Here's the beginning of the big shift. I worked a couple Saturdays this February at a gallery in Brooklyn that had an exhibition of big name graffiti artists. After spending the day staring at a group of paintings by Ewok (www.mr-ewokone.com - check him out) I did this painting. It wasn't so much the subjects in his work but their expressions, and what I found most impressive about them were their eyeballs. So I stole them.

After a few more experiments, and giving into the urge to just go ahead a paint an angel, I arrived at this smooth, matte, non-speckled surface. I was back to the original two color sections with a thin third color edge that I had used nearly ten years ago when this Archetypal Angels series began. Next post, a big breakthrough; or at least that's the way I see it.

Companion of sorts to yesterday's post, same high metallic background, with a matte acrylic angel. No stippling or spots. Not loving it yet but getting there. Heading for the next phase, still in transition. What I was most interested in was abstracting the shape. There was a mirror image of this in different colors that didn't make the cut, it got a couple thick coats of gesso and eventually a whole other brand new painting.

So after 3 1/2 years at the Soho gallery, I was fired when my boss read my personal gmail account and found emails between me and a gallery on Cape Cod that was thinking about eventually hiring me. I'd gone there regularly to visit friends and thought I'd like to end up there at some point. The Cape job had fallen through months before but I kept the emails just in case, so the whole episode was upsetting. It took a few weeks to pick up a brush, I was more focused on writing, and while I didn't like my first couple of attempts, I thought this was interesting.

One last mask, also metallic, I think it will lead into the next group of images nicely. As some of you know by following my photo blog, I've started a new job at a gallery in Chelsea after not working for longer than I care to admit. Oddly enough, timing wise, what kept me from painting during the 3 plus years I was at the Soho gallery is in play again. So here I am writing about that time while moving into a new phase of it. This summer I did 20 some paintings, wrote a 250 page memoir, read I don't know how many books and watched countless films on Netflix, as well as starting 2 blogs that I'm now struggling to keep up with. I will though, maybe not every day, but I'm not done yet.

Remember the sketch from the Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum from a couple of days ago? Here's an armature I built but never finished which was based on that drawing. Everything but the tape holding it together is recycled, including the styrofoam trays which would have been the foundation for the wings. The brown circle is a cap off a vitamin jar that is where the mouth was meant to go as the rest of the face filled out. No eyes as of yet, but I believe he's already singing.

And here's another flat mask painting, it preceded the 3-D one from yesterday. I fiddled around with ideas but basically I was very invested in my job. And since I was meeting celebrities like Ronnie Wood and Ringo Starr and, oh yeah, Bill Clinton there, who can really blame me?

Although I didn't do much painting while at the Soho gallery, and I was enthralled with my new camera, I found time to make a few 3-D masks. This copper one was in several shows and now resides in Brooklyn.

One of the  interesting things about the job at the Soho gallery was the art we carried. We had these incredible prints from Basquiat paintings that sold like hot cakes. There was one titled Cabesa that I was in love with, and it's a good thing they were too expensive or I'd have it hanging on my wall right now. These drawings were done at the Brooklyn Museum exhibit of his work, does anything look familiar? Haven't put breasts on my angels yet, but the figure to the left could be one of mine. 

This is the last of the series of the Egg Tempera angels, done right before I started the job at the Soho gallery. Still part of the Bonticou suite, and the mirror image of the silver and copper angel from April 10th. This new job, which I did five days a week along with a few months of Sundays at the jewelry boutique both at the the store and the Grand Central Mother's Day fair, kept me busy. I discovered I'm really good at selling art, but for some reason I can't sell it and make it at the same time. Most of my creative energy, at least for a while, went into fixing up my house with my new found money, and then I bought a camera which lead to the images on my other blog, Maureen Donegal.

Back to the paintings and time line. By January of 2005, I was no longer at the art supply store, thank you, and had lost my beloved jade necklace, boo hiss, and the world was reeling from the magnitude of the tsunami that had just decimated Indonesia. I still had my weekends at the gallery in Tribeca and found a day or two a week working for a couple of designers, but I was seriously thinking I needed to get out of New York. It's really a young, or rich, person's town and I'm neither. I focused on Cape Cod, I have friends there, and was in negotiations with a few people about jobs there when, on my, dare I say it, 55th birthday, I found one at an art gallery around the corner from my house in Soho. 

