It's far too appropriate that it has taken me over a year to update this.
​Too much has happened in a year for me to delude myself or anyone that I could just plunk it all right down here with words.
​I'm in transition once again. Painting now feels like my grounding point and a stabilizing force. I find the time. I started tending bar. It's a laid back enough place that on dead nights I can sit in a window onto bourbon street and draw quick sketches of people passing by. I am acquiring stacks of these little sketch books that can fit in ones palm. What will I do with all of them? What do any of us do with ourselves?

​I feel steady in my craft. I miss my long idle hours. I love my son who now sucks them up, leaving some scattered for sleep or shower. I enjoy having my circumstances dictate my materials; Palette knife + limited palette oils for the moments I need to take myself seriously. Pull out the wooden easel and make shift paint palette from the freezer (because I am too frugal to waste even a dime of paint.) When my child cries awake from napping or my eyes pull me to sleep I can just wipe the knives clean without worry of a spilled can of turpentine.
​At work I have my tiny notebooks + micron pens...and lately brush pens.  Massing...god I love massing. Toying with fast drying materials. Acryla? Gouche on Vellum? I now feel like one who has clearly defined their food allergies and skips toward the buffet to gorge themselves.

Life has been incredibly rough lately for a number of reasons, most of which I'd rather not announce to the internet. One thing I can refer to is a recent local tragedy- the loss of a great artist and good friend to many. I want to use this space to commemorate the life & work of Ben Gregory. If you met me selling art on the street in New Orleans and pay attention to such things there's a very good chance you met Ben and saw his work too. He was relentless in pouring himself into his work and his work into the world.

Ben was one of the first people I met moving to New Orleans in 2004. We weren't best friends, we often made plans to hang out and would later be nodding in understanding at our mutual flakiness. We both still have books leant to the other a number of years ago that never got re-exchanged. When I first heard the news that was what really got me- Ben was someone so familiar and comfortable to me I assumed I would just always see him. My favorite times were when we didn't make plans and bumped into each other and loitered for hours and shared awesome twisting conversations about art- about techniques and materials, about intentions and results and about what we were working on and what was actually coming out.  Here are some stray bits of those conversations that spilled over online:

As a person Ben was genuinely kind and unpretentious. As an artist he was extremely original & restlessly dedicated. I fucking hate that this is post-mortem and I can't shake the nagging sense that Ben was right in the middle of his work when he got taken out of this world. If anything, I'm hoping we can still share the vitality of his work, so if you haven't been exposed here is a small portion:

It's been awhile since I last wrote, so plenty to tell. Thankfully the summers gone...in September The Decadence parade rolled through my office. This, like plenty other events in New Orleans, attracts the holier than thou - the jesus freaks who come to save us from ourselves with hand made signs and bullhorns. Since I grew up as a homeschooler messianic Jew (jews for jesus) I know better than to argue with religious zealots. Since I'm Italian (why not blame ancestry here) I lack the self-control not to loudly refute things I find irritating and begin spasming with gestures. When I saw them coming down the street prior to the parade I talked to myself "Yeah, be cool, just let them pass..." And then they started hollering about how we all deserved Katrina happening and we're all going to hell and then the spirit took hold of me too and I started screaming back that they all needed to go home.
Bullhorn prophet stopped in the middle of the road and gestured back at my paintings on the fence,
    "And Lord Jesus, Curse this girl! Curse her business! Let her make no sales today!
In the name of the Almighty!"
Even though I was steamed up and really wanted to continue arguing this just confused me. Doesn't 'cursing' someone sound a little bit, I don't know, witchy, maybe a little pagan? Is putting a curse on someone really in the good book?
Anyhow, their prophecy didn't hold much water because I ended up selling plenty of paintings & then the parade came and made it even better.

The one that bothered me the most was a big blue rectangle, probably 10 ft tall by 2 ft wide, it was made of some kind of shiny plastic looking material and was displayed resting against the wall. If I could liken it to anything, I'd say it looked like a piece of McDonalds playground equipment that they had ordered in the wrong size. Just looking at it exasperated me (see! it IS art because it got a reaction out of me! But with that logic...the mousetraps in my kitchen get an even stronger reaction from me when I hear them snap across the house...therefor mousetraps must be art.) I looked at the little plaque next to me for explanation and it was titled, "Why Not?"
I'll tell you why not! Because someone had to carry that thing up the stairs! Because here I am in a museum which is supposed to house our most precious cultural artifacts and this big blue rectangle is taking up space where something that doesn't just provoke a 'reaction' (like every single thing in the world does) but provokes a sense of curiousity, wonder...maybe even 'awe'. (Remember Awe America!?! When something actually stopped you in your tracks and made you stand still for longer than 30 seconds and you didn't even have a word for it so you just stood all gape mouthed and went 'awwwwe')  Anyhow, I tried to find a picture of this piece of art to post here, but couldn't find one. So here's a rendering I made that should pretty much give you the same effect.

