Hey Look! New Pages!

And they only took me a week and two days to do. Here we have pages 12 and 13. For the second part--the part which is no longer detailing Waverly's childhood--I am switching to a more subdued palette and I will be working to make things a lot less flat. Which means that every page takes a lot longer because I have to layer and layer the watercolors on. I really like the end result, though.

Hey look! Clothes hangers! Perhaps we are now in some sort of department store?

We are! And Waverly is chillin' out with a mannequin that looks kind of like a badass Venus de Milo! Why? Because that's how cool I am.

Gluh. I am never going get this whole thing finished in time for the Chicago comic con this summer.

So Bill O'Reilly is a Condescending Racist Asshole. What Else is New?

Oh Bill O'Reilly. It's amazing the things that come out of your mouth. Almost as amazing as Pat Robertson, but that's for another post entirely. It's so funny when people think they are being complimentary when they are, in fact, being horribly racist, homophobic, xenophobic, or sexist. I like to call it the Michael Scott syndrome. Bill O'Reilly suffers horribly from this ailment. As he said in a recent radio show, when he went to have dinner with Al Sharpton at Sylvia's, a restaurant so famous it has its own entry on Wikipedia, he was shocked and simply couldn't get over many things.

"And I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship."

I am not even shitting you. Also, he had a great deal of insight into the African-American community in general, a community he obviously knows in depth and first hand.

"I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They're getting away from the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They're just trying to figure it out: "Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it."

So I just have to say that it's good that we have someone like O'Reilly around to solve all our race problems. Really, it's very important that we create black and white situations that have black and white solutions. There should be no grey area here, nothing O'Reilly can't figure out and work with. It's obvious that "gansta" culture is the ruination of "blacks", even if all O'Reilly really knows about "gangsta" culture is the stereotypes on BET. His cast of characters in the Black community read like the cast list of a bad after school special.

Also, this is really more fodder for the idea that Stephen Colbert's caricature is pretty much spot on.

*Sigh* now back to my essay, How Amy Lowell Totally Breaks the 2nd Commandment (In Verse). That GD lesbo.

listening to: The Smiths--Girlfriend in a Coma

Creepy . . .

Okay, so evidently my beloved Wikipedia was just too liberal (??) for some people so they created Conservapedia, Wikipedia's weird cousin that everyone tries to avoid at Christmas dinner. I guess their main complaint would be that Wikipedia is wrong sometimes, but . . . well duh. It's an online encyclopedia edited by people who can randomly sign up for it. You aren't supposed to use it as a resource for your thesis on Hermeneutical Exploration Of Onomatopoeia In The Works Of William Carlos Williams As It May Or May Not Relate To Post-Agrarian Appalachia. You're kind of supposed to know that going in. If you want hard facts, use a real encyclopedia. If you want to find out about the elephant population is fit to burst, you go to Wikipedia.

Anyway, one of Conservapedia's creepier entries was on Women and Men. First off, they're not terribly informative. I found out that a) women can get pregnant, b) women have thighs like rocks, c) oh, and that according to the Bible, women had best be subservient to men, quiet in church, dress modestly, and constantly pregnant. The men's entry is even creepier, because it simply says that man was created in God's image and that women had better not usurp authority.

I have never first hand experienced sexism and I'm so far removed from it that its just freaky to read stuff like that. We were discussing sexism in my Contemporary Art Issues course the other day and many people seemed to think it a complete non issue. We're past that. And in many ways I feel past it because I think that I am respected by my colleagues and I've never encountered a situation first hand where I saw anyone being disrespected because of their sex. I mean, reading Jane Austen novels where the protagonist had to marry and that was simply the only thing she could do with her life makes me laugh because the situation seems so ludicrous now.

And yet, we still can't get something as simple and straight forward as the Equal Rights Amendment passed.

Dead Legs Layer El Numero Dos

We're getting there. Probably 1-2 more layers . . . and may I just say how much I love galkyd, but just wish it would dry a bit slower? Parts of it were already drying up as i went into the legs! It was freaky!

First Essay of the Semester . . . Finished!

For awhile I was scared. I mean, no more 200 level classes for me. It's 300 and up from here on out. I was really terrifically frightened of the papers I would get because I previously would generally write one paper a semester before because I was taking mostly studios. And sometimes those papers would be being graded by people who had English as a second or even third language *coughasianmythologycough* so they would end up being much too generous to a paper that was written in an hour the night before at midnight.

