Painting On a Budget...and a few old poems

I found an old set of oil paints and brushes today. With my budget for art supplies standing at $0 I made due. The paints were in fair condition considering that they've been boxed away for nearly 6 years. The brushes, on the other hand, were rock hard. Let's just say that I might as well have been finger painting. My other challenge, the fact that I don't have a single blank canvas. Instead, I used the card stock that I've been using to print resumes on. Of three paintings, one is actually good enough for me to feel comfortable sharing. It's still drying out but I hope to upload it tomorrow.

Let me also add that I cannot draw to save my life which means that painting does not come naturally either. I'm an abstract amateur artist at best. Photography and poetry are more my mediums.

Here are a few poems from my collection to end this post. Again, they are all untitled:

Roses blossom
From the trodden
Dirt path
In the center
They bloom
Brilliant red
Against
Cavernous black
Beauty


Stay
Just one more moment
I'm still lost
In the maze of
Your eyes


I stumble along
In the blinding darkness
The deafening silence
To my place of peace
Within
Your arms

Unfinished

A wish
Second guessed
Then taken
Ripped away
Torn
Another piece
Of me
Misplaced
Spoiled

Architecture

This one has taken a beating over the years. It was
underexposed to begin with but I think it gives
it a little something.

NYC is the best place in the world to photograph
architecture.

This is my absolute favorite piece. It is a stairwell at Maymont Park in Richmond, VA. I won a few contests with this image and have sold a few prints.

Found one of my portfolios!!

This is one of my favorites. I exposed it onto metallic paper.
I really miss being in a darkroom. It is so much easier to work with digital media but there is such a great sense of accomplishment when you take flimsy film and turn it into artwork.














This is the same image printed on regular old photo paper.

A Few Old Poems

Here are some old poems that I came across while rummaging through storage yesterday. They're all Untitled:

Wilderness of crazy hair
Entraps an oval face
Guided by a faulty light
That shines to another place
Walks alone in cold despair
Through dark & treacherous night
Breathes in and out the poisoned air
As she reaches for the light

>>>>>>

Calling you
In fits of
Greed
Another chance
Repentance
Even
Then I knew if
The truth would

Ever

Stay

>>>>>>

You sleep
And I hate you
I rise with the sun
Can't sleep til dark again
Makes me feel empty
I need the sun
The breeze
The smell of day
You need the moon
The stars
The mystery of night
How can it work?
Day and Night
Cannot be together
They have but mere moments
In common

>>>>>>

I Survived My Storage Unit

I am happy to report that I made it out of my storage unit alive. I did get myself trapped at one point but no serious injuries. I am fairly ticked off to report that I still have not located my portfolios and journals. I found some old work from a class I took in high school and a few of my very amateur attempts at painting. I'm hoping that the portfolios will turn up soon. I've run out of places to look and maybe I'm just looking too hard. This just means that I better get busy working on a new portfolio. Luckily I still have the slides that got me into SCAD so I can get reprints of my work.


This is my sorry attempt at painting. It's acrylic mixed medium (the weird squares are actually fragments of a mirror). I think I'll stick to the photography for now. More to come later...

Bummer

Well, today really put a hitch in my giddy-up! The weather was formidable and my little models (the kids I nanny for) were in remarkably uncooperative moods. What can I say, they are 2 and 4! I attempted to establish some decent lighting and an appropriate back-drop inside. The pictures looked like candids that the 2 year old probably could have taken. Better luck next time. I'm feeling rather low...it's been a really crappy year for me. My sudden desire to recapture my long lost talents is a product of having survived some fairly awful events recently. I'm trying to find some silver lining and give myself a much needed ego boost. I will try again tomorrow. I'm off of work so I'll have to find someone or something else to photograph. Keeping my fingers crossed. In the meantime I will be working on scanning in my old portfolios....once I find them.

Some Old Work

I swore by my 35mm SLR and promised to never go digital. This makes it quite a task to keep up with my old portfolios and even more of a challenge to get the images onto my computer. Here are a few pictures that I happened to have stored on my old lap top.

This first one is of a man that I encountered while vacationing in Belize. He creates these paintings with only his fingers and nails.

This next image is a still life that was doctored on PhotoShop. It was for a project in the Commercial Photography course that I took in high school. Wow, it has been a long time!

Covering The Bases

So after my first blogging attempt, I have decided to err on the side of caution just in case blogging doesn't turn out to be my niche. I have located my professional digital camera and plan to dig through the boxes in my storage unit until I find my old notebooks and art supplies. I am determined to find a creative outlet and to start doing what I used to enjoy again.

Today was a day of preparation. Tomorrow I will make my first attempt at children's portraits in over 3 years. I am lucky to know about a bazillion families with small children who are more than willing to let me photograph them.

My plan for Friday is to paint something. I am not talented when it comes to drawing and painting. My paintings are always abstract because I have never been able to recreate an existing image. I paint emotion and most of the time my paintings are hideous. But for me, it's not about the finished product, it's about the rewards that are gained in the simple act of putting brush to canvas.

Wish me luck!

Blog Virgin

First off, forgive me, I am completely new to this whole blogging thing. I am using this as a last ditch effort to bust through the wall of writer's block that's been surrounding me for the past 3 years. I used to write to get things out...to work through crap. I had aspired to become a photojournalist to combine both of my passions (and what used to be my talents) into a rewarding career. But it seems that I have been losing bits and pieces of myself over the years. So this is my anonymous attempt to get some of those pieces back.