Our Daily Thread

Doing the Time Warp

2010-10-19T19:15:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned previously, I'm focusing on Halloween-ish subjects for my embroideries during the month of October, and Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show seemed like a fun and challenging idea. He's not particularly scary, but I do remember feeling a distinct shiver down my spine the first time I saw the movie when Frank-N-Furter appeared in the elevator stomping his high heeled boots (or whatever). I remember watching the movie pretty vividly. I'm not sure of the year, but I'm guessing it was circa 1990 because I remember it was not that long after the 15th anniversary of the movie. I had a couple of friends staying over, probably for my birthday (which happens to be a few days after Halloween), and the weirdest thing happened. I think it was the next day, though I could just be compressing two memories into one, but anyhow very soon afterward we were walking around (I think maybe skateboarding) in the parking lot of my (then or future) high school and stumbled onto a portion of the sidewalk where someone had written the names of all the Rocky Horror characters in the cement before it dried, presumably some time around 1975 when the movie actually came out. Anyway, it was cool and exciting for me, at least. Soon after that my friend Brad and I got the various albums (I still have a Rocky Horror comic book I got around that time) and started going to midnight showings of the movie. I haven't been to a screening in a long time, but I still love the movie/soundtrack and the pseudo-sequel, Shock Treatment. Also, I haven't been really watching Glee, but I'll definitely be checking out the Oct. 26 episode.

Halloween Special

2010-10-08T09:05:00.000-04:00

Speaking of Halloween Specials, has anybody seen Paul Lynde's Halloween Special? Pretty good stuff. Anyhoo, I'm still embroidering away, and to celebrate my favorite holiday and time of year, I decided to focus on creepy-ish people for the month of October. This is the only one I've completed so far, but I'm very pleased with it, and I promise to come back and update here whenever I finish more of them. So, without further ado, Mr. Edgar Allan Poe...

I've always been a big fan of Poe's works and the Vincent Price Poe movies (the Vincent Price Hawthorne movies are also great, possibly even superior), and something about the images of Poe are every bit as creepy as his stories. I never noticed before working on this portrait how much he resembles Bill Murray. For some reason, I also always think about the fact that Poe shares initials with Elvis Aaron Presley. By the way, as always, more pictures of this one are available in my flickr. I'll be posting it for sale my etsy store later today.

David Hockney

2010-09-29T19:56:00.000-04:00

Hello, again. I've been getting over a virus lately, so things have been kind of slow, but, as you can see from my Etsy mini in the sidebar, I'm slowly adding new (and old) pieces to my Etsy shop. I still have a few more items to list, including the recently completed portrait (above) of one of my favorite artists, David Hockney. This is another 4 by 6 inch portrait done with cotton embroidery floss on canvas.

By the way, you may be wondering why the group of people I've created portraits of so far is so random, and I don't really have an answer for that other than that I've been trying to keep it fairly random. My original idea was to focus on portraits of visual artists, then maybe artists I admire working in any medium, but eventually I just decided I wanted anyone to be fair game. For a while last year I was working on another project that involved drawing famous people who were born on or died on a particular date, and I may get back to that if I get stuck for ideas, but in the meantime, I'm cool with just randomly choosing people. If there's anyone specific you think I should try to do, please feel free to suggest names in the comments.

And it damn near killed him.

2010-09-24T11:52:00.000-04:00

I followed the Bergman embroidery up with this one of Matisse. Like the Bergman one, I was able to keep the work small and fairly quick, which, again, I'm trying to do because I want to a) keep these pieces affordable, and b) make as many portraits as I can, representing as wide a spectrum of personalities as I can--sidebar: I can't hear the word spectrum without being reminded of a certain person in my family who once noted that a musically talented individual could play "all of the instruments in the rectum." I think that's the funniest malaprop I've ever heard.

Anyhoo, this embroidery was fun to do because I was less literal and played around with the color a bit trying to produce a Matisse-like effect with the large blocks of flat colors. It may read more like a Warhol effect, but whatevs, I'm happy with it. I painted the canvas red to try to achieve the color I wanted. I'm not sure I got it right, but, again, I'm satisfied. I was thinking of Matisse's Red Studio and Red Room.

Missing Links

2010-09-23T09:56:00.001-04:00

Hi all, I just wanted to share a few links to sites I've bookmarked lately.

I just discovered this awesome blog by Jenny Hart. I've admired her work for years (and had the chance,totally unexpectedly, to see one of her portraits in person in Little Rock, Arkansas in 2007), and I'm very excited to discover this new source of inspiration.

