WEEK THREE...DAY TWO

The sweet little redwood sculpture was my first attempt in wood and recently renamed to honor my dog ZABU. I chose to carve a woman's figure because of two precisely positioned knots - which fell out! So my teacher Robert Ortlieb suggested doing innies instead of outties. ZABU was exhibited once at the Palos Verdes Art Center, but I thought she looked a little boring on her return home, so  I pounded her torso with 2 different types of nails. Now she's rockin'.

WEEK THREE...DAY ONE

A SORT OF CAP. Now let's get into the beefy work - sculpture. My love for almost 8 years. This was named after Harry Potter's infamous "sorting cap". I started creating sculpture with stones from the garden during our remodel. This was my third piece. It was my funeral hat - a great black fedora with a great spotted veil. But I decided to retire it, cover it with hundreds of these little stones and attach a bit of black faux fur around the edge.

WEEK TWO...DAY SEVEN

LOUISE NEVELSON

Was born September 1900 in Kiev—died April 1988, New York City. A sculptor known for her large, monochromatic abstract sculptures and environments in wood and other materials.
In 1905 she moved with her family from the Ukraine to Maine. She married and later left her husband and child to pursue her artistic ambitions. Nevelson's first exhibition was held in New York City in 1941. After enduring years of poverty and critical neglect, by the 1950s  she had both developed her mature sculptural style and begun to earn significant critical recognition. She is best-known for works dating from this period; these consist of open-faced wooden boxes that are stacked to make freestanding walls. The boxes and their contents are painted a single colour, usually black.

WEEK TWO...DAY SIX

Fernand Léger was born at Argentan, France, on 4 February 1881. Léger began his career as a an artist by working as a architectural draughtsman.  The first profound influence on Léger's work came from Cézanne. From 1909 Léger himself developed a quirky Cubist style, distinguished by reduction to the simplest basic forms and formal austerity linked with a pure, sharply contrasting palette. As a painter Fernand Léger exerted an enormous influence on the development of Cubism, Constructivism and the modern advertising poster as well as various forms of applied art.

(I'M POSTING THIS TODAY BECAUSE I'M LEAVING ON A ROAD TRIP  TO THE DESERT)

WEEK TWO...DAY FIVE

TAMARA DE LEMPICKA

Now, here's a wonderful story. Born in 1898 in Poland, to an affluent family, Tamara lived with her wealthy grandmother when her parents divorced and was spoiled rotten. She married at 16, moved to Paris and studied art. Left the country as war approached and moved to Beverly Hills and painted portraits of the rich and famous. She may have created the term "casting couch"!

Anyways, this very talented, imaginative, beautiful, powerful woman artist may be leaving the flock soon. Someone is considering purchasing her and giving her a new home.

WEEK TWO...DAY FOUR

ROY LICHTENSTEIN.  I was fortunate to meet Roy when he was painting a mural for the Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills back in 1990. What a delightful person. With a twinkle in his eye! He's the only artist I ever sent fan mail to and he invited me to meet him while on the West Coast. Most of his art was based on cartoons and he was famous for using dots in the background to replicate the strips in newspapers. I keep a postcard from him on my desk.

WEEK THREE...DAY THREE

ALEX KATZ from Brooklyn. Mostly a painter of faces. Keeps it simple. Flat. Reduces to bare necessities. Tries to paint faster than he can think. I can relate to that.

WEEK THREE... DAY TWO

Sunday, we hung 18 of the artists portraits, moving a huge black Asian folding screen into the media room to accommodate the art. It looks wonderful. Now when you walk into the great room, you are immediately greeted with all these fabulous creative faces - it's such an energy boost! 

Poor Vincent. He died from a self-inflicted gun shot wound because he felt like a total failure. Finishing his story last night was so depressing....it put me into a little funk. So I picked up a book on Frank Stella, an elitist Princeton graduate who started with extremely simple geometric abstractions executed in a large scale. The work I really love, are his huge 3D paintings, first begun in the 1970s and created with fiberglass, etched magnesium and aluminum, sheet steel, and canvas. He said he needed something he felt worthy painting on. And he was lucky to have the gift of structure so he constructed paintings, exploited something that  modernism had not experienced - picture building. These sculptural masterpieces are something to embrace if you have not had the opportunity. But they are paintings, never the less.

