Daughters of Mercury Kickstarter

 

Daughters of Mercury

I'm running a Kickstarter until October 26 asking for your support painting a series of full-length oil portraits of trans women, that transcend their conventional depictions in art and media. Rewards include wall calendars, prints, and original paintings. Click above to view a preview or support after Sunday, September 21. If we don't reach the goal, I can't pay the models, cover travel costs, or pay for my time and materials, so I won't make art. If you can't spare, share. Thank you!

Veritas Odium Parit

means "truth creates hatred".



Oil on linen, 72'x60', 2009. I started with a composite of several photographs of colliding/gravitationally interacting spiral galaxies, then improvisationally found humanoid figures (and some more virtual metaphors) in it, following a spatial structure of in for one galaxy center and out for the other, and finding cool and warm pastel lights in fetal forms. It's seeded by a psychological allegory of resisting attractive forces. Dali claimed that relativistic physics suggested the vacuum was meatspace: matter is not pulled towards other matter but pushed by muscular nothingness.

Also finished:


"Insults as Veiled Compliments", 36"x72", oil and silver paint on linen, 2009.

Almost finished:


"Respect the Autonomy of Inanimate Objects", acrylic underpainting with oils on canvas, 72"x72". Painted in brightly colored glazes, cheesy Richard Corben-style, under Nicola Verlato. I started with a spontaneous drawing and then evolved it through tracings, color studies, clay and digital models, and compositional organization.

Panni Malek

website, mostly with work from Otis and illustration.

Panni is an Iranian painter raised in Los Angeles. Her paintings examine female sexuality, celebrating a lush, sensual, elaborate and fussy femininity. She perverts the masculine conceits of high art by embracing not just figurative representation, in warm colors and Sargent-like softness, but of kitsch subjects: kitties, titties,intricate interiors. There is a subversive element in every painting: sex toys, delicate profanity, a certain over-passivity.


oil on canvas, ~20"x30", 2008


(Self portrait in French abandoned house. oil on canvas, ~36"x48", 2008


oil on canvas, ~36"x24", 2008