Cayce Zavaglia, whom I wrote about quite a while ago now has a website that has lots of detailed photographs of her mind-blowing work. Her work is basically what got me started with embroidery.

Two other sites I'm glad to have stumbled upon are The Jealous Curator (I'm jealous of your blog!) and sfgirlbybay. I don't know much about them, but they've both pushing the right artsy buttons for me lately.

Future Tense--Ingmar Bergman

2010-09-20T19:03:00.001-04:00

Ingmar Bergman embroidery (cotton thread on duck canvas)

So, it's been a while, obviously, and much has happened since I was posting here (semi-)regularly. My daughter was born, I started going back to school, I stopped going back to school, and I've started and abandoned several art projects. I've taken many wrong turns that ultimately feel right because they've brought me where I am now, which feels like a good place.
I'm still working on setting up the Etsy shop, and it will definitely take some time and experimenting before I really know what I'm doing, but my goal is to make hand-embroidered portraits that are affordable for everyone. My tendency is to make things very complex and painstakingly, an urge I will have to learn to temper if I want to keep these things affordable. I also want to offer a wide variety of subjects (and commissions), so it will be a challenge not to spend too much time on each one. However, I want the portraits to reflect my own embroidery style and to convey something about the subject (for example, when Ingmar Bergman's work, I first thought of the beautiful black and white films Persona, Wild Strawberries, and The Seventh Seal, so I wanted to do kind of a gray scale portrait.

Embroidery in 4X6 inch frame.

This is far from my favorite piece that I've done, but I'm fairly happy with the finished result, and it looks nice in a frame. I think I spent about the right amount of time on this piece (as opposed to the one I'm finishing up now, which I'll post in a few days), but finding the right balance of time and aesthetics is going to continue to be tricky, I think. More on that later.

A New Beginning...

2010-09-15T13:11:00.000-04:00

Welcome. If any of my older readers are still out there, I apologize for the way-too-long hiatus. I'm just laying the foundation for a new project, so you'll be hearing a lot more from me in the near future. In the coming weeks, I plan to start an etsy shop offering affordable hand-embroidered portraits (mainly of various celebrities, but I'll be taking commissions, too), so keep an eye out for that. It'll take me a little time to get things rolling, but in the meantime, please feel free to take a look at some of my older posts, or check out some of my previous embroidery work here.

Oh yeah, most of you probably know this, but if not, here's something else I made since my last post (I had a little help, of course):

Be back soon, I promise!

Makepeace...um, not war?

2008-07-30T10:06:00.002-04:00

Favorite new website!

Oh yeah, I made this

2008-07-18T08:25:00.001-04:00

Logo I made for an upcoming pin sale for the Athens Area Arts Council.

This is only a test...an embarassingly accurate test

2008-06-25T15:37:00.000-04:00

Your result for The Neurotic Test...

The True Neurotic

You scored 75 anxiety, 81 awkwardness, and 82 neuroticism!

Congratulations, you are The True Neurotic, you nail-biting, conflict-avoiding worrier, you. You're plagued by self-doubt and anxiety, which makes social activity hard--even though you may be well-liked, you feel under a storm of silent criticism. It doesn't help that people give you funny looks for organizing all your pens by color or sharpening your gnawed pencils to a delicate point.

Your high anxiety score implies that you are unable to relax, worry about the future often, and probably are plagued by irrational fears and self-doubt.

Your high awkwardness score implies that you are socially inept, probably stick out from the crowd, and feel uncomfortable in large groups of people, such as at parties.

Your high neuroticism score implies that you exhibit neurotic behaviors--probably organization, fanatic obsessions (can you recite the entire first LOTR movie?), repetitive mantras, constant checking, or orderly rituals.

__

See the other results!

Well-Adjusted

The Neat Freak

The Dork

The Geek

Phobic

Obsessive-Compulsive

The Subtle Neurotic

The True Neurotic

Take The Neurotic Test at HelloQuizzy

Whoa

2008-05-13T11:15:00.001-04:00

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Link via Drawn.

Happy belated, ani-versary

2008-05-09T10:58:00.007-04:00

So, I've been watching all this animation stuff lately on youtube and recently realized that animation is 100 years old this year! I didn't see much (or anything) about it at the time, but this fellow says the anniversary was on April 6th. Anyway, you should celebrate by watching Fantasmagorie (above) and Steamboat Willie, which really holds up well.

