See my new series.  Floating World  Click link  to go to new page.

https://janetboydart.blogspot.com/p/floating-world.html

 

Floating Couple with Baby and Deer

acrylic on canvas, 30"x40", 6/19

 

Detail

Detail

 Floating Couple with Flowers

acrylic on paper, 18"x24", 6/19

 

 

 

 

Floating Couple in Pencil

pencil on Strathmore paper, 9"x11", 5/19

Flower of Life

acrylic on cold pressed paper, 9"x12", 4/19

These few pictures, record the recent evolution of my visual ideas.  I chose these px's, out of many, to summarize an artistic exploration of several visual, artistic, ideas.  The top picture shows my latest picture, the emergence of a painting, the flowering, the growth, of an artistic stream. 

My work continues to lead me along a wide and wandering path of visible invention.  I will be 75 years old soon.  Art has been my most steady friend.  Always available, like a listening ear, but visual, a conversation with myself.  Making art, expressing the essence of my existence, an escape from the box of conformity, to mold my mind, to reinvent myself, as I transverse this particular (and peculiar)  time/life of unique experience.  A piece of paper, a canvas, is a small piece of real estate, where I make up the rules.  A white rectangle of material offers unlimited freedom of expression.  Yes, it is about me, me, me; but I want to communicate, to reach you, and you and you.  To let loose the babble of my mind. 

Here am I.  What ever that means.  Here I am reaching out to communicate with you.  We are all both the same and different.  Our individual minds are a blob of almost incomprehensible jelly packed with a jillion  neuron wires sealed in a bowl of bones.  Art is a way to transport ideas from my bone bowl to your bone bowl. (OK, that was funny. Sometimes I just cant help myself.) We are each alone until we courageously  perform authentic communication. 

OK, enough of that cacophony.

These four pictures are a summary of the progression of ideas.  Starting with the bottom picture, and progressing to the top picture.

 I became interested in the "Flower of Live".  A basic pattern that is part of "Sacred Geometry".  I watched  a lot of You Tube videos.  I played with the pattern, using a compass and other devices that had lain useless for years in a studio box. The Flower of Life penetrated my dreams.  I awoke slowly in the morning with visions of the flower dancing in my head.  The videos explained that the flower pattern illustrated how everything, material and immaterial, fits together. 

The bottom acrylic painting illustrates the pattern. 

Next, I played with pencil on paper.  As I sketched, casually, I wanted my art to be happy.  Much art is angry.  Ugly art is trendy. There is too much anger in the world.  Buddha said,  "That which you attend to grows".  I want to grow joy. 

I reexplored the work of Marc Chagall.  His floating couple is joyful.  I riffed on his couple.  Making simple lines and shapes.  I wanted it graceful.

 The couple wanted a baby.  So I brought in Keith Haring to birth a baby.  Then the baby needed a friend, a sitter, while Mom and Pop floated ecstatically in the heavens.  A gentle deer volunteered and was added to the picture.  A protective tree grew grounded and womb like, around the deer and baby.

Chagall and Haring reached across the years to help me with this series.  We are so blessed to have a glorious banquet of art history to enrich our lives and art.

 

Alter Altar

digital, 2015

 

 

This file was created in 2015, a few years past.  I began using this computer in 2012.  In three years I had created a collection of maybe a hundred or more visual images.   I chose my favorite characters from the collection in order to create these alternative altars.  Altars are places to worship divinities.  Since I am so confused, not sure who or what to worship, I created altars that cover many belief systems.  And added a few idiosyncratic characters just for fun. 

 

Am I really confused.  No.  Yes. 

 

Previous to 2012, I had another computer.  Since it crashed I have been unable to access the few hundred images files on that computer.  Buddha said, "Everything changes but change itself". Get used to it, Grasshopper.

 

Did you know that Marilyn Monroe was the reincarnation of Venus and Aphrodite?   This was Hot News!  just a few years ago.  Subject to a big controversy between different belief system factors.  But what was Hot News!  just a few years ago has almost passed into oblivion.  You know the news cycle,  topics flick in and out like a Bic.  So, I brought up the subject so it wont be completely forgotten.   

 

I know that some people will find these pictures offensive.  It is hard to know what to say to those people.  I would have to start with my strict fundamentalist Christian childhood.  Very strict.  My parents tried to beat the devil out me and my siblings.  They tried to cram me into a very small box.  Finding my own way has been a long and continuing journey.  I know how judgmental and narrow self righteous people can be.  Me, with a bit of PTSD going on, with my Christian programming going on, my mind is on the alert for criticism. 

 

So what can I say to critics??  I want to expand your mind.  Stretch out. Humans have made many stories to explain human existence.  No one mind set can explain it all.  There is truth in many places.  Truth is more than we can comprehend with our rational minds. 