So anyway, I was a bit nervous about my first paper this semester. But guess what? I finished it today in only two hours, much of which was spent twiddling my thumbs. Do you know why? Because I've read The Brothers Karamazov twice already and the topic ("Ivan Karamazov is split between two contradictory ideas. Explain what the contradiction is, using at least two passages from the novel to support your ideas.") is so kickass because I actually spent a good deal of time thinking about ol' Vanka K. after I first read the book and really knew the answer to the question the moment I read it. I also already had all the great quotations I would need underlined so they were easy peasy to find. And this was how my essay, "Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov: A Tortured Soul Who Is Wracked With Some Sort of Negative Emotion ", was born in a mere two hours.

And this is why from here on out I am going to email my professors over breaks, find out what all the reading for the class will, and read it before I go back to school. It makes life so much less stressful.

Listening to: Simon & Garfunkel--Cecelia

The Venerable Bede

"'Such,' he said, 'O King, seems to me the present life of men on earth, in comparison with that time which to us is uncertain, as if when on a winter's night you sit feasting with your earldormen and brumali --- and a simple sparrow should fly into the hall, and coming in at one door, instantly fly out through another. In that time in which it is indoors it is indeed not touched by the fury of the winter; but yet, this smallest space of calmness being passed almost in a flash, from winter going into winter again, it is lost to our eyes. Somewhat like this appears the life of man --- but of what follows or what went before, we are utterly ignorant.'"

--The Venerable Bede
Ecclesiastical History, Book II

Maddi showed me this quotation about a year ago and I looked it up again today while trying to find quotations to put within the three books of my graphic novel. There's something about it that just floors me. Maybe life just feels so fleeting right now because I'm already three years into college and it feels as though I just started yesterday, but magically know the bus routes well. This, along with this Virginia Woolf quotation from To the Lighthouse (stunning book, by the way) will be the quotations that go behind the title pages for part II and part III. For part I I used a classic from Flannery O'Connor:
"She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
--A Good Man is Hard to Find

Someday I hope to write a stunning quotation that just completely alters the way someone thinks about things.

Studio!

Well here is my very own studio. It's like a cubicle, only super messy and full of art supplies. I'm pretty psyched about the fact that I have it because as a junior in studio, I have 24 hour key card access to the painting building and I no longer have to clean up all my shit so the next class won't get pissed at me. This means that my studio will probably pretty much always be this messy. I'm okay with that.

In other news: I got some watercolors yesterday (Dick Blick does the fastest shipping! I ordered on the 11th and it got here the 13th!) and I've been playing around with them. It's time to move on with my graphic novel, and so I've done a "Part II" page. On the other side will be a Virginia Woolf quotation about the passage of time.


And then, of course, I've got an oil painting started. I started this blog to chronicle artistic process, but I kind of suck at life and kept forgetting to take pictures. Not this time! This time you all get to see my oil paintings straight from the ugly beginning! This painting is only a third of the piece which is a choose-your-own-ending painting. Basically there is going to be Agnes hanging from something in the biggest painting (5'x3') and then two other paintings, one which is will be the legs just hanging so she's dead and the other where she's got her legs up on a little chair so she's not dead. I'm going to make little doors for them and have the numbers "1" and "2" on the doors. Anyway, I'm excited and here are the dead legs in their first layer.


I told you it's not pretty! Oh well. I'll do another layer on them tonight. They should look like a great pair of gams by the end, though.

Also: mad props to Paul, who gave me Adobe Creative Suite CS3 for free. It runs like a dream in comparison to CS2 on my macbook pro.

What I'm going to do after college

So I'm a junior, now, right? I've got two more years left in the weird world that is the American academic system (and by weird I mean that I never see children or old people) and then I'm out in the harsh, cold reality of the real world. As an artist/writer. A lot of people would say that I'm pretty much screwed, but I disagree. I have a plan.

People like art. Not a lot of contemporary art thanks to assholes like Damien Hirst, but I think my art is generally much more accessible because I like to make it beautiful as well as thought provoking. At least, that's my goal. Anyway, many people who like art but can't actually do it themselves and who have disposable income like to give money toward art. These come to artists in many forms, but the one I'm looking at is fellowships. This means an organization would give me say, $25,000 to do my artwork for a year. It's basically what Virginia Woolf was going on about in A Room of One's Own. Instead of having to balance two minimum wage jobs just to pay rent and finance my oil paint addiction, I'll have a little bank account full of money just for me! I found a very exciting prospect at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and I'm sure that there are loads more.

Just amazing. Can you imagine it? My only job would be to create my artwork, and it would be whatever artwork I wanted, not commissions. I'm actually getting excited rather than terrified about graduating.

Granted, I have to get the fellowships first.

Reread A Wrinkle in Time today

Madeleine L'Engle died Friday. It's time to crack open that much loved childhood book again. Thank you, Ms. L'Engle. I must have read that book fifteen times at least.