I've been reading the amazing work of Carl Barks (check it out here! scroll down and click his name on the right side of the page), whose work was the inspiration and source material for Duck Tales. So, of course I was reminded of watching this (every day, after school) along with other Disney cartoons of the time, Rescue Rangers, Talespin, and Gummi Bears.

So, I also had to introduce Hillary to a number of less memorable cartoons I watched (she was television deprived). Remember...Madballs? Aside from He-Man, and G.I. Joe, and Voltron, one of my favorite "boy cartoons" when I was a kid was M.A.S.K. After telling her about the He-Man character Stinkor (pictured above; I had the action figure!), I also had to show her a couple of other shows I was fond of, Shirt Tales and The Get Along Gang. Actually, you can pretty much find all that crap at Retrojunk, apparently, so head over there for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Hillary said I should talk more about how much I love Carl Barks, so, without going into too much detail, I'll just say that he's awesome, and you should definitely read about him and go read all those comics (free!) at Beru's Disney Comics Fan Page (thanks, Dark!). I was super into his work even when I was a kid (he invented Duckburg, for chrissakes, and some of its most memorable inhabitants), and all that Disney stuff...you tend to forget just how great it is. Also, he was the one who saturated those comics with treasure hunt stories, which pretty much never cease to be fun.

A Boot de Souffle

2008-05-05T09:55:00.005-04:00

Hi all, I killed a few minutes the other day by entering this Doc Martens boot design contest. Click on the link below to vote for my design (if you like it). Thanks!

Know When to Fold 'Em

2008-04-01T08:50:00.002-04:00

Check it out: Interactive versions of Classic Al Jaffee Fold-Ins available here.

Black and White and Read all over

2008-03-17T08:34:00.008-04:00

I've been really enjoying a lot of Black and White stuff lately, from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (which, not coincidentally, is strongly reminiscent of David B's work) to Charles Burns's Black Hole and work by Matthieu Bessudo, aka Mcbess (check out the above video of some of his work).

Another relatively recent discovery I've been digging a lot lately is Rick Geary's Treasure of Victorian Murder series, which really appeals to two of my interests: the Victorian era and the macabre. Hillary and I love these books so much we had to buy some of Geary's (charming and affordable) original art; we now own the above page from volume 3 of the series, The Borden Tragedy.

Mini-update and Links

2008-03-10T12:14:00.008-04:00

Hi all, sorry for the long hiatus. Unfortunately I don't have much to show and tell about right now, but I am very pleased to announce that I've got a couple of pieces in the group show at one of my favorite galleries, La Luz de Jesus. If you're in the Los Angeles area, please check it out.

Other than that, all I've got is a few links for you to check out:

--Get over to Jeff T. Owens's new Graveshifter blog tout de suite. You can thank me later.

--Star Wars origami!

--Lines and Colors has an interesting post about the economics of making a living as an artist. Maybe all you really need is 1,000 true fans.

--Some interesting painting demonstrations

--I only recently remembered how damn great Drawn! is.

Okay, back with more later this week (I promise!)

Art Show Update

2008-01-15T13:07:00.000-05:00

I've been hopelessly lazy lately* so I don't have much to report, but I do have a piece (my Voltron piece) in the Sci-Fi show at MF Gallery in New York along with Jeff Owens, so check it out if you're in the area.

Here's Voltron and a bunch of freaks having what looks to be a good time at the show opening:

*In my imagination I've been pretending that I've been getting a lot done.

Nature versus Nurture, Part 120,467,564

2007-12-19T10:03:00.000-05:00

There's a fascinating debate about whether "artistic talent" is inherited or earned going on here, here, and here .

This is one of those arguments that's been rehashed a million times (and will be rehashed a million more) and is completely pointless...yet it occupies my thoughts. In other words, it's like 95% of blog discussions I read. (originally found via Drawn)

I'm a Loser

2007-12-18T08:35:00.000-05:00

Well, Scion announced the winners of its Craft My Ride Contest, and I'm not one of them. Anything I have to say will sound like sour grapes, so I'll keep it brief. I'm not surprised that I lost, but I figured it would at least be to this guy.

Update

2007-12-12T11:34:00.000-05:00

I'm not dead.

I didn't mean for my recent blogging hiatus to be so long...I guess I hoped I've have (good) news to report about the CraftMyRide contest, but I haven't heard anything yet. I also really should've mentioned the holiday market at Flat Penny that I took part in, but the past few weeks have just been so busy. Anyway, I didn't sell anything there, but I met some great folks, like David Kirwin, Stephanie Astalos-Jones (oh yeah, she's also an actress), Peter Loose, and, of course, the gallery owners, Tim and Bobbi.