On the other side of things I recently discovered 2 artists who's work is really exciting to me:
 

As for me....painting is going really well. I've gotten a lot closer to being able to visibly merge together the 'seen' world (working from reference) and the 'unseen' world (random intuitive mark making). I this is the closest I've gotten so far....not sure how well the details in the body show up through a screen.

I've got a bunch of markets coming up before the holidays. If you're passing through New Orleans anytime contact me and say Hello!

Summer is always rough. It's soul sedating humidity and not enough tourists and locals bullshitting about one or the other of these topics. Every summer I feel a scramble and I SCHEME. One year I went up to Burlington Vermont to sell on the street there. One year I went out to CA to trim. This year I went to Virginia for 2 weeks to visit my family. To commemorate my mothers 60 years on this planet I compromised my artistic-metaphysical pretensions and painted a simple bowl of fruit that MATCHED HER KITCHEN.  (This is a service I offer ONLY to the person who birthed, bathed, read to me at night & cleaned my boogers off the wall.)

This is actually a painting of FAKE fruit in her kitchen. (see? metaphysics always creeps in...) This was a fascinating thought, albeit a morbid one on my mothers birthday...thinking that this painting doesn't necessarily give away it's plastic immortality.. once we're all dead and gone and this painting makes the rounds of Colonial Beach yard sales who's to ever know that these apples & pears never really did LIVE? No birth, no growth, no rot, no grounds for an empire of fruit fly hell.
To paint it I actually mixed water color patched and held them up against the coloring of her wall (which is yellow). I warmed the yellows so they'd come 'at' you. I snatched little brick a bracks from her shelves to match the reds, though they still ended up a bit purpley (but purple is complimentary to yellow sooo.....) All of this effort should indeed secure my position as most beloved child. (That I live so far away and cannot pop in to do my laundry also probably secures this position.)
    Back home in New Orleans I immediately implemented my most recent SCHEME. I  sublet a friends space in the Quarter and tried to turn it into a temporary art space.

Ah...NEXT summer...the ultimate SCHEME. Until then, I'll just do this:

I didn't get any sleep, stayed up working on a big painting. Around 6 AM I figured, it's the Royal Street Food & Wine Fest- there's gonna be people, the artists are gonna be quick! I may as well get out there now to get my spot.

Turned out the street was totally empty. For hours I was the only one set up. It was a day of minor physical mishaps. My pants ripped on the ride down, once arriving I realized I'd forgotten the clothes pins I use to hang my work with. A kindly, talkative canadian lady watched my stuff while I went to Rouses. All they had were obnoxious pink/purple/blue plastic clothespins. Ah well..the canadian lady bought me some coffee & I drank it blinking, trying to stay conscious.

Another artist showed up, she told me about her other job as a waitress. Said she loved the place, the entertainment factors were high, about a wild day last week involving guns & bath salts. (New band name anyone?)

A guy walked by with a cartoon hand grenade tattoo. I stopped him and asked, "Why would you get that tattoo?"
He stopped and looked surprised. With an enthusiastic gesture he said,
"It's me!"
"What do you mean...internally you identify as a cartoon hand grenade with eyes?"
"No! It's ME! I'm the giant hand grenade down the street!"

A lady who works at a gallery near by came over & bought this piece:

And even left me with a gift of their own work:

This crowd stayed in their 'designated' area. They hardly wandered over. At one point I asked a guy walking by, "Don't you want to engage with us at all?" He said, "No, I don't engage anything." And hurried off in a little bubble. So, yeah.

Then I packed up & rode home and SLEPT & SLEPT & SLEPT.

It's been rainy, so I'm not out. It's kind of nice to have the excuse to have the day off, plus I gotta re-build my rickshaw since the original is made out of cardboard & it is currently 'out of service'.
My boyfriend is helping me (really pretty much building it for me) & we've got a pile of wood and bolts set aside to build one that will hopefully last much longer.
The last day I was out these folks walked by and a woman caught her eye on a piece and said, "Oh, that's like me when I'm worried.." She seemed taken by it, but there's plenty to see in the French Quarter & so they walked on.
A block down her husband turned around and ran back. Quickly & quietly he bought it for her and very covertly we put it in his bag. They strolled back by about a half hour later and the women looked for the piece.
I caught on and got up and acted like I wasn't sure which one and then said reluctantly, "oh..that one is gone.."
It was hard to keep it up because she looked so disappointed, but her husband was trying to hide this wild grin and it made me want to be there later on when he surprised her with it.
I think about things like this...that I wouldn't have gotten to see this part of the  exchange if I were selling through a gallery. As useful as paying the rent is, it's just as much a necessity of living to see demonstrations of love & care. She initially identified with it as herself worrying, for me, him buying this painting for her said, "I love you, and I'm with you- even when you're worrying."
I didn't get their info because of how 'sly' we were being to surprise her, but hopefully they will contact me & I can thank them for sharing the moment with me.

Another pleasant random act of kindness was Richard, a friend from around the Quarter, who appeared with tiny cupcakes.