Visible Woman, Enlivened

Photoshop image,  24M,  10/2018

 

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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

 

 

 

 

 



Gold Fish Mashup Suite

 

 

Gold Fish, Warhol, Elvis, Mashup

digital painting, 6/2018



Gold Fish, Visible Couple Mashup

 

 digital painting, 6/2018



 

 

 





Gold Fish, Picasso Mashup

digital painting, 6/2018

Here are three Photoshop paintings, completed recently (6/2018).  Size is 103Mb for each individual picture.  I make prints with Arches paper and a new Pro Epson printer.

 You may ask, "What does it mean?"   And I will answer, "Your guess is as good as mine".

top picture, Warhol, Elvis, Goldfish Mashup,  Warhol did a picture, Double Elvis, with a gun totting cowboy.  Warhol, Elvis, goldfish and water, all mashed up.  Elvis is shooting and the fish are flying.

middle picture, Visible Couple Mashup,  Anatomy is so interesting.  As a child, I was eager to explore the Visible Man toy.  When the woman with an incubator belly came out, sometime later, I was delighted. 

bottom picture,  Picasso, Goldfish Mashup. A riff on another famous picture.  When creating a digital painting I alter the inspiration picture by photoshopping the entire picture. This Picasso woman is a recognizable image but has been completely redone.  I call the digital works digital paintings, because I have been a painter for such a long time and the texture looks like painting.


Water is a continuing element in my art.  Several of my recent pictures and many past pictures have featured water.  I love swimming, kayaking, and gazing at water.  Ocean, Gulf, lakes and creeks.  My studio flooded twice in 2015.  There was some damage, the bottom of the sheetrock had to be redone, I accept this threat, because, nature is so beautiful here.

On the property here we have two creeks.  One small, the other larger.  There is a relatively low population density along the creek and running toward the Pearl River.  This is a bird flyway and is bountifully populated with wild animals. 

Yesterday

 

 

Yesterday

Digital painting, 5/10/2018

 

 

About half way through working on this piece, after roughing in the background and the foreground, I realized that I was painting Ophelia.

The Forest is My Cathedral

 

The Forest Cathedral

Digital image, 2017

 

 

I have a deep need for nature.  Walking in the forest gives me an elevated feeling.  Petty concerns melt away and I feel a reverence for the earth. 

 

A tree has a million leaves.  Each leaf has a beautiful design of branching veins.  If you look at the leaf microscopically there are a million perfect cells.  How can this happen?  The detail is staggering.  I find it difficult to explain this rationally and must resort to metaphysical wonderings.

 

 

 

 



Weather Report



 

Morning Glory

Acrylic on paper, June, 2017, 18"x24"

 

  

 



Down to Earth, Weather Report

Recent work, these past six months, year of 2017, continues the landscape series, "Down to Earth."  Each day I work in the studio and in the garden.  If we have guest here, then I sometimes miss a few days.  I am blessed with living in a very beautiful deep country area of Louisiana. 

(I know that without nature I would shrivel into a fetal position.)

I paint, I do Photoshop, I garden and I stroll the woods.  These creativities weave together like braided hair.  Each informs another.  A theme emerges and plays out in concert.  I plant wisteria and morning glory, they grow and flower. I pull the glory flowers into paint. 

A few acres of land, bordering on a riparian corridor, is left to Mother Nature's devices.  Trees grow.  Trails are carved down to the creek.   I harvest the visual of forest.  Repeated attempts to do painted representations of the creek, keep me aiming for glory on a flat surface. 

I walk the trail down to the creek, where nature proliferates in tangles of trees and vines and herbs.  I stroll from the relatively civilized area of the house to barely tamed wildness in but a few minutes.  Beyond the lightly used area, there are areas that are impassable due to super thick growths of vegetation.

Deer, coon, squirrel, armadillo, possum, various turtles, reptiles, fish, an embarrassment of bird song.

 I watch were I put my hands and feet, because water moccasins love damp creeky areas.  Another dangerous, occasional forest inhabitant, is the wild boar.  Two hundred fifty pounds or more of potential ramming fury.  (Climb a tree?) The dangers are not great, most of the snakes and boar, along with other wildlife shun humans, but the aggressive critters are threatening enough to increase  my respect.  Add a dash of adrenaline to the mix.

