Our Xmas Tree!

I wanted a potted one but by the time we got around to it, all the good ones were gone and only the scrappy potted trees were left.

New Things!
A friend of mine dropped off persimmons the other day. I am not a fan of persimmons, but growing up my family had a persimmon tree in the backyard and my mom would make persimmon bread that I loved, so I decided to make some.

It turned out pretty good, although I think next time I'll try my mother's recipe to see it come out a little more like a dessert bread. The kind I made came out more like a breakfast bread.

I can't really complain, however, as I am currently enjoying a breakfast of persimmon bread, a miniature tangerine, and silk formosa oolong tea.
Delicious!


Here's a picture of my current favorite fall/winter outfit, and one of my many weaves:
It's cold outside! 30 lows and 40 highs in Oakland, and we're at the low end, being right by the water.

More Dreaming

Speaking of a specific Recurring Dream:
I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Angeliska Gazette: Black Honey from the Bee-Log, and saw she had a made a post about Recurring Dreams. One of the Recurring Dreams she mentioned was about secret rooms. At first, I thought to myself that I'd never had a dream like that, but then I read her description:
"I’ve had this dream since I was little,
of discovering secret rooms or chambers.
One of the first dreams I can remember,
I found an enormous cathedral-like theater
in the steeple of my church. Swooping
red curtains. An apt analogy for my young
mind to make, hmm? When I lived in
a tiny baba yaga shack with only one room,
I constantly dreamed that I would find other rooms
that always been there, behind walls or partitions.
Once I dreamt of a whole second floor!"

I started having these dreams after I grew older and began to live on my own. I didn't recognize her description immediately because my dreams were so much more adult and less fantastical that what she was talking about.
It had a yearning attached to it that was both wondrous and wanting, and in that way you only learn to want once you have known some level of poverty. It is not the same wanting you have in childhood where you are trying to find ghosts or fairies or passages through wardrobes. The dreams still have an element of fantasy and wonder to them, but that yearning that accompanies it is unique to my adult experiences.

I would dream that I was in my apartment and I would begin to wander. I would open doors and find gardens, extended rooms, extra floors, or an extension of the the complex I lived in.
Why did these dreams only start when I got older and began to live on my own, away from my parents? Do the represent some sort of recognition of my lesser means now that I support myself, a sort of anticipation of what will come once I am able to save for myself and afford better lodgings? Or something else?


My most recent version of this dream happened the other night, and took place in our current house.
I love our house. It is a Victorian duplex in a flavorful part of town. It is long and narrow, we have room for our things but it takes some arranging. Inside the house all the original fixtures and wood molding is intact, with carved runners in every room.


In my dream, we had found a way to expand the space in our house by rearranging the furniture, and our duplex turned into a huge, expansive mansion with high ceilings.
However, in the dream, the house was in a level of rather deep decay. We had minimal furniture, the rafters were all exposed, and it was dark and drafty inside.


Just as the interior state of our old house was exaggerated, so was the exterior. Outside I could hear all sorts of ruckus, and people were loitering around conspicuously in a way that I found very unsettling.

The house was mostly a brick red, like the one in this picture I found.

The neighborhood was in decay too. I was anxious and relieved all at once. I had a grand interior, but it was in poor condition. And I was high up above the fray but it was closing in and the doors were weak. It was such a strange dream, filled with a desire to shut out the world and yet to escape.

And yet, near the end of the dream the people I was so fearful of noticed the house falling and propped up the walls and fastened them in place as I hid inside the crumbling structure.

All I can think is that maybe the dream is about my own anxiety. That it's all too easy to see things in great exaggeration and let your perception run away with your good sense. You are suddenly fighting flight or fight, and next thing you know the things you're so frightened of weren't so bad after all, and have a way of resolving themselves if you are just patient enough, and open-minded enough to give events a chance to unfold.
I am definitely in a tense situation involving home right now, where I have to wait for the other shoe to drop before I can decide what will become of our situation. We have no to little control over what we're waiting to here on, and all we can really do is determine whether we will leave our home or remain. In the mean time, waiting to find out...it is better not to let anxiety bubble up and become a storm. If there's nothing you can do, then spend your time waiting enjoying what you have instead of fearing what you can't control. Or something like that....
What do you think? Have you ever had a dream like this, and if so, what did it mean to you?

Last night I had nightmares that a serial killer was stalking me for a reason I didn't know, and he/she was sending me the body parts of friends of mine that he'd killed or maimed.
The landscape of the dream was entirely white; in a white house, with white walls and white furniture, and every time blood appeared it was a horribly vivid splash. I woke up several times to find myself alone in bed, but I was too frightened, disoriented, and tired to find out where Poet was.
Everytime I went to sleep my dreams changed slightly, but everyone of them was about a monster or a man trying to hunt me down to torture and kill me. In one dream, there were monsters made of shadows, in another a man who was angry with my father was electrocuting me and strangling me, but no one really knew what he was angry over.

