After a Long Weekend
Thursday, May 30, 2024
Weekly Wrap:
Lately I’ve been trying to spend little time on social media apps and instead have been watching old movies. The shift has really brightened my creativity. It amazes me to realize that Gene Kelly is an avante-garde artist who managed to squeeze all this insanity and chance and art into big Hollywood movies! Greta Gerwig somehow managed this feat with Barbie (best movie ever!) but this is a precious jewel of an exception in our current times. Being on social platforms where some unknown algorithm feeds me endless images and artworks and ads turns out to not jolt my creativity as one might imagine. All that access to all that scroll suggests a virtual feast for the eyes but unfortunately what might be possible or interesting or awe-inspiring becomes humdrum. When algorithms feed us, chance is obliterated as too is our attention span. I think both chance and attention are crucial to creativity.
In the movie “Can-Can” a dance about Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden inspired me to attempt a different way of painting, to be more playful, more magical, more creative. I’ll update how it goes but for now here is my underpainting:
Product Review:
Sticker Mule 3 inch rounded corner stickers:
I took advantage of a sticker mule promo to have a painting made into 50 stickers. They came out great! My husband mentioned that my painting isn’t typical sticker imagery and maybe people wouldn’t want to stick my painting on their belongings—he has a point—so what to do with my stickers? The stickers feel like vinyl and have a satisfying matte quality that doesn’t diminish the vibrancy of the colors. They look and feel great. Well done sticker mule! If you want to make stickers this link should give you $10 off and me some credit. (update 7/26/24—I received a gaslighting, cringe email from stickermule suggesting i do as the company owner and support Trump after the assassination attempt by buying Trump merch—you know for unity. Gross. And good riddance Stickermule.)
Open call:
Beautiful and Bizarre Art Prize
Deadline: July 17, 2024
Fee: $40
I’ve always been enamored with the images this magazine shares—representational art mixed with a dreamy strangeness. Their blurb on the prize “The Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, now in its 7th year, is an annual non-acquisitive international art prize that celebrates diversity and excellence in the representational visual arts. It includes all static mediums including Traditional Art media, Digital Art media, and Photographic media; and all styles from realism and hyperrealism, to pop surrealism and lowbrow. The Prize seeks to inspire creatives from around the world to pursue a life and career in the arts, and to help careers grow through funding and increased exposure of their work to galleries, collectors and media globally.”
Check out some of the incredible entries here