One last collage from the torn paper background period when I made a little pocket money doing greeting cards at Kate's Paperie. Definitely not an angel, this was a prototype for a Father's Day card; that's my dad bringing me home from the hospital. His hair should give you a clue as to my age. There are Mother's Day images too, but this one was handy.

Coming full circle, the last of these early collages has the same angel in it from the Christmas card I posted last Saturday that started this group. Ozark dogwoods in front and Gibraltar in the background instead of a lotus and Ios. Makes me want to pull out those scissors and glue again.  

I thought I didn't do angels during this period, but here's a collage with two of them. Both are from Tarot cards, Temperance and Judgement, and each was part of a different collage in the 9/11 series. That's an ancient postcard from China in the background with the bigger angel walking through Ozark dogwoods. He held a corizon heart in the 9/11 piece while wandering through a maze of remembrance candle shrines.

A couple more from the original Madonna series, these two figures are the same characters in the Annunciation over Manhattan collage from a few days ago. That's Los Angeles in the forties with a volcano erupting in the background, and the German cathedral is in Mainz, where my family lived when my mother died, with Mormon temple in Salt Lake City behind the adoring Madonna.

Another Madonna, Our Lady of the Canyon; I believe those are some Flapper Era tourists at Pike's Peak. The sky background is my own photograph. Again, the whole image is collaged on metallic tissue paper shapes which reflect what I was doing in my abstract paintings at that time. If you scroll back to the photo of my angel costume on March 7th, you'll see I used the same technique to make those gorgeous wings.

Our Lady of the Harbor, is probably my favorite Madonna. Circa 1995, the sources, as are those for most of the series, are primarily from a shoe box of vintage postcards I found in an abandoned farmhouse in the Ozarks back in my hippie period in the early 70's. All of the cards were addressed to the same woman and came from places as far away as India and China. A sailor nephew, I think, as well as other family members. The oldest postmarks precede the First World War, and the correspondence ends during the Eisenhower era. The abstract shapes are meant to suggest Medieval parchments and tanned animal hides.

Here's the other Christmas collage, certainly not appropriate for holiday cheer, although that is a Madonna and Angel worrying over Manhattan in the middle of some astronomy chaos. And so they should. The first collages, done before I started the Angel series, were mostly Madonnas as well. That series began by accident; I made Valentine samples for my Crafts department at Kate's Paperie using antique Tarot cards, ribbon and rubber stamps. The samples sold right off the display, pinholes and all, and the manager sent me home with supplies to make more of them. Had a little factory going on, and the Madonnas evolved out of that. I should dig them out to scan for you, some of them are quite beautiful.

For Christmas, while I was still at the art supply store job, I made this collage which I laser copied and printed out to cut and paste as holiday cards. An angel, of course, with a lotus and Ios, one of Jupiter's moons; more hopeful than I was feeling. There was a second one, I'll show it to you tomorrow, that was probably the better piece artistically, but it was certainly not appropriate for seasonal greetings. You'll see what I mean.

Right before I left the art supply store with my tiny Ganesh pendant, the tsunami hit. A new word for our vocabulary, the constant onslaught of images. The one of a man on the beach watching, dumbstruck, as an enormous wave roared toward him, got me every time. What, do you suppose, he was thinking? This metallic painting, Pearlie, both Lee Bontecou and tsunami related, was done soon after while I was only working weekends at the Tribeca gallery and had time to paint again.

While I was at the art supply store, which was a horrible situation because I had an undefined job in the office with a boss who out sick a lot so the manager made me do things I wasn't trained for and I just winged it most of the time, I was too stressed out to really create. I did repeat a few of the mask images in the metallic paint I was using; you may recognize Cookie, from my very first posting which sold at the Richmond exhibit and I hadn't really wanted to sell it. Those were a rough couple of months, they let me go at Christmas, but I still had my weekends at the Tribeca gallery. The week before, somewhere between my house and the office, I lost my beloved jade necklace which I'd worn almost daily for 25 years. I'd gotten it in Mexico on vacation with a man I adored who'd died, and I grieved over that necklace as if it had been alive as well. After a few days of retracing my steps and hoping who ever had found it loved it as much as I had, I bought a tiny gold Ganesh pendant and knew my life was about to change. Then they fired me.

