Junior Projects Showcase

First of all, it is Wednesday.
I have done NOTHING on those dance paintings except be very stressed and not know what to do.

ALSO I have a time crunch with them because next week is Regents week and apparently there is no more normal school after Tuesday.Even though the last day of school is Monday June 27.

So really I need to get 7 paintings ready by tomorrow night to deliver to school on Friday, if I want people to actually see them.

But tonight Daya has her Junior Dance project showcase.  It is the first time LaGuardia dance majors perform at the school.  They have to take a choreography class. They work in small groups and choreograph their own dances.  Daya's was of course awesome.  I took pics the first show and a video the second show.  Here are the pictures...she doesnt like any of them.

Also, she is wearing my yoga pants!

My friend Sharon came to the second show.  Her daughter just got accepted into LaGuardia!

Everyone was supposed to clear out but I didnt want to go outside and do nothing. I went up to the mezzanine to look at the art show. Some of it was pretty great!

I did have to hide from security but it wasn't very difficult.

Sunday Exhaustion

Today I am dance-showed out.
I'm just not up for a third show today.

Also, I have no idea what else I can do live.
The backgrounds are blocked in, I already did figure drawing, and I don't know what else to do.
I don't know how to make these paintings actually be paintings, but it has to be addressed in-studio.

Thor texted me and asked if I wanted to paint on 5th ave.  I said yes.
There are parades today and it took forever to get there.

I started a painting but didn't finish.  It's ok. I'm really really tired today. I should have stayed home.

Dance Shows and Paint- Fri and Sat

In the last dance parent association meeting, I was invited to paint at the senior dance concert.

I have been stressing about it, figuring out how to do it.
I have no idea how to approach this.
While I wanted to work in pastels, I thought gouache would be better.

Also, Daya had performances at Manhattan Youth Ballet from Thursday thru Sunday.

Friday Evening I went to the Senior Dance concert.
Originally they had chairs for me at the front, but I have a light on my box o I had to move to the very back, which was absolutely MUCH better.

I used gouache and did some backgrounds and everything looked really stupid.
It was a gear and space experiment, and also while I have painted at live music performances before (they stay till) and also I have painted moving dancers before, I have never painted a dance performance and it's basically impossible.

I think I looked really stupid in public but it's one of those things that I can't care what people think.

Basically I tried to do/plan one painting for each dance, 7 in all.
At the end of the show I had a bunch of looked-like-nothing-but failures-5x7 boards with some colors on them.

I *really* wanted to figure out how to make this successful and not a face-plonk embarrassment.
And Friday night I really felt stressed and also like artistic crap.
Because I had no idea how to handle this situation but I wanted to, very much.
And also I still had thoughts of pastels and pan pastels in my head.

I did not sleep well. Like at all.

The show was livestreamed Friday night And I kept it on my ipad to use as a bit of reference from the backgrounds I chose and started with at the live show.

On Saturday morning I organized all the panels and did a little touch-up with panpastels over the gouache on a few of them. I also reconfigured my gear and packed panpastels instead of gouache.
And i packed a little sketchbook to do some figure drawing to get a feel of the live dancers to try and get some of that movement into the studio paintings.  And also because I didn't know what else to do.

I did have the luxury of the livestream to make decisions on the figure compositions.  It absolutely had to be a hybrid approach. I could not do the figures live. I still had no idea how to handle this dumb stupid artistic hole I got myself into.

I should have taken pictures of all the crappy backgrounds but I did not.

Then Saturday afternoon I went to Manhattan Youth Ballet for Daya's performance, which was fantastic.  Here she is! She would not let me take any more pics than these.

I was so tired and stressed and spacey after the show.  I treated myself to sushi and walked through Central Park, which was lovely.

Ok, Saturday night, time to go back to LaGuardia for the Saturday night show.

The setup was much easier the second night because I knew what to expect.

During the second show, in the places I had pre-planned already with the backgrounds, I painted colors from life (very quickly) using panpastels. So most of the backgrounds for the paintings were painted on-location from life, and then I did some few-second moving figure gesture drawings.

At the end of the show I had 7 little panels with pretty colors, each matched to a specific part in each of the dances.  Again, I didn't take pictures of them but I should have.

Panpastel over gouache is actually a very nice combination. The panpastel goes over gouache very, very nicely.  I had no idea.

Tadej's Graham Class

I was invited to paint at all three shows of the LaGuardia Senior Dance Concert this upcoming weekend.
It requires a little pre-planning and a practice run or 2.

