Meh

I'm super sad because I've come to the realization that I can't eat like a normal person.  I have to say goodbye to all dairy, including cheese, which is my all-time favorite food.  Goodbye red meat, goodbye  lots of fruit and uncooked vegetables.  So sad.  I am basically a bread-atarian.  For now.  Let's see how long it takes me to die from malnourishment.

Aside from that everything is going in the right direction.  I sold an old piece, "Brain", which was part of the "Systems" set, to a guy as a gift for his girlfriend who is a brain surgeon or something.

Selling the old stuff makes me happy, although now it might be harder to find a home for his buddy.

I have a few new pieces:

Tree Deer
Acrylic and Collage on Canvas
12" x 12"

This was kind of meant to be a festive, holiday piece.  It started out being way more Christmas-y, but I'm not about to start making Christmas-specific art, so it underwent some changes.  I love deer.

Cheap Thrills/Land Octopus Returns
Acrylic and Ink on Canvas
12" x 9"

This is the same octopus from an earlier painting.  I've decided he is a character , and en evil one at that.  My aunt thinks I should start illustrating books.  This guy would be in one if I did.

On December 6th Pottery Barn is hosting a fundraiser auction for a children's hospital at Fortunate Discoveries, where my paintings are.  They gave us these really boring, empty frames from a furniture sale or something, and the artists were supposed to do something with it to be donated to the auction.  This is what I came up with:

Empty Landscape
Scuply Clay, Rice Paper and Acrylic on Paper and Wood
14" x 18"

I had a lot of fun doing this.  It was nice to work with different materials for a change.  I think I might do some more of these.  The only problem is I have to figure out how to photograph 3-D material better.  I might have to bite the bullet and invest in Photoshop.

Pleistocene Pop

I finally caved and put up an album of my paintings on Facebook.  Why I waited so long, I don't know, because people responded.  My friend Malaika entitled my work "Pleistocene Pop," which I love and makes me happy.  Even though a lot of my work has nothing to do content-wise with prehistory, I've been drawing on this plethora of knowledge that we don't have about the past, which makes imagination easy.  Imagine what it was like when saber-tooth tigers ruled the planet! When homo erectus interacted with the environment!  It's so exciting.

I've also been looking at a lot of LowBrow artists recently.  I don't consider myself or my work LowBrow, but I don't know under what other genre my work would fall.  What other poppy art movements are happening right now?  I'm also severely uneducated, the art-school-dropout.  I don't want to fall into this trap of labeling myself though, because that's always been way uncool.  You can't label yourself, you need other people to do it for you, hence my newly coined style of Pleistocene Pop.  I also just read this blog entry about why the LowBrow movement is not fine art: http://weirdodeluxe.wordpress.com/.  In my opinion, this guy and his opinions are also a bunch of crap, but I also unfortunately agree with some of the things he says.  I just can't stand people on their high horses in the art world.  I'm talking to you, my former professors.

(Side note: There was this one woman I had twice in art school, whose name I can't remember, but she was the most condescending, snobby bitch I've ever come across, and she made me feel so terrible about my work, even though I actually made some good stuff for her classes.  I wish I could remember her name so I could slander her in my blog.)

This is the painting that prompted "Pleistocene Pop":

Woolly Mammoths Meet the Future
Acrylic on Canvas
9" x 9" x 2"

This picture was taken with my iphone because my camera stopped working, thus the shadow across it and the poor quality.  I will invest in a new camera and take a better picture of it.

Halloween

It's Halloween! It's also a Wednesday and I've had a cold since Friday.  Everyone is sick.  So instead of going out with my friends in my ventriloquist dummy costume, I made the responsible decision to stay inside and watch Frankenstein on TV.

Speaking of Halloween oriented things, you must watch H.H.Holmes: America's First Serial Killer.  It is about a serial killer doctor who plucked his victims out of the chaos of the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893.  He had a house designed as an elaborate castle with torture chambers, and he defleshed his victims and donated their skeletons to hospitals and universities.  It is the most macabre, gruesome piece of Chicago history.  I've been into these things lately.

