Pop Goes the Artist!

Two pieces of good news: one minor but fun, one rather earth-shattering (at least for me).

News item the first: I get to do a painting for credit in the math class I’m taking. We have the option of either taking a quiz or doing a project from the textbook, but since one of the things we recently discussed was the Golden Rectangle, I convinced the professor to let me do a painting incorporating the Golden Rectangle. Waaay more fun than a paper on the Electoral College or Fibonacci numbers or something. I’ll be working on it over Easter Break and will definitely post a picture when I’m done.

News item the second: My art goal for 2006 was to sell at least one piece of artwork and it looks like I may achieve that goal before summer break. Remember the calligraphy piece I donated to my former middle school’s spring fundraiser? Well, someone at the school, who wasn’t at the auction, is interested in purchasing a similar piece (same words, same color scheme, but not identical), matted and framed. I’ve given her a price, so if she thinks it’s fair, then over Easter break I will be working on my first commissioned artwork. It really floors me when I think about it. Amazingly exciting.

At the moment I’m not working on much, although I have a growing list of specific summer projects. I am doing a small (4×5″) pencil drawing of the photo of Cupid & Pysche that I took in Paris, but more as an exercise in value than anything else.

Speaking of summer, I have display space reserved at my local library for the month of July, so once I get home for the summer, I’ll start prepping for that.

I’ll keep y’all posted.

One of the folks at WetCanvas provided a fun link to the Abstract Art Title Generator.  It’s pretty cute, and some of those titles are dead on.  Now, if only titling work were actually this easy.

Woo!  The Hokusai exhibit is on at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in DC, and according to the Washington Post, it’s great.  But it just reminds me how behind I am in gallery visits.  Apart from Cezanne at the NGA and now Hokusai, there’s a Degas, Sickert, & Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit at the Phillips Collection.  There’s also a Picasso exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art that I’d love to see, perhaps over Easter break.

Hi, my name is Claire…and I’m a museum junkie.

I started this painting over Christmas break, but thanks to the joys of living away from home, didn’t get to finish it until this weekend. (However, you might have seen a work in progress photo on the website.) I painted this because I love old Beetles, pure and simple. I used a reference photo someone from WetCanvas gave me, but I just had to change the color from white to powder blue, which is my favorite. I’m reasonably happy with the way this turned out. I didn’t initially like the yellow-orange/powder blue combination, but I think it’s a good fit and they complement each other nicely. I think the composition is a little shaky, but that might just be me. I never know what to do with backgrounds anyway. In real life, by the way, the black in the shadows is actually, well, black. Not sure why that didn’t turn out in the photograph. Glare? (Acrylic on canvas, 20×24″)

I haven’t been doing much in the way of my own artwork lately, but I’ve been lucky enough to get more than my fair share of great art museums in the past week or so. I just got back Saturday night from a trip to Paris, which involved two trips to the Louvre and one to the Musee D’Orsay. Both were, of course, absolutely amazing. D’Orsay was by far my favorite, simply because I’m a huge fan of Impressionism and post-Impressionism, but the Louvre was also great. I got to see the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace (simply put, one of the greatest pieces ever sculpted), the Mona Lisa (of course), two Vermeers, and one of my other favorite sculptures, Cupid & Psyche (detail photo at left). At the moment, I’m working on getting together a Webshots album with all my photos from Paris, nicely sorted by theme (Chartres, Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, amazing artwork, etc). It’s very, very far from complete at the moment, but the link is right here. I’ll try to add more pictures every day.

In other news, I’ll be going home this weekend and I plan to set aside a couple hours to finish up the painting of the old Beetle that I started over Christmas break. I haven’t posted a picture of that here yet, but I will when it’s done–so probably this weekend.

I’m also considering a trip to the National Gallery tomorrow to see the Cezanne exhibit, which is apparently phenomenal. (Wait…it’s Cezanne. Of course it’s great.) My next few weekends are booked solid, but I figure it will probably be less crowded on a weekday anyway. Perhaps I’ll swing by the Dada exhibit too, by means of contrast.