WEEK THREE...DAY ONE

This week I will feature the Artists' Portraits series, starting with the one and only VINCENT VAN GOGH. These works resemble the artist and are created in their trademark techniques. I was fortunate to see the original self portrait in Vincent's very own museum in Amsterdam on my honeymoon. It brought tears to my eyes. His mental stability wavered towards the end (the book I'm currently reading suggests some form of epilepsy) yet I've never experienced more raw, heart rendering emotion painted into a canvas other than the works of Edvard Munch. This artwork returned home yesterday after spending 6 months in Lotus Post in Santa Monica. I really tried to capture his brush strokes with hundreds of tiny strips of canson paper.

WEEK TWO...DAY SEVEN

WRATH.  This 5 letter word certainly holds a lot of power. Our entire world seems permeated with a madness, a vengeful anger, a deep fury of unbridled outrage. The political and economic systems seeth with injustices and corruption. Our "entertainment" thrives on violence. Catastrophes are glorified. Chaos rules. This is the last of the Seven Deadly Sins. I really wish it's days were numbered. Unfortunately, there is no end in site.... 

WEEK TWO...DAY SIX

SLOTH. When I was working on this, I read an article about a forensic school in the south where bodies in various states of decay were studied. It sort of set the tone.....This is my brother's favorite piece in this series.

WEEK TWO...DAY FIVE

PRIDE. A little goes a long way. Too much...well then it becomes me me me me narcissistic me smothered in egocentric, ostentatious navel-gazing. Let us bring some modesty and humility to this conceit, and produce a healthy balance of self respect and self esteem. That being said, this is another favorite. I love the amoeba bubbles resembling oil shining in the sunlight after rain. Again, there's a nod to Mr. Baldessari. And a great "art crossing" sign that obviously upset some narrow minded, stuck in the muck neanderthal with its mind expanding, consciousness raising, all inclusive implications.

WEEK TWO...DAY FOUR

I love  LUST...who doesn't! This was actually the first in this Sins series. Everyone loves this sin. It's a wonderful, enthusiastic composite of pleasurable little bits. There's a photo from my very first trip to Hamburg of graffiti that appears in a recent painting, too. There's a voluptuous kitschy icon from a John Waters film. Some voyeurism. Uxorious - a great new word from Elizabeth Gilbert's new book Committed meaning excessively fond or submissive to a wife (lovely fantasy). Handcuffs. A delightful woven little love mat. A white Chanel timepiece - now that's sexy! And I read earlier today in Salon about the history of kissing evoking "genital echoes" and producing oxytocin (social bonding and attraction), dopamine (craving and longing) and serotonin (obsessive feelings) similar to the high of cocaine. Red lipstick rules! So start you day with that.

WEEK TWO...DAY THREE

I loved today's headline: 7 top Billionaires! You too could be on this list. My favorite was J.K. Rowling...a single mom touching lives thru magic. How inspirational. That insatiable desire brings us to GREED. If your desires get a bit too selfsih and excessive, with a bit of a nasty spin to it, this is where you'll be. The nouveau riche who think having money entitles them to be rude and arrogant. What part of snob is not vulgar? Go for the abundance without the phoney attitude.

WEEK TWO...DAY TWO

GLUTTONY, OUCH!  Who has not been touched by this sin? Humans are so indulgent by nature. We are so greedy in our consumption of everything. The obesity rate is out of control. One out of three kids is fat!
Diabetes has gone thru the roof. But at least, Bob Yassin, the executive director of the Palos Verdes Art Center, stated the size of the collage was at least smaller then LUST (coming soon)! So perhaps there is hope for us yet. I did have a great time creating this - filling it with bulbous bodies, elephants, yummy calorie rich sundaes, and the Spanish word for more. Only one face managed to zip it shut and control the intake. Plus I paid homage to one of my favorite conceptual artist John Baldessari - I'm crazy about his latest work.
Lesson learned: More really is more.

