Cross-Pollination

The knottiness of the screen project has worked its way into my newest painting. I love it when that happens. If it weren't for cross-pollination, I'd be useless. It's something I've relied on ever since I started painting this way.

This is the painting from the dream I referred to a few posts ago. It's going well, but it's daunting just for the sheer amount of paint it requires. (I'm not really letting myself worry about transporting it yet. It won't fit in my car. But that's a bridge to cross when I get there. First I have to finish the actual painting.)

Art Nouveau Room Screen

A couple days ago I finally finished this room screen painting project that I've been working on for FOR. E. VER. But it's done, and gorgeous. I'm very satisfied. And its owner took it home and loves it as well, which is even better. And now, I'm obligated to post pics -- which really deserve a full view.

As if getting a project done isn't sufficient reward in itself, I also got about a third of my painting studio back (the screen took up the whole end wall) and I can get back to painting in oils (the screen was all acrylics).

That's not to say it wasn't fun, though, and a nice departure from my "normal" painting style. It was also really fun to make something specifically designed for someone's personal space. The person who commissioned it left it very open as to what I was to do, except that copper is her favorite metal. So I took a poster she had of the Eiffel Tower being built and used that as my starting point. It inspired me to look at the Art Nouveau style entrances to the Paris metro, and other architectural details from that period. I only realized later that it would go particularly well with many of the paintings she has throughout her place, which are sort of Impressionist style.

This project actually reminded me a lot of set painting, which I haven't gotten to do for years now -- without the reassurance that "it only has to look good from far away." Needless to say it brought out my perfectionist neuroses, as evidenced by the fact that I painted most of it with a quarter inch brush. But it turned out great. And I actually finished it, which is (sadly) more than I can say for many of the project I start.

Oh, before I go I should post a pic of my latest greeting card. I'm working on some other designs, but I don't expect them to be done particularly soon. But the ones that do exist are all available for purchase now in singles and 5-packs on my etsy: carlybodnar.etsy.com. Enjoy!

Mid-Holiday Update

I just started a painting from a dream. I've only ever painted from a dream one other time, and this is different. Last time (7 years ago?) I was trying to paint a scene from my dream. But this is actually a painting I was working on in the dream. I'm hoping that this goes better than last time, not only because I committed to a 4x4 ft panel on it, but because...

...I'm having a show in February! And I'd like it to be all new work. So I'm hoping to channel most of my efforts into actual productive work as much as possible. Ha! Anyway, the show will be at Seven Virtues Coffee House in NE. I don't know much more, but if you would like an invite, I'll be happy to send one. Just send your email or mailing address to carly.bodnar@gmail.com and I'll add you to my list.

I also have a couple of collaborations coming up that are quite exciting. One is with and artist-friend, and the other with a writer-friend. Very much looking forward to both.

And before I go, I'll leave you with a shot of one of my new cards. Soon, it'll be for sale, but I'm just a little too lazy for that at the moment.

Paper, wonderful paper.

I currently have copious amounts of glorious, glorious paper. Paper is the only thing I enjoy shopping for in person. Otherwise, I'd much rather shop online. But paper... I can paper-shop for hours (as evidenced by today's 30-min errand that became a 2 hour paper-shopping extravaganza). I cannot accurately describe how much I like touching every open-stock stack and comparing every shade of cream or burgundy and every texture. To make it even better, my two paper stores are right across the street from each other. It doesn't get much better than that when it comes to picking out new paper.

Anyway, had to share. I'll have photos of new cards very soon, but until then, here's the final version of the Anatomic Valentine cards. I went with the burgundy because it had the best combination of writeability (if that's a word -- I liked the navy, but it would be too dark to write in without a gel pen) and contrast with the ink. And it just seemed right. I also upsized them to A2 size, which shows off the design a little more. You can buy them here: CarlyBodnar.com/shop or carlybodnar.Etsy.com.

Good: A [new local] Gallery

I have to share this brand new (not even open yet) gallery for the simple fact of it's ingenuity of venue and general portlandiness. All over Portland are houses with these little 1-car garage structures out front. Some are kind of half-buried in lawn, sometimes. Most of them look very out-dated, often run-down, and useless. You would have a hard time fitting anything larger than a compact car in them, after all. Some have had the garage-style door -- on structures like this, the door is the single wood panel type that you have to heft up, with a spring to assist you if it's not totally rusted -- taken off entirely and a normal door put in. When we were looking at houses to buy, I had always categorized these little urban outbuildings as a possible studio space for myself. The people at Good, however, have made theirs into a gallery, with a cute little window box. i had never even thought of that idea, but it makes perfect sense. Assuming that it's the garage on your own house, overhead is super low, and the commute is nil. Most galleries go out of business because they can't make the sales pay up the rent/lease for their space, but this arrangement sidesteps that problem.