Okay, back to the paintings; this is Racine, the first influenced by the Bontecou exhibit. I refer you to the ceramic figures in yesterday's post. Hard to shoot because it's highly metallic, that blue is actually pretty uniform. It was done during the third anniversary of 9/11 when I helped the fireman on duty ring the church bell across from Ground Zero. Right afterwards, I got a full time job at an art supply store, but continued to work the weekends at the gallery in Tribeca. I was quite the busy girl. 

So, after my posting about Lee Bontecou this morning, I decided to put in this addendum too. Instead of using my drawings, I thought I'd just scan in these images from the museum brochure. If you Google her, you'll see the work she is most famous for, but these two images include some of my favorite pieces; the big untitled bird sculpture and those little ceramic figures on the shelves. Take a close look at the cluster above the text and the odd pair directly above them as well. See anything familiar in there?

The Lee Bontecou exhibit impacted me almost as much as the Smithsonian internship did; I have drawings from it, perhaps I'll show a few tomorrow if I can decide which ones to use. I almost bought the catalogue there, but I would have had to use that week's lunch money. I was still scrambling, at the Tribeca gallery mainly, but the entry fee was totally worth it. Every piece spoke to me, I walked the exhibit three times. What I got most from it, what I basically stole, were the rimmed but hollowed out mouths and the mismatched eyes. One concave socket with a rounded internal orb, the other eye smaller but raised; which these close-ups of the Sparky and Puddin' sculptures show. It took a while for it to translate into the paintings; and yes, I eventually did get to buy that fabulous catalogue.

This is Puddin', don't know why, front and back. perhaps the most ambitious of the papier-mache sculptures, he is certainly, at 2 feet high as well as across, the biggest. He's companion to Sparky, who I posted February 19th. I did them after seeing a mind-boggling Lee Bontecou exhibit at MOMA when it was in Queens. Did a lot of sketches when I was there, gave me lots of ideas about eyeballs, among other things. 

Another mask, gouache this time, I actually made a version of it that wraps around my face. This was in both of my solo exhibits; and later, in a show I had in an Off-Off-Off Broadway theater lobby. I like his little down-turned mouth, his look of vulnerability instead of howling.

So here's Lancelot, with his broken leg. There was a string running through his back to hang from, but that snapped and gave me a valuable lesson about how fragility of papier-mache. Then another sculpture was also damaged, which made me rethink the process. Now I make a foundation with empty water bottles and old bubble-wrap; and since I cover the armature with newspaper, there's something nice about how much of my material is recycled. I remember that when I was shaping Lancelot's face, I was watching Hugh Jackman singing the role of Curly in a London production of Oklahoma; do you see any connection?

Lorelei, hard to photograph for some reason, maybe too metallic, was done right before I left for the Richmond exhibit. I thought about taking her and her companion, Lancelot, but I decided they were too fragile for travel. I did put them in the smaller solo show I had in New York when the artwork came back in July. Lancelot fell off the wall after that show and snapped off his leg, but maybe I'll shoot his  fabulous face for you. 

Another post-Smithsonian mask, it's actually coppery, although I like the way the photograph of it looks like leather. Too literal for the angel collection, I did not include it my solo exhibit, it still has that archetypal connection since the buffalo was, is, sacred to the Southwest tribes.

Silver Cloud, which I use as my blogger ID, was done during the build up to my solo exhibit in May. The exhibit took place in Artspace, a very interesting gallery in Richmond, where I went to college. The event was all-consuming; even when I was at my part-time jobs, I was thinking about the floor plan the gallery sent me. By the time I shipped the art, I knew exactly, to the inch, how it would hang. I even packed it in order so when I opened the boxes, I didn't have to think about what to do.