 

We are one.  Love one another.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Dali was an Alien

 

 

Dali was an Alien

 

Digital painting, 1/2019

 

 

Real Fake News!!!  In an alternative reality, where alternative facts prevail, there lived a bona fide alien, named Salvador Dali. Dali came to earth from the planet Bizarro.  He came to this world to explode the human neurons which had been programmed for a narrow view of reality.  He illustrated his alternative reality with images mined from introspecting his personal Id.  The Id is closely associated with the human reptilian brain.  Dali changed the world as we perceive it.  He opened the Pandora's box of the subconscious.

 

Ok, that is enough bull shit for today.  It crossed my mind to do a full blown artist hoax, but all I got was this one small paragraph.

 

The seed for this painting occurred during the few moments of alpha wave state of awareness that happens between the dreams of sleeping and the awakening to a more or less consensual reality.  I thought of creating a picture of Dali as an alien.

 

I researched the web for a few hours, looking at Dali images, photographs of the master and art that he created.  One photograph caught my attention.  I am indebted to the photographer, but unfortunately, I cant find his name.  In the photograph Salvador is holding his pet Ocelot, and bug eyeing the camera. 

 

The lobster was a favorite image, that Dali used for surrealistic effect.  Googling, ogling, internet Dali images, I was reminded that I had a stuffed toy lobster as a young teen.  It was a treasured gift from a sweet close friend.  Lost in a house fire.  A toy made after Dali established the lobster as a metaphor for Freuds Id.  An unusual toy, for that 1950's time, chosen as a gift by a teen and cherished by my teen self.  A toy that referenced Dali's image library.  Dali has had wide influence, and continues to be a top all time fine artist and designer.

 

As a Louisianan I see lobster as crawfish on steroids. 

 

I transferred five images into photoshop,  Dali face, ocelot, random sanpaku cat eyes, lobster, and a Dali landscape that I used for background.  All the images were very altered while I worked them over several days in photoshop.  The ocelot surprised me by turning into a feline thug, with Michelin Man muscles, and flesh shredding claws.  I harvested the scary eyes from a random cat image, pasted them onto the ocelot, and worked them in with photoshop brushes.  The ocelot turned orange, because the picture needed that color. (Or is my subconscious trying to make a political statement?) 

 

In the photograph Dali's eyes are deliberately wacky doodle, he is posing for the camera. Sanpaku eyes is a Japanese word that means three areas of white are showing around the iris. Eyes with lots of sclera showing are interpreted to indicate a holistic imbalance.   I made Dali's eyes even more screwball, blew them up larger.  And, I painted Dali green, a little green man.   

 

This was fun to paint.  It made me laugh. While the ocelot was taking shape, I became a bit frightened.  But, then I laughed some more.

 

I did not miss that notice that "artists are suppose to create a cohesive body of work".  I did not miss the notice, I saw it, but my muse led me astray.  My work has a broad spectrum, but some images keep occurring in my work, over the years.

After "doing Dali"  I made pictures of Warhol and Elon Musk. 

This is an artist hoax, joke, folks!
 

 

 

Warhol was an Alien

digital,  1/2019

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elon Musk is an Alien

digital 1/2019

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aliens R Us, Be Happy Babee!

 

Digital picture, circa 2001

 

 

Above is a picture I made about 17 years ago.  The following link is my Facebook page, "Aliens R Us".  I have not been very active with this page, but you might find the page interesting.  I have a continuing interest in wondering about ETs.

 

https://www.facebook.com/pg/AliensRUss/photos/?tab=album&album_id=284053991653817

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 



Concentric Circles and Brief Synopsis of My Art Practice

Concentric Circles with Reflections

 

Acrylic on Arches paper, 8.5x11, 11/2018

 

Concentric Circles with Leaf

Acrylic on Arches paper, 8.5x11, 11/2018

 

 

 

Concentric Circles

Digital painting, 11/2018
Acrylic painting photographed and worked in photoshop



A Brief Synopsis of My Art Practice

 

 

I have been painting most of my life.  My earliest memory is of being delighted to smear finger paints.  Won first place in Sunday School art show, when I was seven years old.  I painted and sketched and had a couple of art classes in high school.  Had a few art classes as an adult.  Enjoyed learning from Marie Hull in Jackson, MS, in the sixties. She was very supportive, and encouraging. (I am 75 years old.)  I studied a few classes with Auseklis Ozols at New Orleans Academy of Fine Art.  He is an excellent teaches.  Took a few other classes here and there, mostly I dropped out before long, because they either taught something I already knew, or something I was not interested in learning, or mostly because I had a lot of responsibilities that kept me to busy for school. 

 

My instructions and art practice have been distracted by constant moving.  As an Air Force brat  moved constantly when my father was transferred.  Attended eighteen schools before graduating high school.  I continued frequent moving as an adult.  " Daddy always kept moving so she did too", Neil Young song. I have lived here, there and everywhere.  "I've been everywhere, man."  Willie Nelson song.

 

 Lived in post WWII occupied Japan, 1950, six years old. Seeing Japanese art and being in a very different culture had a tremendous effect on me, has influenced my art since that time. 

