Rabbits I have known

"Carrot Cottage" 8 x 10 acrylic on canvas board.

I realized recently when my friend who maintains the blog Painted Lady Fingers got a little pet bunny, that I haven't painted rabbits in a long time.  I used to do quite a few paintings with rabbits in them though they were usually focused around spring time, as I posted earlier this year at Easter time.

Most of us have a lot of bunnies in life early on if we ever came across Peter Rabbit, Brer Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, the Velveteen Rabbit, uh...the Trix Bunny...it goes on and on!  But they also have been wonderful silent mysterious moon creatures to me, inspiring things like Kenneth Anger's Rabbit Moon:



Or haunted the book that delighted my childhood with the promise of gold and jeweled riches, "Masquerade" by Kit Williams (I still have positively no idea how anyone ever solved that puzzle). (...and here is a nice blog post about rabbits, below, I found in my search for an image for that book).

Or, perhaps most significantly, in "Watership Down" by Richard Adams, the unforgettable novel that introduced us to Fiver, Hazel and the other rabbits who spoke their own language (yes, I memorized snippets of it in sixth grade) and had epic struggles and battles in the English countryside. 

This book was so emotional for me around the age of 10-14 that although I read it at least three times then, I haven't been able to go back and read it again because I know I'd cry too much.  The same thing happened with the Duncton Woods books about moles.  I drew pictures of each of the rabbits for a little project in school around sixth grade, but of course they all pretty much looked the same...still, I think that is where my basic idea of how to draw a rabbit came about.

So in realized that I have been gravely short on rabbits in my art lately, I'm going to start trying to incorporate more of them, as evidenced by my little Halloween rabbit painting up above, "Carrot Cottage."  Some will be naturalistic like thee little bunny you see above and some will be anthropomorphic and cartoonish but I will try to include them more often than Easter time as I remember how important they have been to me throughout my life.

Higgs Boson Excitement

I've been excited about the LHC (Large Hadron collider) for years, as an armchair physics nerd (i.e. I like to read the wild and crazy stuff but I wouldn't know what to do with an actual formula) so I was beside myself with joy when I heard the announcement yesterday that they are pretty darn sure that they can confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson.  Now, rather than have me explain what this is if you're not familiar, let me just recommend you to this video to do the hard stuff.  Got it? Okay!  So basically this opens up a whole new world for physicists in understanding the universe.  The fact that they built this enormous $10 billion 17-mile-long machine to discovery something that is invisible and undetectable by any other means, is pretty amazing, and to have it basically confirmed, is tremendous.  And it's wonderful to think that its namesake, Dr. Peter Higgs, is still alive to see all of this happen.

Several years ago when they were getting ready to start the experiment I did this little drawing to illustrate my enthusiasm:

I also did some sciencey art, such is this concept of a hydrogen atom (the deuterium isotope, with one proton and one neutron) -- the human-like figures represent quarks.  I made prints of this available on Etsy today:

I'm not the only one excited though, a perfume company I enjoy, ZOMG Smells, which has a lot of science and nerd-inspired scents, also made their Higgs Boson scent a permanent part of their catalog yesterday. I have two bottles of it and it is one of my favorite scents ever!!!  Dark, deep rich tea and smooth, glossy woods.  It's a masculine fragrance by most standards but it's totally me and I highly recommend it and their other fragrances!

I'm reading a book by physicist Dr. Lisa Randall to continue my little personal celebration, since it was her book "Warped Passages" that got me interested in all of this in a big way a few years ago.  I want to make sure I don't forget all this complicated stuff so I want to refresh myself on it a little bit.  It's not exactly information I need in day to day life, but more information and knowledge is not a bad thing!

ACEO adventures

In the summer of 2008 I asked the question...what on earth is an ACEO? Well, they are small and fast and fun to do and people seem to like them so I did a few, but the challenges of scanning something tiny (about 2 x 3 inches give or take) and then having to upload a picture that is about 1000 pixels on a side, means that the images get kind of distorted. Now that I have a camera with a semi-reliable macro function I can take pictures of the darn things so they look like something. So I have relisted a few on Etsy (click for the links) and I will list a few more. Will I do more though?....well that depends if I can find the little plastic baseball card sized sheaths that are needed to protect them. Where DID I put those?....the perils of moving....

