[blog: 10/3] life lately 🌼 preparing for the show, finishing paintings, sketching with acrylics, gardening!

{ End of September / Start of October month review journal, 2024 }
the music in the video is from a recording of my partner playing around on his keyboard hehe
🌼🌼🌼


(above: meowdy from Charlie, our visiting stray has made herself very comfortable in our new veggie garden)

Hello!

Hope you've all been well for the past couple months! It's been such a busy time for me but I wanted to share some of what's been happening in another blog post- both for those who are curious but also for the sake of capturing some feelings and memories during this pretty exciting time for me!

🌼 September's little list:

• lots of gardening

• lots of partner quality time

• new critter friends due to gardening

• wrapping up freelance contract, thinking about career shifts

• preparing & getting everything ready for October group show

• finished my largest painting yet, bigger goals

• trying to make sketching/exploration more fun again

👒 At Home

I started a new storyboarding contract at the beginning of August and it was winding down by mid September, so I was spending a lot of time at home either using my free time to paint or garden! At the end of August, I had an urge to.. GARDEN...I wanted to transform our backyard area- a place where we've been ignoring and neglecting for the past year and a half (largely because we rent) but I've been reading a lot of non fiction about nature during this time (see: Braiding Sweetgrass, Light Eaters, Saving Time) and mostly, I wanted to give us a reason to sit outside and spend time outside without having to travel to a local park. So we got cookin' with watching a ton of youtube videos about building raised beds, preparing soil and looked on craigslist for free dirt and free planters, etc! It's been about 6 weekends since the weekend we started to build it and we now have 4 raised beds, a trellis and 12 different kinds of veggie babies growing steadily! it's crazy how quickly time has passed and how quickly the california weather affects these little guys. Peas and turnips have already started to grow pods and heads- every morning I feel so amazed at the rate that things change.
We've also started using a compost tumbler out there, to turn out food scraps into dirt!
It's been fun to adapt to our changing environment and it's new visiting critters and insects too- I encountered a beautiful fig eating beetle, a swallowtail butterfly, a clumsy lil possum..... and .....so many ants (the ants have been stressful)
new things are happening every day! It's been very lively just being at home.
I'll send updates in another month to show the growth but all in all it's really been such a fun ongoing project/activity to share with my partners.

🖼️
Preparing For The Group Show

Much of this September has also been about getting ready for the October show- typing up labels, printing and cutting them, figuring out my wall arrangement and wiring everything to be hung- packing prints, etc. I felt .. nervous and excited! often blurring between the two..
I felt really grateful to have been accepted as a member but also so nervous that my work looked like it didn't fit there or wasn't up to par... even though I know art is hugely subjective.

(^ a snapshot of the planning meeting before the hang night )

I'm definitely still working with a lot of imposter syndrome...! but at the core of it, I am very happy to be taking this first step towards my bigger dreams and to be joining a community of other local artists!

🔨 🐻 Hanging Night

Writing this on Wed-Oct 2nd, the hang night was actually just yesterday! It went smoothly and was quite a fun memory to share with my husband. Here are all the pieces packed up and getting loaded into the car:

And here's my wall space section before we started to put my arrangement up! (always fun to see a before & after : P )

I recorded a timelapse to capture the memory! you can see us bumbling around in it here:
[ ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/posts/113269892 ]

I really don't know how I could have got this done without my big guy- hauling 11 pieces to the city, bringing tools- hanging them up- it would have been a pain without help! I feel immensely grateful.
The view from outside the gallery's window:

feels pretty cool!

Other Things I've Been Up To

as I've been packing prints, editioning them and making more artwork- I've had to contemplate how I'd like to be signing my stuff moving forward. I've always had such an aversion to signing my art.. but the more time I spend in physical creating/sharing space- the more I realize it's necessary.. I decided to get a carved stamp with my given chinese name. I think it looks pretty neat!
my local physical prints and framed works are all signed and editioned with this stamp.
I never get very many opportunities to use my chinese name, being 2nd gen, so bringing it into my creative work/identity has felt fulfilling and nice.

(above) Here are the latest works in the studio! I thought I'd start sharing more in progress stuff in my blog posts- just to give you an idea of what is coming down the line sometimes. I have a few others that I finished before these but I'll leave those a surprise, since I'm in the middle of editting their videos. The big one (I'm titling it: "Everybody is fed" ) was finished at the end of August, I have lots of footage but haven't even started editing the video yet so it'll likely take a while before I'll be able to queue up the timelapse for that one.. but please look forward to it! I had so much fun painting it. I'm really liking the direction my paintings are going right now. Eventually, I plan to lock myself into a single ratio and scale for these images. I'd really love to just push scenes out at a very immersive size and then work towards a solo show sized collection. That feels like a far away and kind of naive dream right now, but that's what I'd like to work towards, even if it only happens when I become an old lady. I just wish I could have more time to focus on painting, instead of balancing it with freelance production schedules.

lately, I've been thinking a lot about my career path and my relationship to art making, and how mostly, I've just been more and more wanting to dream up ways that I can find time to paint and work on my own series..

🎨 Playing again

finally, I thought I'd share some recent sketchbook pages. recently, my big himi gouache palette grew mold.. it's been too warm up here.. I tried to recover it a few different ways but it didn't really work, so I had to discard it. but that made me want to give my acrylics a try again- and I think I'm getting the hang of sketching with it!

I am loving how it forces me to work fast with my brush and the fun textures you can get with being rough on the paper. and I thought I wouldn't like that the layers don't blend (unlike gouache and oil where your last strokes can be reactivated and blended), but for sketching it actually helps me a lot! I think I was struggling for a while with gouache sketching, I never felt fully satisfied with the studies I did.. It's been a bit easier to feel satisfied when playing with acrylic. I don't know what it is!
anyway, I'm thinking this might be a great way to do color tests and color thumbnails before creating them at full scale in oil moving forward.

That's all I have for now, but it ended up being quite a lot! If you read this far, I hope it was interesting to you! I'll let you know how the opening night for the show goes in the next blog post.


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Thanks again for your support!

💛

all my love,

LITTLELIST