I'm looking forward to this space opening, and wish them the best of luck.

New Painting, as yet untitled

Finished up one of the paintings that's been on the wall for too long. (I have to make room to start new work.) It's about 4 ft tall by 2 or 2.5 ft wide. Not sure what to call it -- been struggling with that the whole time I've been working on it. It's "about" multiple unrelated things. Don't want to pin it down too specifically with a title. Worth looking at the larger view. Better pictures to come later.

Just needed to share.

I found this image a few days ago. I don't remember what I was googling. But I feel the need to share it because I'm kind of in love with it. If you don't know me, or aren't familiar with my work and obsessions, you'll probably be weirded out. But then, if you don't know me/my work, I have no idea how you've happened upon my blog.

So here it is: (from here)

I can’t help the way I feel (2003)
John Isaacs
“In this work lies an interest in a possibility of the emotional landscape of the body becoming manifest in its surface. Visually, the way in which the flesh grows, erupts, and engulfs the body can be seen as a metaphor of the way in which we become incapacitated by the emotional landscape in which we live and over which we have little control. The body also appears to be suffering from some kind of malignancy, as in cancer, but for me, the image of the figure, coupled with the title, leads one into an open contemplation of the plight of the individual.” - John Isaacs

Cold and flu season, right on time.

There are so many wonderful-to-ogle things in the blogosphere... I'm getting sucked in, I feel it. It's like when I used to LiveJournal, and got sucked into the goings-on of my friends' lives, except that this feels so much more legitimate. Pretty things are legitimate!

Anywho, I had a really great printing day last week, following a really great paper-shopping day, the result of which was a bunch of great Valentine's day cards. But then I got sick. So I'm just getting around to posting pics and links and such now, many days later.

The first thing I must share is my drying rack -- not for its fabulousness (yarn, clothes pins, and scrap lumber, oh my!) but simply because I've been whining about not having one and now I do. Sort of. So here, bask in its glory: Not worth picturing but which makes me giddy with pride is my new, genius registration system that makes everything line up wonderfully and resulted in absolutely no registration errors during my batch of card making. The only errors were due to bad ink passes (totally my fault) and that brings my success rate to something like 98%, up from around 64% not too long ago.

Back to the cards, though, because that's what you should be ogling. Most of the batch was gold on burgundy, which looks really great. But I also tried to find a color that worked well on the red paper I picked up. Less success there -- tried a salmon-y color and straight white, neither of which had the same pop that the gold/burgundy combo did -- but they're available too, if you like them. The shop page on CarlyBodnar.com is working now, so you can get them there. So go get some!

Valentine Test Prints

Printed a test batch of valentines day cards. (The design wraps around the back, fyi.) Very cute, although gold ink was frustratingly sticky. (Typing will be very limited because right after printing, I cut a chunk out of my finger with a kitchen knife. Left hand, thankfully, but still makes lots of things difficult.) Now I have to track down large quantities of this card stock I printed them on -- it was given to me by a friend, so I have no idea what it is exactly, or where it came from. Once I find it, they'll be for sale, but not just yet...

Andrea Zittel Lecture

I went to the Andrea Zittel talk last night at PSU. Packed house -- a bigger turnout than I've ever seen for a Monday night artist lecture. I felt lucky to snag a spot on the floor from which I could actually see the projector screen and wasn't blocked by other people's heads. And this was in the new room they have for the artist lectures -- I can't imagine everyone trying to fit in the old venue.

(I'm not going to recap the whole evening. The lecture will supposedly be made available on Art Talk AM, though at the time of this posting it's not.)

Anyway, it was really great -- the lecture, the crowd, the general vibe. I caught myself admiring Andrea Zittel's dress before I even realized it was her, and once I realized that it was, I couldn't help but wonder if it was her own creation. It's true that her personal uniforms are now from a few years back, but it definitely looked like it fit into that vein. (Or maybe it was related to this smockshop tangent.) I was also surprised at her age. Turns out she's 43. She seems very youthful... and it's hard to get a sense of perspective on an artist's progression through just looking at articles and whatnot, but her talk actually helped me do that much better.

I found her to be very approachable, personable. And she had a lot of interesting things to talk about, like how freedom can be found in the loopholes of society, flying under the radar, rather than having and accumulating more and more. (Something I should really take to heart.) She also talked a little about her choice to not make money off reproducing her work, mass producing her creations for sale. I found that very refreshing... it's not a stance that I hear much in the art world (not to say that it's not common, but I think it's either not voiced very loudly, or it's repressed).

Perhaps the most interesting thing she talked about was a residency where she spent a week in a "vacation from time," as she called it. The residency was in a basement studio, which lined up perfectly with a project she had been wanting to do. She wanted to see what natural rhythms or cycles developed without the structure of time. I guess she ended up feeling like hell from it, but I think that would make an awesome ongoing residency program. I, for one, would love to be a resident in a program like that (see previous post).