I set up my wall at Fortunate Discoveries today.  I'm excited about that place.  It's really cute inside and I like all the other art.  I think my paintings will call attention to themselves and people will walk right over to them once my little piece of wall comes into view.  I jammed as many of my little, newer pieces on as I could, so hopefully the initial appearance doesn't come across as too busy.  I sold two pieces at The Common Cup: The Great Plains and Flies.  One of the barristas bought The Great Plains and the owner bought Flies.  Even if I don't make a lot of money selling my paintings, it is very validating to sell them at all- to have people who actually have my art in their homes.

I think there is a point where my work changed.  I think it was with The Heart of Captain Kurtz and Shiny Things Three.  My paintings became more upbeat, and I think I've gotten the hang of some problems with I was having with creating distance before.  I looked at all of my older paintings at once when I brought them home from the Common Cup today, and they are darker and flatter.  I'm sick of looking at them, they feel kind of stifling.  They went into the closet.  One thing that assures me of this is that I keep selling my new pieces.  It would be great if someone would buy the first Shiny Things painting, or The Factory.  I think someone should buy The Death of the American Landscape already.  It is really cute and well done, and everyone loves buffalo skulls.  My sister wants that one, I should just give it to her.  Christmas is coming up!

Here are my new pieces:

Got Yer Goose
Acrylic on Canvas
10" x 10"

The Queen
Acrylic on Canvas
9" x 9" 

The Eruption of Mount Bubblegum
Acrylic and Gossamer Paper on Canvas
14" x 11"

The Migration
Acrylic on Canvas
14" x 11"

Bear Hunting
Acrylic on Canvas
6" x 8"

This is my wall at Fortunate Discoveries.  As you see, the only old piece up is Landscape.   Very colorful!

End of the Month Drama

TI haven't updated this in about a month.  I've been really busy with lots of different things- I just got back from visiting my niece for the first time, I've been doing some managing shifts at my restaurant job, which is new, and the classes at the retirement home in Wilmette take a lot of planning and energy on my part, even though they're only once a week.  And I still don't have my first paycheck yet...dun dun dun (flashbacks of my last job at the Chicago Art and Design Center that I never got paid for).  Next week it will be two months that I'm working there, spending my own money on supplies, and haven't gotten paid.  What-do-I-do/Why-does-this-always-happen-to-me?!?!?!  I must have one of those really sweet, angelic, "Oh you don't have to pay me, I love to work for free!" faces.

I sold three pieces in September: Deer, Land Octopus, and The Family Tree.  I was really happy about that, especially The Family Tree, because I didn't like that painting and didn't think I was ever going to sell it.  It's pretty exciting that people might actually want to buy my stuff!  I have five paintings up at the group show in the West Loop, (Petroff Studio, and the show is put on by Lucid Artist Co-op).  I went to the gallery opening on October 5th and it was pretty interesting.  Imagine that- artists being weird and interesting.  Mostly in a good way.  Then the rest of my paintings are at the Common Cup, which is a cafe around the corner from my house, and so far I know I've sold The Great Plains, but nothing else that I know of.

I have a new, semi-permanent place for my paintings starting in November: Fortunate Discoveries on Armitage.  Its a gallery where you lease out a wall space, and its in a really upscale neighborhood with lots of pricey little boutiques and people with money.  That bodes well for selling art usually.  The other artists represented there are really good, so I feel kind of honored to have a place there.

I'm always so busy at the end of the month- thus the title of this post- because I have to get everything back from its current locations and get ready for the next month's show.  I just finished up a couple pieces, and I know I'm being ambitious but I want to have two more done by November 1st.  We'll see.

This is what I have completed and photographed for this month:

Quail Skull
Acrylic on Canvas
9" x 9" x 2"

Face Off
Acrylic on Canvas
18" x 9" x 2"


The woman who owns Fortunate Discoveries said she likes my sense of humor and the irony in my paintings.  The one above, get it? The two skulls are having a face-off in the desert, and since they are skulls the have their FACE OFF??? Haha.  I think that may be the direction that my work is evolving.

Fall

The weather has changed rather abruptly from hot, sticky summer to fall.  It's chilly and gray now, which I love, but will be totally sick of by spring.  I've had a lot going on in the past few weeks; my sister had her baby, a little girl named Fern, and I'm so stoked to be an aunt.  I got what seems may actually be a permanent job at a retirement home in Wilmette teaching arts and crafts classes once a week, which is going well so far.  I got into my first group gallery show at Petroff Studio Gallery through the Lucid Artist Co-op.  The show starts October 5th.  I'm really excited about that because the Co-op has their own PR person, they put out ads and send out emails all over Chicago, and one of my paintings will even be on a postcard! I'm going to put about four or five pieces in the show but I don't know which ones I want yet.  The problem is that almost all of my paintings are in cafes right now through the end of September, and I don't know if I'm going to sell any there, so I don't want to commit any of those paintings to the Petroff show.