I was thinking maybe I could use pastels, since I'm in the mood for them, and I decided to do a little painting from Tadej Brdnik's modern (Graham technique) class from last Tuesday.

He runs an absolutely beautiful class.

Last night I did a little 5x7 pastel, using panpastels and Nupastel.

It's on a colourfix-primed piece of watercolor paper I prepped years ago that floated to the surface of my paper cabinet.

This is a 1 hour paining... I wanted it to be fast.

I like how this turned out but pastels are absolutely NOT the way to go for painting in the concert hall.

It takes up way too much space.

  

Well I might bring a few just in case but it's going to be gouache on 5x7 panels.

I hope Tadej likes the painting, I sent it to school with Daya.

I asked her if she gave it to him, she said yes, I asked her if he likes it and she just said yes.

Furball Goes to the Vet

Since Isis stopped coughing (almost completely) and isn't getting the $1300 trachea wash, I decided to take Furball into the vet.

I got Furball in July 2013.  She went to the vet for her last set of kitten shots, and she has not left my apartment since then.

Furball is a super freaky panic-mode cat.
She is super friendly and LOVES pets, but she's terrified of absolutely everything and can't handle.... anything.  

So she hasn't been to the vet because I can't handle her to get her there. She has to be sedated.

This is a traumatic ordeal for Furball.

And the vet won't give me gabapentin for her because she hasn't been there for so long they can't give her a prescription medication.

So she can't go to the vet without a sedative and the vet won't give me a sedative because she hasn't been to the vet.

Life can be really stupid like that.

But I had gabapentin for Isis that I didn't end up needing, so I booked the appointment with the vet, sedated Furball with Isis's pills, and took her in.  I also signed an anesthesia release in case they had to sedate her even more for the appointment.

(Isis is still angry and swipey even on 100mg of gaba, and Furball has crazy paranoid terror so I thought she would be difficult.)

Isis is such a jerk, when I got the carrier out she knew someone was going to the vet and she decided it must be Pebbles and let her have it.

As it turns out, Furball did great.  Everyone absolutely loved her because she is sweet and adorable and perfect.  No further sedation was necessary.  She is ok but has one cavity, missing teeth, tartar, and an ear problem which I got ointment for.  I will deal with the teeth later.

She is not feeling well after being home, she needs to sleep off the sedation and is probably also feeling crappy from her vaccines and the stress.  Pebbles was worried about her which was really cute.

54 Minute Alley Pond Painting

My friend Sharon invited me to go with her and her husband to walk around Alley Pond, just to get out a little today.

Both her teenager and my teenager stayed home to lounge around and do nothing.  Its very funny, they both seem to have read the same "How to Act like a Teenager" handbook.

I wanted to do a quick little painting, but because I was with others I had to be considerate of the time.  They are very tolerant of my painting habit, which I appreciate, and Matthew wanted to watch.  I provided commentary to make it less boring.

I said the painting would take under an hour, and it took exactly 54 minutes.
Matthew did not get bored!

One of the swans bit a kid who tried to pet it, so that was entertaining!

6x8 oil

If I was on my own I probably would have spent an hour and a half, but honestly this was a really good exercise to be very efficient and make quick decisions.

Lower Manhattan from Pier 34

Yesterday I had planned to paint the skyline again from Pier 34 but no painting happened due to weather...

So I went today.

I have done this painting before, but I wanted to re-do it on a long skinny panorama panel instead of 8x10, and also last time I had a technical issue with my ground not being dry.

This is an 8x16 panel which is a fun size.

I had to build a panel carrier for it since it won't fit in my box.

That was a pain to carry around but it worked! 

I just had to remember not to leave it anywhere, like on the train! 

The sun was hot, I started late and I was really tired and started to lose focus before I finished.

This painting took 3 hours.

I missed my goal of getting the whole Freedom Tower up to the top in!

The boathouse and kayakers are in the painting, it was a busy day over there.

A man who had been kayaking came over and asked me to put him in the painting, and make him purple because he was wearing purple.  I did and he was very happy.

David was painting the skyline too from Pier 45!

While I was painting I was wondering how he would handle it, and I got to see!

I am trying to get better at clouds, I am making no progress with that...... oh well.

(David's clouds are excellent.)

I really should go out just to do small cloud studies.

I did not have time to go to the boathouse after and see everyone, because I HAD to go to Blick before they closed and also to The Strand to return the huge heavy book that of course I had to carry around all day.

I did not get anything else at The Strand, just a paper cut  and my refund which all went to Blick.