I'm working on a new embroidery that I'll post about when it's done (hopefully soon), but here are a few things to explore in the meantime.

Devorah Sperber (re)creates large inverted works (see above picture) of art out of spools of thread.

Read about Ray Materson's tiny embroideries and then go checkout his website.

I love Paula Scher's map paintings.

Charley Parker's Lines and Colors blog is absolutely awesome. Go there now (and check back here...in a couple of ~~days~~ weeks).

Tag Party

2007-11-16T16:08:00.000-05:00

Lylou tagged me over on her blog, so you get to learn some random facts about little ol' me.

Here are the rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 5 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as wellas links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

And here are the weird and random facts...

1. My mom's maiden name was the same as my dad's last name (Brown, duh).

2. I've had "Nightshift" by the Commodores stuck in my head, inexplicably, for the past week.

3. Jasmine Guy went to my elementary and middle schools as a child, and she came to my elementary school for a special assembly at the height of her A Different World fame. It was very exciting! Also, I went to school with Isaac Hayes III, aka Ike Dirty. I've heard that Alyson Hannigan went to my middle school a bit too, but I can't confirm that.

4. I'm deathly allergic to bee stings.

5. I'm trying to break in a new pair of shoes (for the third time) and I have a blister on my foot. Ow.

I tag Hillary, Gordon, Christa, Ryan, and Karen, but some of them probably won't do it.

I May Already be a Sellout---I mean Winner!

2007-11-09T12:18:00.000-05:00

Happy late Halloween, everybody, and sorry, as usual, for the light posting. I do have some news to report though: the judges for the Craft My Ride contest have narrowed the entries down to twenty, and my gloves were one of the twenty they selected. From those, they'll select the three winners. Wish me luck...unless you think maybe I'm selling out (I have zero qualms about this so far, btw...but then, I suppose that's what Anne Elizabeth Moore would say is the problem).

In other news, I was browsing through Hi Fructose in the bookstore the other day and discovered the amazing work of Brendan Danielsson and Travis Louie. It's like a rainbow in my eyes so nice i like it!*

Danielsson is apparently on hiatus, but you can see his awesome paintings and drawings here. Also, I think he started the Art Dorks Collective, and he may live in Atlanta (anyone know)? Here are a couple of his creepy drawings:

Travis Louie's recent work (see below) has a similar Victorian macabre thing going on. They're gorgeous. Be sure to check them all out (and read the descriptions!) here.

*Hillary and I thought this phrase would catch on like wildfire, but it doesn't seemed to have yet, so please help us make that happen. Maybe we can team up with this dude Todd Levin from tremble dot com.)

Okay, I give

2007-11-02T08:26:00.000-04:00

Was trying to ignore this...but I caved in. Stole this from Hillary, who got it from Dehumidifier. Here's the instructions:

"These are the top 106 books most often marked as 'unread' by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list."

In my case, "to-read" just means someday. They're not all on my bedside table or anything. Also, if I ever get through all the underlined ones (doubtful) I'd add some of the others.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby-Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad*
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath*
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles*
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels*
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: A Novel
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
Catcher in the Rye*
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Mother FLICKR

2007-10-28T20:07:00.000-04:00

Hillary and I started a Team Brown Flickr page, so a lot of my free time for the next week or so will be spent getting all our photos up. Check it out if you want, and I'll post again as soon as I'm able.

www.flickr.com

team.brown's Team Brown photoset

I Can't Believe it's Not Ripley

2007-10-25T12:57:00.000-04:00

I was browsing Ebay recently and this listing amused me, so I thought I'd post it here. I was looking through the Robert L. Ripley memorabilia, as is my wont, and this listing for a "signed" Believe it or Not! book caught my eye, mainly because it was so cheap (click photos for larger versions):

The description amused me because the seller clearly doesn't know much about the real talented Mr. Ripley. His initials are R.L.R., not R.R.R.,! You can read the Ebay description here, if you like:

But what really cracked me up, is the signature they were trying (admittedly, not very hard) to pass off as Ripley's:

They might have wanted to compare this "autograph" with what Ripley's signature actually looked like, which they could have found...oh, I don't know, ON THE COVER OF THE BOOK THEY WERE SELLING:

So, Believe it or Not? I choose not! Here's a better image of a real autograph that someone else was selling on Ebay at the same time. I hope the person that bid on the fake listing was doing it for the book and not the autograph.