 

Another huge distraction from art was being married and divorced twice and being a single Mom. 

 

Never the less I always made art.  Way back in the day, I remember telling a friend, "I can make art when I am too tired to do anything else".   Her one word response was, "Good", she was also an artist. I usually had a studio, in a garage or a spare room.

 

I really identified as an artist in the mid seventies,  my early thirties.  At that time, I committed to doing serious work.

 

Over these many decades of painting my work, style and subject matter have been all over the map.  For the last, maybe twenty years, I have worked three main series, which I call:  POP Religion, Luminous Woman and Down to Earth (landscapes).

I work primarily on paper now, because I like it, and because I have run out of storage space for canvasses.

I have consistently produced art since the mid seventies, but have shown my work only intermittently.  I am just really terrible at marketing.  Not being successful has its upside.  I paint what I want, follow my muse where ever she leads.

In 2002, at 58, I finally found a stable home.  I work in my wonderful, beautiful studio, on my gorgeous property, almost every day.   

To see my resume click here:

https://janetboydart.blogspot.com/p/resume.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

Looking Up

 

Looking Up, 1

Acrylic on archival paper,  18"x24",12/2018

Looking Up, 2

Acrylic on archival paper,  18"x24", 12/2018

Looking Up, 3

Acrylic on archival paper,  18"x24", 12/2018

 

 

 

 

 

The sun is rising as I step out into a bright, light purple world.  Purple prose be damned, that is how it started.  I wanted to paint that purple light.  The quality of the sunrise might be called lavender, but lavender sounds even more purple than purple. 

 

I had been planning, in my mind, the creation of Looking Up. My best planning is done in the hypnogogic and hypnopompic states that occur when one is falling asleep, and as one is waking up.  On an electroencephalogram, the electromagnetic waves of the brain would measure a slower pace for the firing of neurons.  The change in perception, the change of a brain channel, is indicated visually, is measured, becomes scientific data.  Introspectively the brain channel changes from waking, to dreamy and visual, then to sleeping and levels of sleep, then, before waking the channel is again dreamy and visual, on the edge of waking "reality" and dreams.  A bridge between the subconscious, or Jung's collective consciousness, and the concrete of wakefulness. I see pictures, I visualize painting the pictures, as I move between various conscious states. 

 

I painted three pictures working with the plan.  Modifying the plan as I painted. I am open to changes, new insights, happy accidents, that occur in the painting process. 140 pound Arches cold pressed paper.  I like the pebbly surface, it makes a fine texture under water thinned paint.  I paint with Golden acrylics from the tube used in a watercolor manner.  The paint is watered thin enough for the white of the paper to enlighten the picture.  When it is called for I will use opaque paint, but mostly I like the fluidity of wet in wet.  Layers of transparent color, glazes, create subtle color variations. 

 

These pictures show exaggerated perspective, the lines of the trunks create depth.  The branches get smaller as the trees move toward the off center circle, more depth.  Color is greyed, lines a bit blurred, more depth. 

The viewers eye is driven by the impelling convergence of the trunks. 

 

The eyes are led to the pale circle.  But, there is not much in that circle, it is just pale with an irregular outline.  It could be the sun, or the moon, or the gate of heaven, or a portal to a different reality, or just a peculiar/mundane round patch of sky.  A mandala design allows for layers of meaning and the viewers subjective experience.  The blankness of the patch invites reflection, makes an empty space that may induce introspection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

Visible Woman, Enlivened

Photoshop image,  24M,  10/2018

 

close up

 

 

 



 



Visible Woman, Enlivened

 

Visible Woman is the name of a toy.  It is a model figure illustrating simple pregnant female anatomy, that a child can assemble.  The toy has been around for maybe fifty years.  Not so long ago, and even today, there was, still is, a taboo against teaching a young female about her own body.  A human can drive a car, without knowing how an internal combustion engine works.  A girl can run and jump without even a hint of knowledge about muscles, bones and blood circulation.  However, when the storms of adolescence make landfall, it would comfort her, and help her to guide her life, to know about the tubes and folds of flesh and the cat 5 hormones that roar and whirl wind her mind and body.  It would help her to know about the cycles of the moon. 

 

 

Sex, Sex, Sex.  Sexual images are everywhere, enticing us to buy, buy, buy. The choices for a girl range from cloistered nun to Fellini orgies.  She can be a saint or a slut or anywhere in between. The traditional route features marriage and donating her body to incubate infants.  Each human has a personal path.  Not all decisions are made by reasoning,  however, information helps. 

 

 

A human girl needs level, healthy information to make informed choices.  But still there is a gibberish babble, a confusion of signals that make understanding difficult. 

 

I have been creating images that reference the Visible Woman, because, I, a saggy old grey lady, I am still trying to sort it all out. 

To see more of the Visible Woman go to:

 https://janetboydart.blogspot.com/2018/06/gold-fish-mashup-suite.html