Is this art?

Dusty Sunset

Tonight the sunset was yellow and purple, and the background sunshiney and and dark blue with storm clouds hanging low. That is one thing the desert has, amazing sunsets. Of course, without trees there is nothing but the horizon. 

The Beach

Spring is Springing in NV

Spring is coming to northern Nevada. You can always tell because the sage brush turns a little greener grey, and there is just the slightest hint of green grass that pokes out from under the dead brush from last year.

There is no water in the ephemeral drainages, so we are pretty low in snow this year. But the meadowlarks have made it, and they have quite a song.

Quotes

Paradise to love many things with a passion.

Picasso

All You Have To Do Is Ask

The exact opposite of the other piece I worked on this weekend- this one is of spiritual uplift.  That asking for change is itself the beginning of change.

The line of the mountains in the back also represents the fluctuation of the stock market, with the light coming out of the low point- I think many of us were “awakened” by a severe drop, when our lives changed. Certainly the very geography of where my family lives changed.

There is also a human figure in the naturescape, an arm lifting upward. And then the changes brought on by knowledge, awareness, loss… and for me, art.

A Soul in Torment

A Soul in Torment just kind of came out of me. It is almost humorously noir. I think I’ll just leave it at that.  

Project Runway

Mondo won last night. I was so excited, it’s ridiculous. I love watching the creative process at work with all the different artists- and I was a huge Mondo fan in season 8.   His use of color, pattern, and form are very... graphic design to me. I love the 'mod' feeling of his clothes, and I was absolutely broken hearted about his loss that year.  It was equally ridiculous. Go Mondo!

Sketchs

I love skecthing character of a tree, and also to create the feeling of a forest. Anyway, this one turned out kind of cool:

Sketching

I love playing with color and shape. And, you know, just practicing.

PS I've completely lost all font control at this point.

An Artist on Art

...painting does not talk; but reveals herself as she is, ending in reality; and Poetry ends in words in which she eloquently sings her own praises... Da Vinci

I read a little Da Vinci on painting last night, and love his perspective of art as portraying the emotion and the reality. I enjoy poetry as well, and he argues (fairly, perhaps) that in a glance at a painting you can get more than in pages of poetry.

Of couse, that depends on the poet.

Fate Found Me.

This is from a series of pieces titled "Fate Found Me"

It is the moment of revelation. A strange feeling of being in the path of your own fate, even if you don't know if you believe in such things.

Monday

I spent a chunk of the weekend designing my next piece, which I think will be a map that symbolizes the journey/ adventure of life.  I will probably use the idea of the human body flattened as part of the underlying concept of the map.

Still modifying the last one as well. Here are part of the mountains in it:

I used the idea of the stock market line to draw the outline. Which will make more sense when I finish it and show the whole piece.

Keeping It Honest. ?

One of my friends sent me an email last week about how honest my art is, and how much she loves it for that reason.  It was a great note, it inspired me because I was feeling down at that moment and I wanted to express the truth existing in the moment itself.

Follow me here, LOL

This got me thinking about honesty in emotion.  There is a big push in literature and business thinking to focus on the positive and maybe not acknowledge the dark moments but find them and cull them from inside of yourself.  And yet, I experience some of my greatest moments creatrively  when I'm in the most painful of spaces.  

I feel like I push against and deny a piece of self in order to exist in one world, and yet embrace and acknowledge all that it is in order to exist in a second world. If I'm tracking my own thinking here... sometimes it's hard to find balance.  And hard to be honest about what I really feel now.

Love Is Not What You Expect

One of my friends is getting married this weekend, so it seems apropos to put this piece up- as weird as it is. This painting is all the imagery of things I love. Volcanoes and cities and ocean and caves. .. etc.The vertical pattern in the lower right corner symbolizes the journey of life that is both literally and figurative.

Have a great weekend!
JAS

Sunshine-y summer-y day

To get us all through the rest of the week! Cheers!



Current Work

I'm still working on the new piece, but I wanted to show the way the element I sketched in watercolor last weekend came into the piece.   

LaMoille Canyon

This piece is set in LaMoille Canyon, just south of here. I painted the basis of it on an outing with some friends, we just hung out by the river painting and reading.

I was thinking about love and hate as well. They idea of loving someone and simultaneously knowing that it's all wrong. 

Taking My Medicine

I joke this is from my Nietzsche phase.

Elko Cityscape

Font

Sorry my font is all over the place.  I get a little weird about font. I really love graphic design, a key element of which is... well... font. Thus I felt the need to apologize.

I prefer Garamond, but the blog format I'm using doesn't have a Garamond font. So I have to type it into word and transfer over (which I don't do all the time). On top of that, the font size transfers much smaller than in the word format, so I play around to make the blog readable.

Garamond is historic serif type-face developed in the 1500's by a type cutter. Most versions of it have a natural undulation up and down, and there are subtle width differences not found in modern fonts like Calibri or the very ugly Times New Roman (ugly is a fact, not an opinion). 
I have designed my own font. Just need time and technology to play around with it- one of those 'someday' things.

Butterfly

I felt like showing this today. I was actually setting it up for a painting last summer, but I kind of like it as a photo. One of those “what is reality?” things. The elements are meant to be very joyful.  

Sketching

My current piece is about engaging personal spirituality. If I complete it, it  will be titled “All you have to do is ask.” It’s been a slow design process. This weekend I was thinking about bleeding hearts (the flower), and somehow these turned out just right. Almost like… beings?  These are an element for use in the final piece.

Fate

This piece a symbolic representation of ways of dying, and the cycle of beginnings and endings- touching a bit on the concept of reincarnation. It is interesting to think about all the ways we could pass on, and whether or not there is an influence to your daily life based on these risks that exist. 

A friend pointed out that this piece coincided with a near death experience I had along I-80 one winter. Pogonip, or ice fog, had left a thin layer of frost on the highway, which resulted in an accident. My friend and I stopped to help, and were nearly killed by a second car which lost control as well.

Lovely Moments

I'm a really visual person- I suppose that is natural for an artist- so I find beauty very inspiring. Which is a bit difficult in the high desert, as desert beauty is all about moments, seasons, and times of day.  The spring is lovely here, for example. If you walk out into the desert you find tiny little mountain flowers: lupine, Indian paintbrush, and phlox. When you hike in Lamoille Canyon you can literally find spring flowers up until the snow flies again, for spring comes as the snow melts in the high mountain peaks.

Sunsets are also lovely- the colors are usually quite intense, and they stretch across the sky.   

But right now it's very cold. Winter has finally come, so the snow has been dusting down the last two days, light and dry for the skiers.  

I went for a walk last night, a bit on the late site. It's been a long week. The moon was out, and the wind blowing so that it was quite cold.  Stars were visible for long moments, then shrouded in clouds again. There was a moment when I turned around, and realized the wind had blown the light snow into a billowing low cloud, all along the ground and to about three stories high. It wasn't readily visible unless illuminated by the homes, street lamps, and cars. It moved and swirled like the northern lights, but on the ground, and look like it was lit from within. It took me a moment to figure out what was going on, to be honest. One of those lovely and eerie moments, that you only see when you get outside once in awhile.