WEEK TWO...DAY ONE

This week THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS will be featured, my most recent collage series. And the first in line (alphabetically) is ENVY.  That painful or resentful awareness that flashes those jealous green eyes. Could get you stabbed in the back! This has only one photographic element and all the other items are taken from a variety of collages created over the years. Repurpose!

WEEK ONE...DAY SEVEN

We made it thru week one! I only lost one entry. Spell check doesn't catch all errors (but let's not sweat the small stuff.) And I'm loving this. My creative juices are stimulated, I love the focus and it's becoming a wonderful forum in a newly forming art community.

My gorgeous friend Adrienne Short sent me this collection of  National Geographic's Photography Contest 2010 - The Big Picture http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/11/national_geographics_photograp.html?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed5. ...that I just had to share.

And here's the final image for the First Blog Week. The last of the Kid's art and the perfect introduction to our exciting, limitless possibility crammed year of 2011. Picasso once said it takes a lifetime to be a child again. Always strive to be a kid at heart...I swear it's a wonderful wrinkle reducer! There are two little images in this BEE SEEING YOU that are near and dear: the little bee costumes are a reminder of my first starring role - the second lead in a elementary school production where I played Baby Bee (my 3 year older sister Linda was the Queen.) I sang and danced myself into a precious memory of shellacked brown paper bag wings and  black tights that weren't quite long enough for my already spindly legs. And that black cat clock wagged its tail, eyes scanning side to side on our kitchen wall, as my childhood marched along. Being 8 was a very good year.

WEEK ONE...DAY SIX

Thankyou to my three followers! A representative of the Palos Verdes Art Center was here this morning - Kristina Mermelstein - wanting me to make a submission for the Art At Your Fingertips program for the 2011-2012 scool calendar. If my concept is selected, I will teach two workshops to the art docents who in turn would bring the project to 6000 students. At the moment, I'm considering Guiseppe Arcimboldo, an Italian artist born in 1572 who painted portraits using  a combination of fruits and vegetables. I'd adapt it to a collage with magazine images as the paper source. How much fun could that be?
Today's collage is SAINT BARBIE, one in the only triptyck in this EYE collection. Plus, the only 3 pieces where a friend  - Mick DiMaria - was so excited about the series, he donated some images to the project. I later honored him by creating his portrait (you'll see that soon). Each piece works on its own and also fit together as a puzzle. Jesus is the centerpiece and I mean no disrespect to The Guy but the triptych has some subtle S & M undertones. This one includes one of my favorites black and white collages from the 80's called THREE BABES. I liked how the briars in the background complimented the crown of thorns. And we all worship one thing or another during our lives, sometimes just as a passing fancy or it becomes a permanent part of the fabric of our discipline.

WEEK ONE...DAY FIVE

I'm exhausted today. Sleeping was not a good thing last night. I spent hours on the computer cleaning up art in Photoshop and went to The Palos Verdes Art Center to attend a memorial for our wonderful custodian Bruce. Two older women are mourning the deaths of their spouses and a shining angel from my past is in hospice. I'm reading Committed by Elisabeth Gilbert. There was a very tender entry last night about her remembering her grandfather burying her grandmother's ashes on the family farm. You have someone for a little while, and then that person is gone. So it will come to pass for all of us. We all share our homes with Time, who ticks alongside us, reminding us of our ultimate destination. So let us cherish the ones we love a little bit extra today. Let's be a little kinder in word and deed.
This is BEACH BABY:  the innocent new life filled with wonder, embracing all that is without judgement.
The world is limitless and brimming with possibility. Be here now.

