Lost/Last #1

I watched Season 1 religiously: I was living in Pensacola and we had just survived Hurricane Ivan, so we were kind of shipwrecked ourselves. Lost premiered the night the storm hit, we lost power for three days, and then the next Tuesday, the pilot was rebroadcast. I was hooked.  I loved that initial ride, then watched only sporadically at best after Season 2, so I'm not one of the chosen few. The way I see it, that last hour, and especially the last ten minutes, without all the insane complications of plot, wrapped up the story that drew me in, in the first place, in the sadly satisfying manner of "An Ocurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."

Dailies: Portia and Bird

I've been working on a children's book about Portia for a few years now.  I think I had to figure out color first, and I'm FINALLY happy with the results. So, this will be one of my summer projects: images for the book and also stand-alone images like this one for a proposed Etsy shop. I think the bird is proportionally too big, and it's sort of a generic bird. I may change it to a mockingbird or a mourning dove or a blue jay or something.

Dailies: (In progress): What is wrong, young pretty girl?

(In progress): One of the most memorable (and funny and surreal) scenes from the Pilot,  in which a bored and attention-seeking Audrey lets slip to the Norwegians, that her "friend Laura was found face down on a rocky beach, completely naked....she'd been murdered."

Dailies: "The Mimic"

Mimic see, Mimic do.
One of my favorite SNL skits from back when SNL was actually funny.
I spent most of the 90s quoting this rarity, which cannot be found on YouTube, or on the Saturday Night Live Best of Alec Baldwin DVD, or anywhere.  I think it may be because Paul McCartney plays Simon Bain's butler.

Dailies: "Recipe for Hot Chocolate"

When my friend Jess and I hung out this rainy, cold Wednesday, I made hot chocolate for both of us, a'la my version of the recipe used by Juliette Binoche's character Vianne in Lasse Halstrom's film Chocolat. I only put the cayenne in my cup, though Jess was intrigued, and thought I should illustrate the recipe. The results are pretty literal, but not as easy as it seems on the surface. 

Dailies: "That Video Footage of Laura and Donna"

It would have been a fun extra on the Twin Peaks box set, that footage that Donna claimed was taken by an unknown woman hiker (who was really good guy/biker James Hurley).  In the video, Donna and Laura goof around and act exactly like a couple of teenage girls, which seems to be important at first only because Laura is alive in the video (I can think of only one straight out flashback: when Laura gives half of her heart necklace to James.  Laura was usually seen and heard though indirect means, like  this video, the homecoming portrait, and the audio tapes made for Doctor Jacoby) though later Cooper is able to extract a clue in the Harley Davidson reflected in an extreme closeup of Laura's eye.  "Looks like a hog to me."

Dailies: Green/Ginger

When I lost my voice in the middle of travel season last November, drinking half a box of Tazo Green Ginger Tea restored it to a Demi-Moore-like raspiness, so I was at least able to do my presentation (3x) and review 15 or so portfolios (the mental and physical collapse came later).  It would be too much to say that this commemorates that, but I had  one of the labels sitting around in my sketchbook since then. My motto, or the moral of the story is: If something sits around long enough, it gets incorporated in artwork. 

Dailies: "Agent Cooper/Gary Cooper"

David Lynch likes to have fun with naming his characters. Sheriff Harry S. Truman.  Dale Cooper: D.B. Cooper: (and as Dr. Jacoby mistakenly assumes) Gary Cooper.  I had the Gary Cooper stamps lying around (they were from a scholarship application envelope at work) and pasted them into my moleskine on a whim, not knowing what composition would evolve.  I remembered the scene, played around with it, and  this is what occurred.


 

Dailies: "That Scene in the Twin Peaks Pilot with Laura Palmer in Disguise"

There, I've gone and given it away. It's a fun piece of trivia, though, especially since Sheryl Lee was playing a dead girl, the tragic Laura Palmer, that she should turn up alive, wigged and padded and bespectacled as the clerk at the bank who takes Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman to Laura's safety deposit box.
It's a foreshadowing of Madeleine Ferguson, Laura's identical cousin.
When Cooper and Truman glance at the deer head on the table, without a beat she says, "It fell down." I'm not a fan of taxidermy, but I love that the deer looks like it's eavesdropping on the conference.

Dailies: "Multiplying Binomials"

So, in this dream, I'm in high school, which is an amalgam of all the schools I've ever gone to. There are hallways  and breezeways and staircases and walls of lockers.  The bell has just rung, and it hits me, that even though we're five weeks into the first six-week period, I haven't been to math class once since the first day of class.  How can that be? We have our eight classes every single day, so there's no way I could have forgotten, and as much as I hated math back then, I would NOT have skipped a day of class, much less 25 days of class. It takes me a while to locate my classroom and I sit down to a quiz on what I first thought was the quadratic equation, but now know to be the FOIL method of multiplying binomials and polynomials in Algebra 2.  I don't wake up immediately, but the dream seems so real, and seeps into my consciousness the next day until I realize: it's happened again. 

Dailies: "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg/Ranunculus"

 

I'm a little backlogged on the dailies. Lately I've been drawing whatever crosses my mind, and these were on my radarscreen last week. Or was it the week before?

I bought three weeks of ranunculus and wish they lasted longer.

The first time I saw Umbrellas (at the Baltimore Museum of Art during a Freestyle screening) I cried, my friends cried, we all cried–at a movie in which every line of dialogue is sung.

Dailies: "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves"

I've been catching up on my short story podcasts, including this extraordinary story by Karen Russell,  read by Joanna Gleason at Symphony Space.  It's a tale about the children of werewolves (the condition skips a generation) being rehabbed by nuns at a Catholic home, for an attempt to return to civilization, and is at turns both hilarious and heartbreaking.  

I didn't like the cover of the actual book (yes, I do judge books by their covers, like Stuart Murdoch).

This is how I re-imagined it.

State 1 contains a big typo: in a classic Freudian slip,  I switched out "Home" for "School", which considering that the month of April was mostly spent at

MICA, weekends included, is uncannily accurate.  The correct title is St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

Yeah, I should have checked before I inked, but it's a pretty snazzy looking mistake.

State 2: Playing around with layers. The top layer is not quite as vibrant as I hoped. I'd be happier with the transparency if the colors were a bit brighter. I don't like the author's name on the bottom: could use more ingenuity!

Dailies: Fox/Fascinator

Common elements: 

Pheasant Fascinator (found on Etsy, coveted ever since I saw it on Nora Zehetner in Brick)

Fox spied in the shrubbery off Northern Parkway

"A Curtain of Green": short story by Eudora Welty that I was listening to Frances Sternhagen read on the Selected Shorts podcast this morning

Makes me think of: Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

New New Pornographers album Together out tomorrow