I know for sure I'll put this one in.  I just finished it recently and because I have it on hand this one will go on the postcard:

Tarsier Skull
Acrylic on Canvas
9"x9"

This painting is on a gallery profile canvas, 2" wide.  The edges are painted green and the purple gears continue onto the sides.  Tarsiers have some of the most primitive traits (as opposed to adaptive traits, as we have) found in primates, making them a good candidate for what our very early ancestors may have looked like.  A lot of their features, such as the big bulging eyes with an open socket behind them, have been selected against, for the obvious reason that it would be really easy to poke their eyes out.

The Great Plains
Acrylic on Canvas
6" x 8"

Flies
Acrylic on Canvas
12" x 16"

I feel like my work is slowly evolving.  I don't know if it is maturing necessarily, or if I'm just getting kind of tired of my old subject matter and moving on to new things.  I was doing a lot of birds, jewels, deserts and hearts, all of which I'm still interested in, but I'm mixing in new environments and new characters to my repertoire.  I get kind of obsessed with a certain environment- such as the southwest, and have to paint it.  I have a certain way I paint the southwest.  But I'm also into the north- like the Yukon territory in Canada.  And the Great Plains (see my little buffalo).  Also, I'm trying to break away sometimes from doing landscapes, per the Tarsier Skull.  It's good to have some variety.

Some New Stuff

Since selling some work at the Art Festival, I have felt the need to make some more pieces, especially because I have two shows going on simultaneously.  I have a smaller one at the Kitchen Sink on Berwyn, only about seven paintings, then I'm setting up an exhibit tonight at Dolce Casa Cafe on Damen, which will be a much bigger show.  I'm really excited about Dolce Casa; the owner is very organized and expects me to promote myself and bring people in, and the employees in turn will also talk to interested customers about my work.

So I've created a handful of new, smaller paintings, because smaller work are the ones that sell quicker:

Elklungs
Acrylic on Canvas
10" x 10"

Mooseheart
Acrylic on Canvas
10" x 10"

Rambrain
Acrylic on Canvas
10" x 10"

This set is part of my "imitation" concentration- human organs or machinery trying to disguise themselves as part of nature (see The Machine, The Factory, The Pump, Fresh Fruit Coup).  I feel they were very successful and fit in with this series, while at the same time I was able to experiment with some different painting techniques and styles.

Deer
Acryic on Canvas
6" x 8"

I think this painting is so sweet!

Land Octopus
Acrylic and Gossamer Paper on Canvas
11" x 14"

I want to start incorporating some different mediums into my work, as I've been so focused on acrylic for so long.   This attempt was perhaps not the best, but it is the first in a while, so we'll see how the next one goes.

Finally, Success!

Last weekend my friend Erika and I did our first art fair.  We had a booth at the Glenwood Ave Arts Festival in Rogers Park, right around the corner from my apartment.  WE KILLED.  It was so much fun, we were a lot more successful than we thought we would be, and we got a lot of good feedback from people.

As we were setting up our tent we were saying, "Oh no, we're going to look like such amateurs, we have no idea what we're doing..." but it came together really well aesthetically, especially the second day.  We both had paintings and jewelry, and I had pottery and little handmade journals as well.  We had three tables set up and arranged in interesting ways, then paintings hanging from the side.  I think the result was very eye-catching, then we had a nice flow from one table to the next, so we had a lot of visitors to our tent.  Most people just looked around, some people wanted to talk to us about our work, and some people bought stuff.  I had business cards right in front, and a lot of people were picking up my cards.  I've already had one person contact me asking me to do another fair next weekend, but the entry fee is $350...so, unfortunately I can't do that.  But it was flattering that he asked!

This is what our tent looked like:

All in all I sold 8 paintings, three pots, and one pair of earrings.  To be fair, most of the stuff I sold was to people I know, but that's ok!  My parents bought my Delicacies triptych, my friend Libbey bought Georgia O'Keefe, Noel bought my Mushrooms, Jake bought the Lightbulbs, and I made two little skull paintings specifically for the festival and a stranger bought one and my friend Kasey bought the other.

