Me, This Afternoon

Visit Girlish Whimsy in at it's new home.

Or, check out Curiosities, an "electronic wonder-room" on tumblr.

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad

This is what I made Maw and Paw for their 38th anniversary*. Check them out, in all their youthful innocence (at ages 22 and 23).



*Yes, it is the cheapest gift ever.

New Art!

A portrait of my friend Esmerelda FitzMonster*, circa 2002.

And, me, circa a few minutes ago.

*Not her real name

Is It Just Me...

...Or is Sir Walter Raleigh giving me the "Pattinson Eye" in this portrait?



Aw, and look, he's got his kid doing it too:



Is that the look that got Bess Throckmorton in to bed?



Liz and her ermine are Not Amused.

Father's Day (DAD DON"T LOOK)

I made my father three portraits of himself for Father's Day. It may just be the cheapest gift in the history of gifts, as it didn't even cost the price of paper/paint.

But he's required to love it because I made it, right?

Right?

That is so Hufflepuff

You know how, during the run of a show, there comes a point where you get a little sick of the play and everyone involved and you have to try really hard to remind yourself why you wanted to be an actor in the first place?

Or is that just me?

Anyway, we just finished our first week of rehearsals and right now we're in the bright and shiny patch where everything is fun and new and exciting. And because I'm a bitter husk of a human being who hates love (remind me to post about that later), all this happy joy of performance makes me think of last summer, specifically the parts of last summer when I felt like most of the rest of the company could take a long walk off a short pier, and take all the stupid costumes with them while they were at it.

One day, we were all sitting around backstage, sweating through our costumes, when somehow the topic of Harry Potter came up (I have this theory that the sort of theatre person who gravitates toward Shakespeare tends to also gravitate toward meticulously created fantasy worlds. Maybe I'll post about that sometime too).

Nearly a year later, I can't quite recall how the conversation went, but it turned into a discussion of how Hufflepuff was clearly the lamest house, and how humiliating it would be to be placed in Hufflepuff, and how any kid who actually wanted to be in Hufflepuff would be the Saddest Kid on Earth. And from thence we invented the adjective Hufflepufflian, for instances of rank stupidity and egregious laziness. The phrase "that's so Hufflepuff" was tossed around to describe thoughts of extreme lameness.

But the apex of this bored, sweaty and somewhat mean-spirited bout of Hufflepuff mockery (after we'd singled out the cast members who were obvious Hufflepufflians), was the founding Hufflepuff Community College.

And all of that was just a very unnecessarily long introduction to this:


I'll go ahead and justify it's creation as Photoshop practice.

Portraits

"Charlie"

Some more.

Three Newts

Newt Tree


See the other two

For No Reason

Drew this while I was on the phone.

19th Century Illustrations of Dinosaurs

Henry de la Beche, Duria Antiquior

(If you look closely, you can see that many of the dinosaurs are pooping.)



And here's what they looked like when not eating each other:
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkings, Teleo, Ichthio and Plesiosaurus



I love how sneaky this one looks:
Megalosaurus



Iguanodon

This one doubled as a lovely spot for dinner

Bamboo Art

Made on my Bamboo

Art?

I'm pretty ignorant/indifferent when it comes to Art (the expensive, capitalized kind you find in galleries). I can, and do, go on endlessly about Theatre, Literature, Music and Film, but my knowledge of the other stuff, the stuff that used involve canvas and marble and now involves human remains and feces, is admittedly lacking. In a conversation about anything that happened after the 19th century, art-wise, I'm basically confined to smiling and nodding.

If forced to express an opinion, I would say that I have no problem hearing about why 500 rubber chickens hanging from the ceiling of a black box with the sound of cash register ringing in the background, say, is a meaningful critique of factory farming, or a witty commentary on art as product, or whatever, I'm not especially interested in actually seeing it. If more work went into the artist's statement than into the piece itself, then reading the statement is, to me, a better use of my time than seeing the thing it explains. Once I know why some one believes that a chipped tea cup with a single raven's feather in it is worth putting on a pillar in a gallery, there's no need for me to haul my ass there and look at it; I've seen a tea cup before, I've seen a feather, I can extrapolate.

On the other hand, if that some one had painstakingly fashioned an exact replica of a tea cup with a feather in it out of plastic, or spam, or the hair of 1989 Pink Jubilee Barbie Dolls, I'd be all about seeing it in person, whether the rationale for doing so was interesting or not. I might look at it more in the way that I'd look at Corn Palace or the world's largest ball of twine than in the way I'd look at The Death of Marat, but I'd definitely be intrigued.

So, there's art whose concept is more important than it's execution, to which I typically say "Meh, who needs to see it, then?" And there's art whose execution is more important than it's concept, which may not even bother with a concept, to which I mostly say, "Sure, I'll gawk at that."*

But not until now have I said "I would like to be that art!"

In the New Museum’s first triennial survey, “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,” (because all the artists were under 33, I suppose), Chu Yun hired women to come to the museum and sleep in the middle of the gallery all day.



Seriously. How do I get that job? Icelandic Elf Inspector has just been bumped to second place on my Most Desired Form of Employment list.

You may also enjoy this condescending take on the exhibit's opening:

"Four floors of self-referential young-person art dealing with young-person topics. Think new-media references like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, Internet jargon (e.g., “OMG”)"

Now, I make no judgements on whether or not any of the art presented was any good, since I a) don't care to do enough research to figure it out and b) am not qualified to make that judgement anyway. But I find it funny how the things called "young-person topics" are mostly things that the agéd media has been squawking with alarm about ("Good heavens, have you heard that the childrens are sending naked pictures of themselves? Also, I fear they use poor grammar and baffling acronyms!")

What should art explore, if not the human experience? What is unique about the turn-of-the-21st-century human experience, if not our unprecedented access to each other's personal ephemera? If anything, young people should be faulted for failing to try and find what's meaningful about the strange combination of inerconnectedness and isolation internet life imposes. Those of us who were teenagers when the online community went mainstream are in a unique position to appreciate how it changed the way we socialize, the way we access information, the way we experience life (or, perhaps, fail to experience it in favor of "documenting" it).

Whatever, though. The real point is, how do I get paid for sleeping? I'd be awesome at it:





*And, of course, there's art which inventively employes craft in service of an idea. You know, the good kind.