amaryllis belladonna

From Salvador Dali's autobiography:

"I was twenty-nine, and it was summer, in Cadaques. I was courting Gala, and we were having lunch with some friends at the seashore, in a vine-covered arbor over which hung the deafening hum of bees. I was at the peak of my happiness although I bore the ripening weight of a new born love clutching my throat like a veritable octopus of solid gold sparkling with a thousand precious stones of anguish. "

I've always come back to this image when thinking of the ways that love is something you bear, it is this extravagance that weighs upon you even as you cultivate it intentionally. I thought I would have more to say, but I'll just let it speak for itself for now.

oil on canvas, 4 panels. 6'x3'

sleep

Now that my paintings are physically in California with me, I can take better pictures of some of them. This is a little more accurate in terms of the colors and detail.

work in progress

detail of the monster that I've been working on since August. It will be done by the end of the week, I hope, and then I will have so much to say about it

some watercolor portraits

This is from a series of watercolors I've been working on for the past few weeks. I've avoided doing portraits for a long time, but lately I have found it really cathartic to paint people who I love and miss.

This is an old one, made in 2009, circles traced around cans of cafe bustelo. It's another kind of portrait, of myself and the people who meant the most to me at the time. I made it on a whim and it has become one of my personal favorites, folded many times (as you can maybe see) and carted around to every apartment I've lived in since. 

wings

this was a new one for me- I wanted to precisely recreate a visually beautiful scene from a dream, without applying any particular meaning to it. In that sense I failed, because it was a parking lot and not a river, because the sky was red and not gold, and the birds were not so colorful and there was definitely not a parrot. But the compromise between my original plan and what my hand was willing to make has left me with this thing, which I do love.

oil on canvas 72x30

something about neglect

I've had recurring dreams about being in rooms of giant fishtanks full of enormous, decaying, endlessly-reproducing goldfish that overpopulate their tanks because I neglect them. I can't be the only one

oil on canvas 4'x3'

the bigness

This six-panel monster was made in five days just in time for the community art show that we held at Launchpad last summer. I think I could paint hundreds of clouds and not exhaust their meaning. The sky is completely impartial and laughs at your problems.

oil on canvas 7'x4' ish

jessica's dream

I have been calling this painting 'Jessica's dream' but that's not what it is. It's a painting of the cartoons that I used to make while waiting for DNA preps in lab, it's an abstraction of the george washington bridge as seen from the west side bike path, it's the cliffs in the utah desert that we drove through for three days on the way out here. It's almost purely the shapes my hands like to make, so in that sense was an exercise in design as I continue to figure out how I solve problems in paintings.

oil on canvas 48x30

old favorites

sleep

I have said and thought more about this painting than I could ever remember. It is laden with personal symbolism, maybe burdened by it. I consider this the first painting I made as an adult, though, and I love it dearly. Even though it's busy,  I still sense a stillness and reverence that reminds me of the quiet, sacred, enormous thing that inspired me to make it in the first place.  oil on canvas 48x30

ice breaking up on the hudson

oil on canvas 24x15

robert

based on a photograph of my brother in in the jungle on the Big Island of Hawaii, reaching up to the aerial root of a banyan tree.  I had a lot of fun making this one, and I find its simple message reassuring. oil on canvas 48x30

alchemy

this is an ambitious piece that I think failed. I love parts of it, I love some of the ideas behind it,  but I was just not skilled enough at the time to pull it off.  Why even include it in this post? I love explaining at length why I do not like things that I do not like. So: I'll be honest and admit that while it is indeed hard to render a laughing face in paint, I did an unusually poor job here and so it looks weird because I ended up wiping the smile right off the face. The fish reflected in the mirror is trite, the weird empty space above the bricks was impossible to fill, and the whole stained glass turning into leaves thing would have been good but it's just poorly rendered.  oil on canvas 50x30