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.

Cecilia Roberts

is in the class of 2009 and has a website up, although it was last updated in summer 2008, so I'll put up some more recent paintings of hers soon.


Portrait of Mallory, oil on canvas, 2008. Anyone else reminded of Magritte's "Pleasure"?




Portrait of Antonia, oil on canvas, 2008. Antonia is a Greek printmaker and artist from the class of 2008, now working for Jeff Koons.




Self Portrait with Candy and Babies, etching?, 2008.

Cecilia paints intimate portraits that capture the idiosyncracies of personality. They develop out of a process of looking an interacting with her subject and their things, with a kind of improvisational feminist space structured by interest. Both her oil paintings and her prints show a quirky line by a quirky observer.