I feel like I finally broke the seal in selling work, and now all I have to do is keep the momentum going.  I also feel like I got some recognition at this festival.  People took me and Erika very seriously as artists, and probably assumed we were a lot more experienced and professional than we actually are.  I can now say I've sold some paintings and had a couple shows.  I'm setting up another small one today at this cafe called the Kitchen Sink, and then another bigger one at Dolce Casa Cafe.  Since I've now sold 6 large pieces, and I have two simultaneous shows coming up and another one in October, I've got to get to work making new paintings! This is the only new one I have other than my little guys above:

Shiny Things Three
Acrylic on Canvas
16" x 12"

Not Much Goin' On

It's August, and I always feel like there is this stagnant air to this month.  We're all trying to slowly savor the last days of summer before the world kicks into gear again in September.  The heat is oppressive, though not so much today.  Our air conditioner broke, so we keep the shades drawn and the lights off all day, which contributes to this feeling I have of pungent, melancholy bliss.

I should really get out of the house and go do something.

I went on vacation a little over a week ago.  My mom and I went to Seattle for my sister's baby shower, then I went to Olympia and hung out with my friends Nick and Carlos, then back to Seattle, then to Portland with my sister and Carlos.  It was busy, and I guess I was expecting inspiration that didn't come.  We went to the ocean, and it was dreary and ugly.  We went hiking around the Cascade River Gorge and saw a lot of pretty waterfalls, but I never got that breath of air that felt like I was really somewhere else, unique and different.  There were too many other people around.  But I have come to the conclusion that I need to live somewhere like Portland where I can go on day or weekend hikes at the whim.

I have one new painting, and it is about the Northwest.  Oddly, I had finished most of it  before I even left.

Northwest
Acrylic on Canvas
20" x 16"

I remember being at beaches in Washington that had these really cool caves and rock formations  when I was a kid.  Weird things wash up on the beaches, at least they are weird to me.

Little Experiment

Usually my process of painting is to just work on one at a time.  I don't start a new one unless my previous one is completely finished, even if I'm working on a series.  This time around I decided to work on two paintings simultaneously, that have nothing to do with each other thematically, and document the process.  The only thing these paintings have in common is that I was using some  elements of steampunk in them.

The Heart of Captain Kurtz
Acrylic on Canvas
10" x 20"

This painting is about the character of Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  The novel was written at the height of the steam engine (the main character is in the Congo building a steamboat) and also takes place during one of the darkest times of history.  

The Machine
Acrylic on Canvas
16" x 20"

Summer

It's been about 95 degrees for the past week.  We finally got air conditioning in our apartment, so once again we can breathe and move around.  Chicago has such awful, intolerable weather most of the year, I don't know why we all continue to live here.

My paintings have been up at Beans and Bagels for about a week now, and so far no bites from potential buyers.  I didn't leave any business cards with them, but I'm picking a bunch up from the printing place today and I'll drop them off tomorrow.  By the way, never go to Kinko's.  That place is an awful, evil corporation with nasty, incompetent employees.  Go to your local business instead.

Check out the new work:

Fresh Fruit Coup
Acrylic on Canvas
18" x 18"

I really like this one, I'm really into these hearts.  My boyfriend is getting so sick of me painting hearts over and over again but too bad.  They're fun to paint and I love how they look.

Luxury
Acrylic on Canvas
12" x 16"

I wanted to make a really ugly creature in an ugly landscape beautiful.   She and papa vulture are decorating their nest because even vultures have the right to live luxuriously.

Reverse Organic
Acrylic on Canvas
14" x 11"

This one is a little different, and I'm not too crazy about it, though people who have seen it have given me positive feedback.  I wanted to make an inorganic object look natural.

First Exhibit!

Today I put up my first exhibit at Beans and Bagels, 1812 W. Montrose.  It was really awesome to see a selection of my paintings up on a wall together.  I think it looks great.  They are for sale, but mostly I'm just excited for people to see my work.  This is the first of three cafe exhibits I have lined up, and I just want to get my name out there and hopefully I'll sell a couple paintings in the process.  It's kind of weird to send my babies out into the world- (anything could happen to them, coffee spillage, psychopaths, earthquakes, etc)- but that's what they're made for!

