A Second Exhibition: Earth, Moon, and Mars Paintings

I've been incredibly busy this past month getting ready for my Mid-Candidature Review, which I passed on Thursday. (This wasn't helped by me coming down with a moderate case of the flu last week.) All of which meant that I didn't really mention here the exhibition I had some paintings in as part of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landings, which was partly because I never even got to visit the gallery and see everything in person. (And yes, this means I'm now a twice-exhibited artist! Maybe I should add that to my résumé…)

Thankfully, my friend James at Swinburne visited and took some pictures for me, so you all get to see them after all. (All these pictures are courtesy of him; you can check out his website here.)

“Main Sequence”

The first one is one you've seen before, my series of stars on the main sequence. Here, though, they're arranged similarly to how they would be located on a Hertzprung-Russel diagram, from which the main sequence was first identified. This is how I'd always envisioned hanging them if I got the chance, so it was pretty cool to see.

“Tenuous Transport.” Individual panels 40×40 cm, or 40x80 cm. Acrylic, embroidery on canvas.

Now, this is an interesting one. It's a four-panel work (or tetraptych), of which I've posted the Moon painting before. The rest are new, however, and they're not all mine! This piece is a collaboration with another Swinburne student, Grace, who embroidered the outline of the Eagle (the Apollo 11 lander) on the second panel from the right. I had originally envisioned this piece as a single new panel, but while discussing it with everyone at one of our art workshops the topic of making it a multi-part collaborative effort came up, and since I already had the Moon painting it was a simple matter to paint a matching Earth painting to go with it. (Plus a few stars on a blank panel.) Grace meanwhile stitched the outline of the Eagle onto another canvas. The stitching and outline gave it a very fragile feeling, which led us to give the piece the name “Tenuous Transport” in recognition of the sheer fragility of the craft which carried the first humans to the Moon, and just how dangerous the journey was. (You definitely can't see it at this scale, but Grace also subtly highlighted some of the edges in the Moon in thread, making it an interesting mixed-media collaborative piece.)

Since it's probably not obvious at this size, the Earth painting is mostly looking at the Pacific Ocean; you can see Australia at the lower left, and the western coasts of North and South America on the right, but it's mostly water and clouds. Also now that I have it back I may go and touch up the shape of the terminator on the Earth a bit, as it doesn't quite match the Moon and it's been bugging me for a while.

“Vallis Marineris Afternoon Overlook.” 8×10 inches, acrylic on canvas.

And finally, here's a little piece I did unrelated to the Moon; instead, it's a view out over the colossal canyon Vallis Marineris on Mars. At least, that's what I intended, it never quite came together with the right perspective in my eyes, but at least the pink sky is really attractive. Much of the red color in this painting comes from iron oxide pigment, which is interesting because A) it's one of the first pigments people ever used for painting, as seen in cave paintings, and B) it's the reason for Mars' red color in the first place: iron oxide is rust. While I wouldn't call this one of my better works, it was still pretty fun to play around with some new colors I haven't really used before.

Anyway, those are some of the paintings I spent most of May, June, and the first half of July working on. Now that I've passed my Mid-Candidature Review I'm taking the next week off, which will hopefully allow me to get a lot of work done on the ones I've been working on since. A hui hou!

Changing Food Preferences: Celery

I've been home sick the past few days (with what I thought was a bad cold, and in retrospect may have been a comparatively mild flu; I'm almost over it now, however), and, among the other illness-addled thoughts in my brain over that span, I got to thinking about how my views on celery have changed over time.

Well, somewhat: I never liked raw celery as a kid, and I still don't. It has never seemed at all appealing to me, even with something on it. What I've discovered in the past few months, however, is that I really like celery stewed, or fried, or cooked in any way—in fact, I absolutely love it, to the point where I've been buying more and more celery lately and using it in more and more dishes. It's hard to say if I've always felt like this and just didn't know it (it's possible I just didn't recognize cooked celery in dishes as a kid), or if it's an actual change from growing up.

Whatever the case, I've started making more meals at home and bringing lunch in over the past two months, as I think I've finally gotten a bit sick of eating out so often during the week. This, of course, has led to lots of opportunities to experiment with celery, so I'm pretty happy with it. Who knows what other foods remain out there that I might like now? Exciting possibilities! A hui hou!

A Frozen Wave, in Paint

I don't remember if I've mentioned it here before, but several months ago I decided to try an experiment with paint. After being inspired by the three-dimensional texture available with acrylic, I decided to experiment with taking it to the next level and creating an actual sculpture out of paint. I had ocean waves on the brain, so I thought I'd try to make one out of successive applications of thick, heavy-body gloss gel (mixed with a tiny smidgen of phthalo turquoise to provide some translucent color). Due to the thickness of the paint I had to wait several days between successive applications of paint (so it took quite a while to build up), but as of a few weeks ago I think I'm satisfied with it.

Unfortunately, I seem to have created a shape that just doesn't make for a good photo from any angle. It's roughly the shape of a cresting ocean wave, but I couldn't seem to find an angle that actually showed it off well while taking pictures. So instead you get three photos from different angles to hopefully give you some idea of how it looks.

Here it is from the front…

…and here it is from the back…

…here it is from the side…

…and here is…a preview of my upcoming painting! (And a fairly small part of it, too!) I'm quite fond of how this turtle came out, so I wanted to show it off a little early. I think the rest of the painting is nearly done; just some last few details and fixes I've been wanting to do for a while. I might add a shark, as well, but we'll see how I feel about it when the time comes. Hopefully I'll be able to show it off before too much longer. A hui hou!