences of companionship & mutual understanding - our most disruptive experiences date from childhood - Growth is a quiet thing, and gradual. - Savor the peace of self-acceptance - A disordered life-one that is marked by conflict, inconsistencies and unhealed emotional wounds. - Compass of our interest, anxiety & hope. - Words are medicine that can make us whole. - The effort he makes to hold himself together is so consuming it leaves him apathetic and stupid in his relationship to the shared world. - Begin planning a life to fit the self you see. - Words of self-pity, self-excuse & self-aggrandizement - An adequate power to express oneself is not a literary frill with which to decorate the edges of life. On the contrary it is the indispensable tool of our self-understanding and self-acceptance.

In addition to some helpful insight into the healing of emotional disturbance, the authors shared some interesting bits about the threat of communist conspiracy circa 1954.

An interesting book found at the dump. I need to finish it some time and also continue with the palmistry theme in some more coherent fashion.

Let's Get Some Art On Here

2011-09-11T09:34:00.001-04:00

Here's a drawing I did in my sketch diary last night of my latest collage titled Dorje (Theme No. 3). I hear it calling to me to repeat pattern it in Photoshop.

Giving Folks Credit

2011-09-10T18:08:00.001-04:00

I always like to give people credit when they inspire and influence me. I'm doing something here because of the two kind folks who left a comment on my initial post. Thanks for the encouragement. And I've been getting a lot of traffic from Katie Wright Photography.

I also want to mention someone inspirational that I found via his comment left on Jim Linderman's blog Dull Tool Dim Bulb. That would be the gentleman who blogs at Cafe Selavy. His writing seems to be extremely honest and his photography is beautiful in the way that paintings can be. They have a certain atmosphere which escapes my ability to use language. Anyway, go look - go read and you will see what I mean. I hope to achieve that level of honesty here.

Song of the Future Dead

2011-09-08T20:10:00.001-04:00

Are Words
Too Painful to
Voice Aloud
Poetry of the
Soul or
Tears of the
Heart?

Things To Do Here

2011-09-08T19:54:00.001-04:00

A Happy Find

2011-03-27T15:14:00.000-04:00

I probably have more blogs than I should right now, so many that a few are shamefully neglected. But I stumbled upon this one, formerly abandoned and linked to a site called Trickhouse. I think the name is genius and too good to pass up. So I guess I take in stray blogs as well as cats. There are worse things I could be doing. Far worse.

So, welcome to Future Dead Artists. I am one.