I took a really terrible picture of them with my phone, I'm going to go back and take a better one with my camera.

I had to climb up really high on this ladder to hang the ones on top, it was kind of scary.  I also put labels next the paintings on the bottom, but I took this picture before I put them up.  This is eleven paintings, but several of them are meant to be viewed and sold as sets.

Go check 'em out!

I Haz Website Now

I decided I needed a professional looking website as I have a couple of exhibits coming up.  It was kind of a lot of work, and I probably paid way too much for the whole package (domain name, web hosting, design templates...) but I'm very pleased with the result.

www.sarahcurllarsonart.com

 I remember I had to make a website freshman year of college for a graphic design class and mine was pretty horrendous.  We built them from this really bad Adobe program that no one uses anymore and the color got skewed when they were published, so it made my already bad design look even worse.  I didn't understand design at all then. Not to say I do now, but I have an idea that a website should be clean, easy to navigate, and eye-catching.  It's not about cramming as many weird little images and superfluous design elements onto a page as possible.  That's one of my pet peeves, in fact: badly designed websites.  When I'm perusing yelp looking for a restaurant to go to that night, I won't go to one that has a bad website, even if it has good reviews and the menu looks delicious.  It just makes you have less respect for that business.  So I hope people like my website.

What else is new...I've been hard at work in the ceramics lab.  I've been pursuing the same theme of my paintings with my pottery.  Mostly I just make these little vases, then add stuff to them and carve them.  My friend told me that I'm not very adventurous, but all my vases turn out very unique.  I also bought a set of underglazes with a gift certificate my sister gave me for my birthday, so I'm super excited to use them! I like bright colors, if you hadn't noticed by now, and that's hard to achieve with the glaze selection available.

Here are some pictures of some of my pots:

I Think I Need to Slow Down

I've noticed that I churn out paintings at kind of an alarming rate.  Sometimes two a week.  I can't stop, I finish one and I start the other right away.  I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about making art, because the last couple paintings I've done I haven't been that pleased with.  I should probably take more time to think them through, work on them, re-work them, study them, make changes, etc.  But I don't. Instead I just keep spitting them out.

I feel some pressure to make more because I have four upcoming shows- Beans and Bagels in July, the Kitchen Sink in August, the Glenwood Arts Fest August 17th and 18th, then the Common Cup in October.  I'm also going to submit a few to a LGBT pride show at the Kitchen Sink in July.  So, in the event that I actually sell my paintings, I'll need to have more for the subsequent shows.  So, here I go, churning them out:

The Factory
Acrylic on Canvas
24" x 18"

This is the finished version of this painting.  I added a couple more jellyfish and touched up a few details.

The Plight of the Lovebird
Acrylic on Canvas
14" x 18"

No Rain in the Desert
Acrylic on Canvas
14" x 11"

Betsy Johnson
Acrylic on Canvas
9" x 12"

Rainy Day

Today is a rainy day after a lot of hot sunny days, perfect for drinking a cup of coffee and writing a new post.  My sister is pregnant with a girl (!!!!) and I'm so excited to be an aunt.  She is due in September.  She's having a baby shower in July, so I'm going out to Seattle for that.  I don't know if my mom is going to go, she seems to think she can't afford it. . . But the baby shower is the weekend after my friends Benito and Larra's wedding in Ann Arbor, so unfortunately Norberto and I won't be able to go to that.  People are growing up! It's crazy that my sister is having a baby.  I'm really excited for my parents to be grandparents as well! I wish we could go to the wedding but I can't take two weekends off from work in a row.

I also got a second job at the Chicago Art and Design Center.  So far I've taught two birthday parties for little girls to learn how to paint with acrylics.  It's super fun and really gratifying.  On Sunday this little boy who is apparently usually really hyperactive painted a really awesome parrot, and his parents were so impressed.  That made me feel good.

I have a couple new paintings, Enjoy!

The Pump
Acrylic on Canvas
12" x 16"

I don't know what to call this one yet.  Any suggestions?
Acrylic on Canvas
11" x 14"

The Factory
Acrylic on Canvas
24" x 16"

This is the unfinished photo of this painting.  I did some more work on it, and I'll post the final painting later.