At any rate, these continue my themes of gothic horror and there are also some ghosts in bottles and a cryptid....UFOs are coming though, once I get those pictures taken....I mean of the ACEOs, not of the actual UFOs, unless tonight turns out to be more interesting of an evening than I had planned!

Some sketches

I haven't had much time to do personal paintings or new Etsy paintings lately, so whenever I have a spare moment I do a couple of sketches.  They're tending to be more female figure sort of things lately.  The bottom one, I didn't mean to look as fairy-like as it does...I just sort of wanted tendrils extending from her.  But it does look like wings.  Oh well!

a few sketches

Nothing terribly surprising here, give me a pencil and you get a cat eventually.

Or some kind of a flower thing


Or sort of sci fi towers.

It's what happens.

I don't know what else to say about it!

A change of pace

I usually just do colorful things but I do have a long history of doodling in notebooks to fall back on when I don't want to make a big colorful mess. I'm trying to do more of this in between other projects. Above is with a soft, thick sort of pencil lead. Cheap ones, of course. Lots of smudges.


I like things that are hiding or veiled, and this started out as a batwing kind of thing like the one in the background on the top sketch. I could do these all day. When I don't have colors, I tend to go with line weirdness and textures, since they kind of seem like colors to me. Certain types of shading or cross hatching...sort of look like colors to me...sort of a synaesthesia thing I guess.
This one is the crowd pleaser. A bird or a butterfly or a fish or a peacock. Aren't we all of those things sometimes?

Artist feature: jojosart

Above, "Restless Night" by Joe La Fargue

"RIP 1994" by Joe La Fargue.

Yesterday I featured SingASongofSixpence, who has many lovely original pen and ink drawings in her shop -- I love black and white, pen and ink art, possibly because I don't do a lot of it myself. I need the forgiving amorphousness of paint since I do not have a steady hand! I really admire the way a talented pen and ink artist can imbue their work with color just by the textures, shapes and forms with which they populate their paper.

Jojosart.etsy.com is full of inspired, visionary art with figures that suggest themes like life, death, time, dreams, freedom and madness.  Above are several examples, included here with his permission.  Another piece this week features ghostly forms with clock faces; others include angelic and dream figures, trees, night imagery, butterflies and anthropomorphic flowers.

He describes his inspiration in his profile: "I'm a self taught artist born and raised near some cotton fields in mississippi. I can remember finding an old tattered notebook on the school bus when i was just a little boy. It was full of all this cool fantasy art. It sparked my imagination and lit a fire in me that i still can't quench."

He offers prints of his work and I look forward to seeing many more. Please check out his shop!

sketch

One of the projects I have going right now is illustrating a children's book.  Details on publication are still in the works but I've completed two paintings for it and am working on a painting for this image, this weekend.  I think there will be at least a dozen paintings in total for the book, maybe 15.  Initially we were looking at finishing it by the spring but we might complete it earlier now that things are moving along.  I should have this one finished this weekend.

It really feels like fall now.  There's a chill in the air, I heard Canadian geese tonight and I swear I can always catch a hint of distant smoke in the air.  Maybe the Pine Barrens are on fire again, I'm not sure!  It will warm up a bit again this week but I have to admit that I'm soon not going to be able to be out in the woods for two hours a day, every day, quite like I've gotten used to since May.  It is sad but being indoors can be fun too.  Last year I spent all fall knitting a Doctor Who scarf and watching Dark Shadows DVDs.  Right now I'm reading Ulysses.  Being inside, drinking tea and working on introverted things is very fulfilling, though I know I'll start to have dreams about the woods again before the end of the year.  I'll still be IN the woods, but I will have to go home by 5 p.m. and wear a hat. :P