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!

Teleportraiture

(FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 4/9/2012)
by Janet Bruesselbach
teleportraiture.com
Exhibition May 18-31, 2012
Opening Reception Friday, May 18^th, 7-9pm
Space Womb Gallery
22-48 Jackson Ave.
Long Island City, NY 11101

Teleportraiture is a series of small, intimate oil portraits, painted from live poses, by remote video chat, via Skype, Google Hangout, or iChat. Janet Bruesselbach launched Teleportraiture in 2011 as a Kickstarter campaign.  The subject of each portrait is a backer of the campaign, or a loved one volunteered by the backer.

Janet is pleased to announce that the 45 resulting paintings, completed between October 2011 and February 2012, will be displayed in a 2-week gallery exhibition in New York City, in downtown Long Island City, to be more precise.  Attendance at the opening reception on Friday, May 18^th, will also be possible remotely through a simultaneous online video chat.

The pricing and experimentalism of the series made the fine art portrait experience open to people who had never before considered commissioning one. The subjects include the artist’s friends and relatives as well as people met only through the campaign, and only online.  Some posed from the other side of the world, others from the same room, all framed by their computer screens. The ages of subjects ranged from under a year old to septuagenarian.  Many subjects had never used video chat before.  The project reflects a moment when a flexible technology is still finding its social niche.

Janet has been working as a portrait artist since she was 15, and was further trained at RISD and the New York Academy of Art.  Her painting is traditional but fresh and lively, and feeds on the energy of interaction with a live subject.  Paintings reflect on both the artist’s personality and her subjects’.  Yet as artifacts of sittings, they are not quite realistic, and often contain traces of awkwardness in every level of communication.

Some of the portraits remain available for purchase, as are a limited number of catalogs.  The artist will be working in the gallery and will be available for live video chat Monday (21, 29), Tuesday (22, 30), and Thursday (24), from 12-6pm EST.  The gallery is also open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 12-6pm.  To commission a portrait during this or another time, to schedule a viewing, and for any other inquiries, contact: janet@bruesselbach.com (310) 617-3366

Download as pdf

Teleportraiture

Kickstarter approved my project!



Teleportraiture is a series of oil portraits painted through videochat. I am an accomplished portrait artist whose work has always been based around the intimacy generated during the interaction between painter and subject. The painting is artifact of a performance of relationship and conversation, mutual but asymmetrical observation. Often I describe things like the mirror effect where I have to put the expression on my face that my subject should have in the painting. The outcome is the result of a face moving through time, capturing a personality, and particularly a personality in interaction with my own.
I’ve grown up on the internet, and in the past few years interacting remotely in this same facial, visual and vocal way has become commonplace. In videochat, the mirror effect is more explicit, as you’re always able to see yourself as the other sees you. You find yourself having to alter your face from the way people look at computers to how they look at people – yet the portrait artist often looks at people the way people look at computers.
This project seeks to examine the strange intimacy and changed emotions around communicating remotely by making the archaic oil portraiture tradition site-unspecific and international in a way that, if anything, makes it more personalized. This differentiates it from the portrait-by-photo services made affordable by outsourcing. The ultimate images use the intermediary camera and compression to generate artifact artifacts. They are not supposed to look like they were done in person, but reflect their particular system of old and new technologies.
I have worked this way on two occasions: once with deep romance, and once with a complete stranger speaking another language, on chatroulette, where most other video screens showed penises. Thus this project examines the current trend toward erosion of online anonymity.
The donor structure is based around other donors being able to sit in and watch the process, and, with the permission of the subjects, will be recorded. Higher donations are given private sessions, and there’s plenty to be had if one is shy. A lower donation will allow posing without buying the painting. The intent is to continue to make these after the project funded through kickstarter is fulfilled.
I’m aiming to complete 20-30 paintings through this project and exhibit them. Guests will be able to attend the exhibit remotely.

Don't Get It

Don't Get It. 2011, oil on canvas, 32 x 36 inches. Model Kate P.
You may think I didn't do anything with this, but no, I wanted to make it finished before I turned it into something else.

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

2010, oils on canvas, 54"x42".
This took a year to complete, mostly because I've been taking a bit of a break from painting to curate a lot.
I was thinking about constructed causality, consequence, and how easily we mystify. Post Hoc is the "correlation implies causation" logical fallacy underlying much of religion and a great deal of bad science and rhetoric. I like to extremely remove it - to live in truth is to live in doubt. Although even drawing that connection is a causal relationship subject to methods of disambiguation. What does this have to do with insecty elf robots? Nothing, basically.
I did start with another astrophysics metaphor: the binary recurring nova system as a feedback loop. As in Veritas Odium Parit, a painting preceding and arguably causing Post Hoc, personal communication represents mass gravitational interaction. I kept going with redefining paint as figure until almost nothing was only itself any more. The scale has been reduced somewhat, and the interaction is asymmetrical. There are distinctly different regions with expanded rules for visual improvisation. There are fewer illusions of depth or animism and more archetypality and cartooniness to forms. The evasive mosaics are solid pixels rather than mimicking compression artifacts. What do you see here?

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