All in all, I found it to be a lovely evening, very encouraging, if not inspiring. I need to go to more Monday night lectures.

My circadian clock is broken.

I took a nap this evening, and now I'm up all night. I woke up from my nap at 11pm, and have to be back at work at 8am, so really, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do a little redesign of my site. My fingers are very cold now, but I got done what I wanted to. At least the first bit of it. I'm just hoping the delirium helps me out mood-wise for work.

Work was going to be pretty rough anyway -- we sold out of all our sale stuff in the first hour of business yesterday (not kidding) and despite what I told pissed off customers yesterday, we're not actually getting more of anything on the trucks overnight, so people are going to be even more pissed tomorrow. Yay. If you need me I'll be hiding in the admin office.

Oh, and speaking of work and my inability to sleep: Shift Work Sleep Disorder. I knew it.

Now I suppose I'll do some bookkeeping I've been putting off in my more conscious states. What's more fun than that at 5am, eh?

The Artist and the Day Job.

Someone I interviewed with a while ago called my manager to check up on the references I had provided. Kind of caught me off guard -- I wasn't expecting to be in the running since I wasn't able to commit to full-time. And I'm not sure that I'd want the job if they offered it to me. I actually ended up going to the interview because I forgot to cancel it with reasonable notice, and I figured it might be a good connection to have made for the future. And my interviewers were great, and it's something that on a lot of levels would/could be very fulfilling -- but I also have a gut-level hesitation about it. Part of it is benefits. Paid time off and (cheap!) health care, I'm increasingly realizing, are pretty damn valuable. The other part is trying to save all, or at least the majority of my feelings of fulfillment (not to mention energy) for my art. I think right now it's important for me to have something of a shit job, and be able to come home and throw myself into the art and make that the good part of my day.

And yet I keep looking for more jobs.

The artist and the day job: the epic saga...

PDX Must See: Thomas Wood etchings

If you're in the Portland area, and have any appreciation or knowledge of etching, you must go see Thomas Wood's prints at the Augen Gallery's NW Davis location. Images online absolutely do not do them justice. I'm not the type of person that buys art, because usually I'm just too critical of it. Plus, I'm not the type that can go look at the same piece over and over, like you go back and re-read books. But these prints I could sit in front of for hours, I think. I almost bought one of his prints last night. I really don't have the money, but so beautiful... and the more I screenprint the more I can really appreciate well-registered prints, and he's got multiple plates on many of his prints. Super rich colors, textures... very realistic but surrealistic... very satisfying.

Ok, I'm done. Back to my painting. I got the painting wall in my studio clear enough that I can actually do some work. (Yay!) The rest of the office/studio is slowly, ever so slowly, getting cleaner as well.

Summer colors just in time for winter.

I've fallen into the trap this evening of ogling fabric online. Links to links to links have resulted in a million tabs open on my browser, each a gateway to fabric wonderfulness.

I want to stencil our bedroom wall -- originally I was looking at doing it with fabric, but fabric that I like tends to be expensive ($15 per yard, times 8 feet high, times... oh dear) and wallpaper paste is a pain. We just got done undoing the horrible wallpaper border in our tiny bathroom, and that was enough to convince us that wallpaper just isn't an option. So now I'm just ogling fabric in order to steal inspiration. Today it seems I'm having an orange day:

I am, however, seriously considering purchasing one of the following (leaning toward the woodgrain) to re-cover my computer/office chair and maybe make a matching tack/magnet board. My 'theme' color for the office/non-painting areas of the studio is yellow, but paint only goes so far. The office needs some lovin'.. Plus, the fabric is on blow-out and super affordable ($4 a yard!) . How can I not get some.

Mmm. Fabric.

Hello, world.

Okay, so I'm blogging. For "all the wrong reasons," like increased google-ability. And because I'm sitting with a beer and waiting for a screen to dry, and... everybody else is doing it.

Also, it's potentially a really great way/place to collect and share all of the lovely things out in the world (and by world I mean internet, of course). Like GingerAndGold does. And like Design*Sponge. I've recently gotten into reading design-y blogs and can finally see the value in them. So I guess I'm a convert.

Plus, I have to have somewhere to direct my self-satisfaction over the small improvements I occasionally make to my studio. Adrian is sick of hearing about how much I love my new wash-out booth (see photo).

It's the shower curtain from our old apartment (the house has sliding glass shower doors... which we broke... beside the point) hung from screw-in eyes from the beams and then packing-taped to the laundry sink on the outside. It's pretty ghetto -- my whole studio is -- but necessity is the mother of invention and it works like a dream. I also put a pressure nozzle on the end of the sink hose, which is fantastic.

P.S. This is genius: I may have to work my employee discount and get me some. Like I need more places to stash crap.