In the midst of a breakdown, we often wonder whether we have gone mad. We have not. We’re behaving oddly, no doubt, but beneath the agitation we are on a hidden yet logical search for health. We haven’t become ill; we were ill already. Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis. It belongs, in the most acute and panicked way, to the search for self-knowledge. - Alain de Botton The School of Life: An Emotional Education
It can begin with a fear of public speaking, or heights, or social situations or something seemingly silly and benign. It may be based on a frightening or painful past experience, or it may not. The why does not matter to the Honey Badger. You can waste a lot of time asking why. The real question is: what? What is your body experiencing, what was the situation before hand, what can you do to feel better?
Congratulations, Candis and Thea! Wonder Mike chose your names at random as winners of the March Reader Giveaway! Email your mailing address to thewanderingsofllola@gmail.com and your free art will be on its way to you. Thank you for sharing your super powers with us. xo
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As Harjo says so beautifully in She Had Some Horses: She had some horses she loved. / She had some horses she hated. / These were the same horse. Esme has looked herself in the eye and stared down the bully. I think liberation looks good on her. :) There is one more week to enter the March Reader Giveaway! Leave a comment - what's YOUR superpower? (see last week's blog post). One lucky commenter will win a piece of original art - free! Huzzah!
I am actually grateful - this ability is pretty good for keeping life from going off the rails. But a day of leaping tall buildings, invisibility, flying or even just figuring out who done it in the crime novel we're reading would be nice. Just saying. SUBSCRIBER PERKS!
This month, take 35% off anything in the shop with coupon code SPRINGFORWARD35. Books, art cards, paintings and prints! Coupon expires March 31. Thank you for being a subscriber and for participating in this little zone of connection and art. I so appreciate you!
The only way to get better at conversing is to - you guessed it - converse. And the only way to have control over things is to - you guessed it again - give up the idea you have any control in the first place. Which leads to art, the creation of which is a conversation of sorts. And no matter how I see and rehearse the conversation with the canvas in my head, what happens at the end of my fingertips is something else. Often so so SO much better than anything I could have imagined. Well. Who knew? About the art: This piece began with a gesso murder of an old acrylic painting and a vague idea of what I wanted to create. Something that hints at a dystopian setting, but could also be a landscape, or maybe a contraption or a view into another land. How's that for wishy-washy? But I knew the colors I wanted, so I began with a loose sketch with a long brush laden with thinned oil paint. From there, the piece developed solely with two sizes of rubber wedge and a chopstick. Moving around the piece, sharpening lines here, softening and blurring there. Adding paint with the wedge and then subtracting by dragging another wedge through the wet paint. The ghosts of city buildings (or are those the masts of ships?) appeared on the "horizons" so I let them be. In the end, it is nothing like I imagined, and yet it is something more than that. It packs a lot of punch and drama in a relatively small painting. Huzzah!
Congratulations to Mary C.! Wonder Mike chose your name as winner of the February Reader Giveaway. Be on the lookout for package of free art coming your way in the mail. And thanks hugely for participating!
About the art: at this point, I have hundreds of inspiration images for this series of ballgown-bots. It becomes easier to see what poses, fabrics, colors and compositions grab my attention - like this one, which I loved immediately. Beginning with unprimed Yupo, I sketched the rough outline of the figure and painted the first wash of the background first. Building layers on the figure, then carving into wet paint with a rubber wedge to "draw" the pleats and folds of the fabric. Rubbing away paint in highlight areas and to expose the now stained Yupo. More layers to the background to deepen the darks. After several days of drying time, a thinned layer of white applied with a large rubber wedge in a circular pattern to soften the "poufs" and give weightlessness to the fabric trim. If only I could wave a paint-laden wedge over my wardrobe...
Art is autobiographical it always means something - something about me My insides, my demons, my outsides, opinions things churning up something to see But people are not so unique our patterns repeat and persist I can see you in there You can see me in here We are all tangled up (and so often banged up) Resemblance is not to be missed. - LOLA
It's time for the FEBRUARY READER CHALLENGE! Channel your inner composer and lyricist - if your life were a musical, what would it be called? Extra points if you've got some lyrics to share. :)
The winner will be chosen at random by Wonder Mike at the end of the. month, and will receive a piece of art FREE! Woot!
About the art - sometimes the AI bot surprises you in the inspiration images it creates. It cannot create a mermaid or a centaur no matter what you tell it, and I've learned to lower my expectations accordingly. But ask it to make a series of cyborg madonnas and it will give you endless images of odd mother-figures and some really, really weird babies. Ignoring the weird ones, I focused on the images that were both heart-touching and compositionally pleasing in the inspiration for creating this painting. Beginning with unprimed Yupo, I sketched in the figure shape and added background with oil-thinned paint. Layers of thinned paint on the bodies. Burnishing off the wet layers with a soft cloth where I wanted highlights. The Yupo is lovely this way - it becomes stained but not thickened, allowing a lot of movement and working back into the layers. As always, resisting the urge to overly define or get fussy.
About the art: If you ask the AI bot for "orb-headed ballgown-bots" and give it a few other parameters, I swear it jumps up and down and says "ME! ME!" and spits out a host of glorious images. It loves fabric, light and round shapes. This piece is inspired by one of those images. To begin, I murdered an old painting with gesso (creating glorious textures) and roughed in the main figure with thinned paint. Working from the outside in to further refine the figure by building layers of thinned paint. Pearl is the result of 80 million layers (nearly) of paint to provide the many variations of color/texture in her outfit. For the boots, RESISTING anything but those few highlights. Hello, Pearl! My, don't you look lovely? Thanks to all who participated in this month's reader challenge - Where Do You Hang Your Art? Seeing the unusual places where art finds its home was quite delightful and eye opening! Congratulations to reader Thea, whose video made me laugh out loud and garnered her the win! Thea, send your mailing address to thewanderingoflola@gmail.com to collect your original art prize. I wonder where you will hang it? :)
Want to win original art for your unusual space? Stay tuned to your email for next month's challenge! in the weekly blog announcement!
For me, a mistake can mean starting again, changing directions or muttering fervent pleas to the universe to steady my hand long enough to fix something challenging. Sometimes one countermeasure leads to the need for another. The mistakes are legion. And the fix is not always obvious. What I've learned is this: if I walk away from the piece for a day or two, when I return again the next steps become clear. Even if the next step is a bucket of gesso. Often, though, it is ten minutes of confident execution and VOILA!
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AuthorLola Jovan |