WEEK ONE...DAY FOUR

I had a dream last night....I met a woman who was having her own exhibition in a museum. Her work was very similar and she had just purchased a $12 million home on Emerald (my favorite stone). Her motto: Don't give up!
HARVEY AND NORM is named after my goldfish. They were purchased when I moved back to West Hollywood to Feng Shui the smallest apartment ever. They started life in a bowl near the front entrance (left  side of course) and they would float up to the surface and let me pat their heads! They were named after my parking spirits. Norm was introduced to me when I first arrived from New York City. I was attending a metaphysical lecture by Rosalyn Bruyere in Pasadena where I was informed that this entity named Norm would secured parking places. Oh no, they warned me about these Californians back in the Big Apple. Yet shortly afterwards I was in Beverly Hills, driving around, minutes away from my appointment, and asked Norm for help. A car pulled out in front of me with money still left in the meter! The magic worked! I became a believer! (Dad was an amateur magician so I was pre-disposed). A short time later, I watched Jimmy Stewart in Harvey, had always thought everyone should have a partner, introduced the two, and they've been buddies ever since. The fish thrived 4 years, moved into a huge luxury tank, and once Randy came into my life, they felt they could safely entrust me into his care, passing on to continue working on the spirit level. As you will discover, everything that happens to me eventually becomes a work of art. One of the very first animal portraits I created is in the background, too. That became a very lucrative sideline which led to numerous magazine articles and selling in a number of Dog and Cat stores across the United States. But that's another story....

WEEK ONE...DAY THREE

Arrrrrgh! I was almost completed with today's entry...then lost it! So I took The Dogs (Bentley and Zabu) out for a quick 20 minute walk and I'm back again, refreshed and invigorated.
So let's start again. Today's art is REPRODUCTION.  This is a beginning and it all begins with an egg and the sperm. May this be the gestation and formation of a great new life form. Yesterday, I forgot to mention the Stieg Larsson trilogy I also devoured recently: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I found them entertaining and informative: the main character genius computer hacker taught me to never sign any petitions or press "like" on the computer!
So this blogging is already having an impact on me. I feel very creative and focused. I did retire from my 3D Art group today. It just wasn't exciting to show up anymore. I've completed photographing and retouching all the EYE SERIES. My computer designer Todd Richardson is updating my web page. And maybe I can get Randy to help me burn the discs later to send to galleries.

WEEK ONE...DAY TWO

It may take me a while to figure how this system works. My original idea was to post 7 images for the week with a dialogue about each piece, but on this blog template it seems as if I can only download one at a time. So here is Art Collage Number Two WEALTH,  still in the Eye Series (as will continue this week). Not only did I prepare lentils for New Year's as is a traditonal Italian custom to ensure wealth and prosperity for the coming year, I thought it only appropriate to start this new blog with symbols of success and adundance. This one even has real money in it.
So what was the impetus behind this blogging desire? It may be that I've been afflicated with a lingering cold since Christmas Eve, which has forced me to bed and increased the amount of reading and TV watching above normal. The Tiger by John Vaillant was an amzing true story of a tiger and the history of Russia. Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden was a dark humor written by Cornelius Vanderbilt's great great great grandaughter explaining how 167 billion dollars can trickle down thru the ages annihilating every successive generation. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell a somewhat informative theory on how things "stick" and become trends, or the effectiveness of word of mouth. The movie Julie and Julia which I had seen before and only watched the last half but was reminded how her blog and cooking and having some continuity in life could be beneficial. But I think the biggest influence has to be Van Gogh's Van Goghs a beautiful photo book I bought in Amsterdam in his museum on my honeymoon  8 years ago. If Vincent's sister-in-law didn't take up the torch left by his brother Theo was passed a mere 6 months after Vincent's death - the world would never know of the existence of this talented if not tormented soul. So the truth is.....I'm lookimng for my Johanna.

WEEK ONE

 To start this great new year I've decided to blog about my creative life. Every week I'll post some art and talk about it and anything else that seems relevant.  So let's begin with MONEY. This is an ungoing series I began in 1998. A woman I know in Los Angeles needed some small artwork to decorate TV and movie sets. It started with faces (one of my passions) and sport related works and then became "anything and everything with glasses". Why not...they are the perfect accessory. So 105 pieces later.....