Finally, some time after the sun had risen, I woke up to see that Poet had returned to bed. After that I had one last dream. It was a little better than the previous dreams. I was in Hawaii with some family members. We are heading towards to the beach in a group, and I'm trying to snap pictures of everything in sight, but I'm having a little trouble with my camera and am getting mixed results*, and it frustrates me. As we get nearer to the beach, I realize we are in a tourist van, and an announcer is directing us to look toward the ocean so that we could see the whales. I look at the water and I see that the waves have frozen like a wall, and there are gigantic whales hovering right over crowds of people on the beach.













I start trying to take pictures, but my camera won't work and I can't get a thing. I'm getting increasingly frustrated, and I notice that we're getting awfully close to the water and that the whales are making a lot of noise, and all of a sudden the sea begins to suck us in.

I'm afraid we'll drown but the van fills with water and is tossed on to the crowd.
We scream for people to run as we fall, I see one woman who can't get out of the way in time. Some how I catch her with just the tip of my finger and am able to pull her up and into the van with us just in time.

After the crash, no one is hurt. But I am upset by the even and run off, away from the beach. I meet up up with a friend of mine, and he tells me I'm in danger, that there are dark forces out to get the "other part" of me. I ask him what that means, and he explains to me that we all have three parts: our bodies of which we are aware, and also our souls and minds that walk around outside us everywhere we go.
He explains that a friend of his warned him that demons were out and hunting down my soul, to take it away from me.We decide to find a local voodoo witch to see if she can help us. We drawn a mandala, and she receives us warmly.








She has warm brown skin and lives in a bamboo hutch where she renders her services to the needy.
We also give her a gift of tarot cards, but the dream ends before we are offered a solution by her.















After all that, I wake up feeling pretty shaken. But then Poet tells me that he stayed up all night because he wants to go to bed early tonight to be able to get up tomorrow morning for Thanksgiving with my family, and to be sure to wake him up again so he give me a ride to work.
And then I come into the living room and he's left me a note saying he bought me fancy bagels and brie for breakfast. And he's picking up furniture all by himself today, and he's meeting the repair man to fix the cable today.
If you had asked me how I could feel better, I probably wouldn't have been able to come up with a whole lot, and some how he does just the right thing to make me feel better, and safe, and cared for. For a huge part of my dreams last night I was just running around trying to find someone to help me, it's nice to wake up and know that while you were sleeping some one was up caring about you and coming up with things to make you happy when you wake up.

I'm not happy with this scan at all, it's so grainy and the picture looks so much better in real life, but here it is:Brown color pencil on bristol paper.

A take off on this photo:

The unhappiness with technology aside, I'm very happy
with this piece and I feel like I finished it in good time.

When I usually draw women or girls, I tend to make them quite thin and lithe, probably because of the context of our current mainstream/alternative aesthetics, or perhaps as an act of self-insertion or a symbol of frailty, but probably for all of the above reasons.
When you look at these visions of beauty from the turn of the last century, they tend to be a good deal heavier that most pin-ups and models of our time. When I draw a girl from that era, I try to make her softer and fuller, to do otherwise feels disingenuous. Nonetheless I try to split the difference, use it as a bridge between this time and the past, one aesthetic bleeding in between inspiration and perspective.






This is a lovely movie:


I think I like Charlie Chaplin better behind the camera than in front of it.
What can I say, I'm a lover of Buster Keaton, that's the kind of lovable hard-luck case I fall for.
I still haven't seen the end of this movie, it's hard to make myself, I know it will be so sad!

New and Old Art

This is a quick pen sketch I did a couple weeks ago, however I do not have the means to complete it as I usually would before posting it online. While I wait for a new computer I don't have photoshop to add textures and correct color, I don't even have a scanner to use.
Believe it or not often half the work of using photoshop is to make an image resemble itself on a computer screen as it does in the real world.
In any case, here it is:



































And I'd also like to share an older one that I meant to upload previously but somehow missed:
This one was inspired by an image I found in a book of vintage erotica. I loved the concept of the image but it was done so simplistically for a magazine cover, and I wanted to try and spend a bit of time and detail on it, and do it justice.


I'm really proud of the line work and shading I did on this one. I titled it "Cannelle et Clous de Girofle"
which means "cinnamon and cloves."
I sort of love the somewhat naive concepts about eroticism and exotica that came from that era. Not that eroticism on it's own was a naive concept back then, we have a tendency in these times too look back on earlier times as being closeted and ignorant of sex, eroticism, and perversion. Trust me, they could be quite scandalous, they were human back then too, after all!
But I do love the idea of what at the time was considered "exotic" being automatically erotic, there are so many neat photos of such "naughty" fan girls haha....
Maybe I'll make some more art of that theme.






Here is the original:










































Mata Hari:

Other lovelies. Would we think these women were beautiful if they were walking around today? Probably not, we've learned such a critical eye! We should learn to relax and enjoy beauty out of context the way we do when we're looking at someone from another era.

