Super-belated ART NEWS!!

Somehow, I neglected to announce a few bits of news from this past year. I must have been distracted by... Oh yes.  Everyone's 'that's why' excuse for the past eighteen months, for better or worse. Lord knows I took my lumps too, but thankfully, I think these two art brags fall squarely in the "better" category? OR at the very least, new.

"Because of the pandemic" #1.

 

Like many, I found weird pockets of time to indulge weird ideas, with no particular reason to stop myself. Like obsessively taking photos on a hike last January after a windstorm, when all the dead, broken tree limbs looked so much like twisted bodies and human physiology, I just kept seeing the same theme over and over:

I couldn't help it. Apparently, nor could I help submitting said photos to the very next call-for-submissions I found. And lo and behold, two photos from the series were selected for publication! "Arboreal Arms" and "Bronchial Branches" (left to right, above) were selected by the The Tatterhood Review (a really cool literary scifi/fantasy 'zine, y'all!) for publication, and they even paid me a few shekels, too. Eeek!    

 

"Because of the pandemic" #2. 

In another twist of temporary insanity, at the same time I submitted an old painting I did back in 2015 to a gallery seeking work on the topic of "Paradoxical Paradigms." I called the painting Rembrandt's Bathsheba: The Hellscape Abloom and... it made it in! To an actual, honest-to-goodness ART SHOW!! Entirely, in my opinion, by mistake.

Nonetheless, the painting hung at the The Huntington Arts Council for a number of weeks, they threw all us artists a virtual reception (you can still view the body of work here), and the whole thing was both a total hoot and a real, true honor.

WHO EVEN AM I RIGHT NOW, YOU GUYS?! 

I know, I know, I usually fancy myself a writer. But that little surge of inspiration last year was a much-needed boost during a particularly demoralizing pandemic. So it just goes to show ya—submit submit submit! You never know who's crazy enough to call you an artist! 

 

  Rembrandt's Bathsheba: The Hellscape Abloom (2015)

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Rembrandt's Bathsheba: The Hellscape Abloom

Artist Statement: In painting Rembrandt’s Bathsheba: The Hellscape Abloom, I purged a demon in a single sitting with the materials I had on hand: some old tubes of acrylic and oil paint, some torn pages of a 1950’s Rembrandt art book my toddler had destroyed, spiritual enhancements of mood and music—and a subconscious laden with timely insecurities: body, motherhood, femininity, sex. 

 

In the Biblical story of Bathsheba, King David spies a bathing beauty on a rooftop and desires her, summoning her with a demand letter informing her he’s just sent her husband off to war so they can be together. 

In Rembrandt’s Baroque masterpiece, Bathsheba at her Bath (1654), it’s widely agreed that Bathsheba is lovingly depicted as despondent, deeply disturbed, saddened, and/or resigned by Kind David’s letter. 

 

When I first saw Rembrandt’s masterpiece hanging in the Louvre many years ago, and again in our vintage art book, I was not familiar with it, nor the biblical story it was based on. In blissful ignorance, I read this alluring, sensual woman as contemplative. Torn. Conflicted. Excited, but terrified. Perhaps even horrified. But also... Alight with possibility. Abloom, in a Hellscape. Conflicts in emotion make sense to me. Paradox’s make sense to me. Even when faced with such a profound paradigm shift as Bathsheba’s: you can hold two feelings in your heart at once.

 

 

 

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"Arboreal Arms" (2021) & (Above, Top Left)

"Bronchial Branches" (2021) (Above, Top Right)

Artist Statement: On one of my solitary hikes through the trails of eastern Long Island, I found the haunting, textured, and gnarled mess of the woods too striking not to capture — if only with a newcomer's eye and a smartphone camera. Yet with these rudimentary tools, art still finds a way. In this series, I aim to reveal how the arboreal can look downright aboral as the broken limbs, fallen trees, and knotted vines of the bare winter forest map unto our bodies' own tangled physiology — hair, veins, arteries, posture, caress — manifested in simple plays of light, color, and texture.