Psychedelic Sunday

Maybe it's my proximity to the fantastic Menil Collection lately, a museum in Houston with a fantastic surrealism room, but I've been in a very surreal mood so far this year. It's really my favorite art movement -- that and the Symbolists, and the Pre-Raphaelites, but it's the one that I think stretches the furthest back and the deepest for me.

And on the other hand, I watched Yellow Submarine the other day, a lifetime favorite, but which I haven't seen in awhile. Stir in a healthy helping of going through a Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band phase this week and you've got an interesting cocktail of images and ideas and weirdness to be swirling around right now.





So with that, I give you some recent paintings. "Lucy the Snail in Dessertland", above, was inspired by a little character that I saw several times in the background in Yellow Submarine, which was a snail with a colorful shell -- but I mistook the shell for a cupcake! I thought that was a nice idea though so I gave this snail a cupcake shell back.

I thought I'd take that idea a step further and make another mollusc into a dessert treat. I admit this is a little odd. I took what I think is an auger sea shell, the long pointy ones that look a bit like an ice cream cone, and made it into an ice cream cone animal underwater.



01.16 - edited to add one more painting, I might put him in a separate post too but I did him last night after completing this entry. It was kind of impossible to resist once I started doing molluscs with desserts. This one doesn't have a dessert as part of his structure though, he's just carrying the ice cream around, but I had to do it once the idea occurred to me!




On an unrelated note, I also completed a painting I've been wanting to do for awhile. My ghost bottles print has an extremely well-viewed and liked item and I took the idea of ghosts in bottles and transported them into lava lamps for this piece, "Spectrum of Psychedelic Spectres." The original ix 6 x 12 inches but I also made a print that is 8 x 10 inches on photo paper, and it has a wide border at the top and bottom to make up for the strange size.


Here is the painting (above)...


And here (again, above) is the print.


Some of the other things I've been messing around with are the surreal alien landscape paintings I did about three years ago (in January) and working on presenting them as prints. I don't think I ever gave this piece below a more complicated name than "Alien Moon" but it's one of my favorites. I kept the original but I have prints of this now available.



And finally, on the psychedelic theme, I uncovered this painting I did in 2010 and decided to bring it out to share, with some of the flora and fauna of the warmer climate that I am currently enjoying, with flowers known as firewheels (or Indian blanket flower) and passion flowers, as well as my little friends the lizards. I wound up calling it "Sunset in the Magic Garden" (below):



I am working on something for Valentine's Day right now and a few other odds and ends I need to scan or write up a little something about but it's a busy time for art right now -- and enjoying the nice weather and lack of snow, and later sunsets!

Widget?

I'm trying out this widget (look to the right) from Craftcult, which shows a slideshow of items in my Etsy store and lets you see the prices, feedback, hearts, and other stuff. I thought it was pretty useful, let me know if you see if and have an opinion either way!

As I mentioned before, I will close my Artfire store until further notice around Sept. 19, since they only have Pro accounts and since my online sales activity is fairly sporadic and not a fulltime pursuit, I don't want to have a monthly charge at this point in time if I can't devote a lot of time to promoting it. I am going to keep working on making my Etsy offerings better and more diverse.

That reminds me, I have some UFO and alien themed things up right now -- the second in a series of UFO/Alien/Conspiracy theory paintings that I meant to get cracking on a long time ago, and I relisted some ACEOs that I haven't had in the shop in awhile.

First here is a new 6 x 8 inch painting with a bug-like lizard alien, Saturn and stonehenge that will make you look crazy for buying it and me crazy for painting it. Who can resist!!



Since everyone loves ghost bottles, I did a couple of ghost bottle ACEOs a couple years ago too but I didn't quite get around to selling them. These were hand-cut art paper, and although it looks like watercolor it was watered down acrylic paint.

More UFO abduction...


And more!...


Anyway I did these a couple of years ago but I had them tucked away for awhile and they are ready for sale again!

Space girl, and featured artists

First a little show and tell -- I really have too many paintings in my apartment so I have put space girl up for sale! She combines my love of 1950s/60s sci fi pulp novel book covers and movies from that era. eta: aaaaand, she sold already! :) But I have some more sci fi inspired art in the wings that I need to scan. :)

It's thunderstorming right now so I'll make this quick! I will be featuring some pen and ink artists in the next few days, since it is a medium I love to admire but don't do much of myself. In the meantime I am going to take advantage of the October thunderstorm to finish up reading some Edith Nesbitt ghost stories, because apparently I can just NEVER get enough ghost stories...

We're gonna sit at the welcome table

When I start a UFO cult, this will be the cover for the brochure. I don't know if we're been watching too many UFO documentaries on late night cable, or if it's listening to Ya Ho Wha 13 in the car or re-playing Katamari Damacy again on the Playstation, but apparently something has snapped and I think I might have joined a rainbow flower hippie alien gnome UFO flower mushroom cult at some point in the last 24 hours.

And just to confuse things a little, there's some Tarot card imagery, with the black and white trees in the background similar to the pillars in the High Priestess card, and various planetary symbols scattered throughout, on the staves that the alien and gnome friends are holding.

The mystic white-robed priestess welcomes the craft to earth with a crescent moon in one hand and a red star/pentacle in the other. She is draped with blue flowers, her robe adorned with moons and stars, and a rainbow of flowers blossom over her head. An eye in a pyramid, and a crown-like headpiece with a third eye on her brow, complete her ritual garb. The UFO projects rainbow beams in all directions. Welcome, Alien Friends!

This one is on Etsy.