 

Flock Flying

Acrylic on paper, 24"X18", 2017



 

Weather Report

Acrylic on paper, 24"X18", 2017

 

 

The Spring Creek corridor connects with the Pearl River corridor, where there are rumors of the Honey Island Swamp Man, Big Foot.  These mysterious rumors, which I entertain as possibly true, add another layer of meaning to the land.

Ambling from the house, a primarily human area along the short trail, to the border of wilding area,  I can feel my spirit lift, I can feel the nurturing energies of nature.  I humbly attempt to pin this,  all of this spot of earth reality, down on a small piece of paper. 



July 29, 2017
I started this blog entry in early July.  Between this time July 29, 2017, and that, I suffered a terrible tragedy, about which, I am unable to go into detail.  This morning I awoke at 3am.  Set myself a goal of posting a blog entry.  I had not loaded pictures, I had only written words to this blog.  I loaded some pictures, and here is the blog entry.

August 24, 2017
I hope to get this blog entry posted today.

 

Beaming

Acrylic on paper, May, 2017, 18"x24"

Ruby Rose

Ruby Rose

Oil on canvas, 36"x48", 2003



Cardinal

Photoshop, 2011

 

 

A rose and a cardinal bird, both red and showing centrifugal movement.  Kinda dizzy, head swimming.  A bit like entering a daydream, or a trance state.  One is from 2003, the other 2011.  This gentle swirling disequilibrium, which stirs our thoughts and seeks a new, reorganized, equilibrium, has been a reoccurring theme in my art practice.  The grey brain jelly, streaked with miniscule rivers of red blood,  this soft, almost fluid organ in our skull pan is capable of many different states of consciousness. 

 

Our TV gets more than 100 channels.  The black box in our living rooms flickers with lights and screams at us to buy, buy more. It pounds fear into our being.  It is impossible to ignore.  There it jiggles with compelling light images in the center of our lives.  Nailing our attention to the 100 media channels and distracting us from our potential for myriad inner channels. 



 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Price of Living in Paradise

The Price of Living in Paradise

Loving Louisiana



                                  Dragonfly 3                                  

Acrylic on paper, 18"x24", August, 2016

 

 

 

 

 



 Dragonfly 3, detail

 

Dragonfly 2

Acrylic on canvas,  18"x24", August, 2016

 



 

Dragonfly 2, detail



It rained and rained and rained.  Twenty inches in twenty hours.  The water rose, over the creek banks, over the knoll, and into the studio, where it knocked over the easel and bathed paintings in swamp soup.

When the water retreated we were left to pick up the pieces.  Grateful, we were, to have relatively minor damage.  Some neighbors had no pieces left to pick up.  Grateful, also, for the help of family and friends for the clean up.

After four weeks of cleaning and repairing we were comfortable again, and my studio was up and running.  I painted on creamy, textured cold press Arches paper.  With oil and acrylic paint I did thin washes, to impart the luminosity of watercolor techniques to landscape backgrounds.

The flooding came again, six months, to the day later.  Again, we cleaned and repaired.  This time the studio was ready, still grungy, but ready for creativity, after only two weeks.

Two "100 year floods", back to back.  Surely, it will not occur again for another 100 years, we reassured one another.  The neighbors said, "This is the highest flooding since 1980,... since 1950".

After the flood, when the low areas had dried out a bit, we walked the trail alongside the creek.  Overhead, we felt the elevating energy of the arching, cathedral canopy of tall trees.  All about the ground was dappled shade.  Alongside the trail an expanse of impenetrable jungle flora.  Grapevines with trunks as big as a sumo wrestler's thigh, send tendrils twining up to the towering tree tops where a bird banquet of grapes ripen sweetly. 

Rambling the bramble, we read the wildlife signs of deer, rabbit, wild hog, beaver, armadillo, opossum, squirrel. We see blue heron and owl overhead, turtles and catfish in the water.  Occasionally we see snakes,  rarely cotton mouth moccasins.

Strolling the trail, a wafting fragrance introduces a thicket of Elder Trees.  Elder was a sacred plant of the ancient Druids, shamans of the metaphysically talented Celts.  Elder, prized for food, medicine and magic, grows with wild enthusiasm.  A large tree fell two years ago and created a spot of sun for Sambucus Niger to grow.

When the sun rises, and when it sets, there is a symphony of bird melodies, tree frog trebling, and bass of bull frog.  A sky washed with cobalt and orange.  An embarrassment of riches.