Claude Smith, Education Coordinator of 516ARTS, was nice enough to do a studio visit and interview with me recently, as part of an ongoing series of such visits on 516's blog.

 photo by Claude Smith

I've really been enjoying reading these interviews, even prior to my own fifteen minutes of fame, and am happy to be in excellent company--check them all out if you get a minute!

I'm working on painting enlarged versions of two of the tiny pieces I sent to Australia, Stalk and Invasive. They sold quickly, which was awesome, but meant I didn't have time to get tired of having them around.

Invasive, 6"x9"

 Stalk, 6"x9"

Before I spend a month executing each piece, I wanted to make sure I was going to be pleased with the impact of the final size--I also wanted to take a stab at working out color formulas. Both purposes were served by making a to-scale, brushy draft, which I did for both pieces.
 

I've gotten a good start these last couple of weeks on the large final version of Stalk. The piece is staged on the banks of Rotten Lake, at the Calperum Research Station in NSW. While there's a large figure dominating the scene, the real protagonists of this piece, I think, are the plants. So I'm invested in infusing the landscape with life and energy. Below are a few details of its development. Following the images, I've transcribed a brief passage from the AU field studies journal describing my first impressions of the site.

 

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The dry, good-natured station ranger (“yeah, these types like Rotten Lake, it’s artsy-fartsy”), led the caravan, while Jn followed in the second vehicle. We blazed down the packed dirt road away from Renmark, took a right down a softer dirt road, stopped to open a gate, then screamed back into full throttle again.

“All these guys drive like a bat out of hell,” Jn said, and I grinned and took note; coming from Jn that was something.

We zigzagged and backtracked for miles down seemingly identical dirt tracks until I was well and truly disoriented, and then we left anything I would have called a road at all—though occasionally it was discernible that there were two parallel paths that wheels had caused at one point—and mowed over bushes, grasses, even small trees taller than the vehicles. It was easy to lose sight of Gt only twenty feet ahead, but not hard to follow him by the thrashed branches. At last we came to a meadow, where the growth—mainly the purple-flowered succulents I’d noticed before—was low enough that we once again were able to pick up speed, and both vehicles flew in a straight line towards the lake, not even pretending to follow any semblance of a route at this point. I could hear Fk laughing and gasping from the front seat: “I thought we were supposed to care for the environment.”

We pulled up alongside each other and, like the plant life, stopped short on the edge of blindingly bright salt/sand. The lake—such as it was, low and stranded in the middle of the drying bed—spread before us in the late afternoon light, reflecting the changing colors of the sky, dramatic white clouds, and a rainbow completed the scene. Very pretty, truly. Rotten seemed an unfair name.

It was incredibly photogenic, and I went wandering and snapping, picking around the mummified bodies of scorpions and tiny frogs. First I tried to walk across the lake bed towards the water—but had only gone four or five steps in before my boots were sunk up to the laces. The tracks I left behind were dramatic, a centimeter of white crust giving way to black muck with each step. I began to understand...

Egg tempera!

(photo reference on left)

There's a lot to learn as I go. I think I know how to start the next one so it won't result in the blotchiness that's visible in the sky at this point. It's proving to be a very enjoyable medium so far...all these myriad little glazes. Very meditative.

So, having finished up my time at UNM, I had to clear out my studio in the Annex in December. I had accumulated pretty impressive masses of stuff in there, but thanks largely to friends who agreed to house the majority of the furniture, it's been a surprisingly easy transition from roomy-campus-studio to tiny-apartment-studio.

Now, I have two small niches from which to work at home. One:

Can you see the massive old packer trunk filling the space under the drafting table? It contains all of the paintings, organized and taped up in bubble wrap. The table's oversized drawer holds all of the works on paper--Tamarind lithographs and the like.

But most of the serious work happens here:

(In this portion of the post, the part of Cedra will be played by a small dog)

It helps that the work is small--these spaces suit my needs pretty effectively for the time being.

I don't know if I've mentioned this here before, but I have the world's most beautiful studio. No, I really do.

(This photo and the next courtesy of Tim Tracz)

And I got a chance to show it off a bit last night at our Open Studios event!

I love my space, and I like seeing other peoples' spaces, too, so Open Studios is pretty much my favorite campus event of the year.

Here's my friend Leslie Ayers and some of her work:

...my friend Julia Blitch and some of her work (and her incomprehensibly adorable mutt Pikah):

...and my friend Luanne Redeye and some of her work:

(Is that painting just incredible, or what? The answer is yes. It is incredible. The shifty camera doesn't do it justice--hopefully anyone in the area will go see it in person when she has her thesis show this spring.)

So many beautiful, strange work spaces and so many cool, weird, nice artists. Can't wait for next year!