Around the House

A few photos from my home.
It's still a work in progress, but here's a spot that's photo-worthy.
I'd like to put up more on the sides of the mirror as well.




Most of our walls are waiting for appropriate frames, at which point we have many lovely posters and pictures waiting to go up! When will that be? On Saturday! Our friend works at Michael's and is going to help us to pick some affordable frames. Frames can make a room, it's nice to know we don't have to wait indefinitely to find a reasonable deal that suits our budget.
This is all pretty exciting to me, this is the third place I've lived since I've moved away from home, but it's the first place I've really felt a connection to and that I've considered staying indefinitely. Therefore, decorating and home maintenance has become a constant preoccupation with me.
Also, I bought new "work" shoes yesterday:































Are the days of wearing combat boots everyday at an end? Perhaps. I work someplace quiet fashionable, I like to look at least somewhat professional at work, especially as a supervisor. I hope they are comfortable enough to wear all day! If not, at least I can wear them on the office days. I'm usually a stickler for comfortable shoes, but again...the budget!

A Backlog of Art Part IV

My most recent works!


Again....all sepia, rose tones, and gold, haha! I drew on inspiration from classic illustration, fairytales and mythology, and the antiquarian aesthetic.
At this point, you might begin to notice a repeating theme of dual symbols.
A snake and a peacock, here.

Here, two octopi.

Here, two birds.



Although at the time, the deep significance of such things were only just beginning to become apparent to me, in hindsight it's a clear reflection of a split occurring in my life.































I was moving from one experience to another, one life to another, settling into the realization that there was somewhere else I needed to be, and I found myself caught between two influences.




Now, I feel as though I'm in the right place, with the right person. Life still has so many kinks to work out, but there's nothing that beats that feeling of being on the right path, of making progress toward where you want to be.
I eventually found my way.















This is my most recent piece:
Pencil and gold acrylic paint on vellum tracing paper, layered over burnt butcher paper for texture, with pressed flowers and leaves.






















I'm very happy with how it turned out, although I couldn't show it digitally in a way that does it justice. For instance, I don't have a photo-editing program at my disposal at the moment. But at least you can see the gold!

A Backlog of Art Part III

2008-Present: Getting back to naturalism, texture, mixed media, sepia and GOLD!

This was a commission for an acquaintance, whose girlfriend does tribal fusion dance:


watercolor, pencil, pen, marker, and a little bit of gold leaf paint. You can't see the gold on this at all, this was before I figured out how to make it show up on digital copies of my art, but there's a faint halo and her jewelry is embellished with it.

Sepia pen and marker, also my first successful photoshop-created textured background.

Getting into the archaic, the mysterious, and the vintage. Using motifs inspired by art nouveau and illustrators from the Golden Age of Fairytale illustration such as Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac.











Almost caught up!
So much to share....

A Backlog of Art Part II

Late 2007 to 2008:
I had a definite aquarium phase (can't say I'm out of it, even now!), and a love of negative space.

One of the most valuable things I think I've learned about making my art thus far is the idea that less can be more.















I was so technical, starting out. I had such a Western perspective.



Think of it in terms of what you might see in a Western comic book vs. an Eastern manga: In many Western comics, especially good ones, there's a tendency to have many lines drawn in that show facial expression, muscle tone, etc., while in manga there's a lot of implied fullness and 3-dimensionality without actually filling in planes with excessive lines.








After playing around with both styles I tired to reach a happy medium between the two artistic perspectives.
I also gained an appreciation for pop surrealism and artists like Camille Rose-Garcia.

A Backlog of Art Part I

I'd like to update with some of my art, to give an idea of the sort of thing I like to create!
Let's begin with 2006-2007:
These are the years I really came out of my shell and began to grasp my own style.


This was one of the first I was really happy with, it's never been terribly popular but it holds a lot of personal significance.




Where most of my friends at the time lacked technical skill but had fantastic style and creativity, I had grasp of detail and rendering but I didn't know how to just let an image flow from my hands. I was painfully slow at producing pieces and had a tendency to come up with very contrived themes.



So I'm starting at a point when these limitations really began to right themselves and I truly began to feel happy with what I was producing.

This one in the left was my first really successful piece with any watchers. I still love it dearly, and it's my most consistently used concept to date.





Trying out new styles, textures,
and color combinations....
This is the time when I picked
up my favorite technique: mixed
media. My most often used combinations:
-pen and marker
-water color and pencil
-all of the above!
I usually use bristol or heavy water color paper.
All of the pieces featured here were also produced after a difficult break up, the first hard one of my adult life. I was engaged and my fiance left me.




Ever feel overwhelmed?
This one is the last one of that era of my life. Expressing your experiences through art is sometimes the one thing that can excise the negativity you're going through, and let you move on.
The hardest pain is the kind you can't express the words to explain, and when there's nothing else, there's always art.
Getting better at art allowed me the eloquence I needed to take the next step in life.