Psychedelic visions, imaginary album art, and dark memories of dungeons. Necklaces, too.

A big update is underway in my main Etsy shop this July, and one of the big things to know is that I've reduced the cost of prints, at least through the end of the summer, to $6 for 5 x 7 prints and $10 for 8 x 10 prints. I also tried to make sure that first class shipping is available for all prints. If you see it coming up as only priority mail shipping please let me know and I can adjust it down to first class. As always, international quotes are available on request, but require some extra time to pin down the exact cost.

I finally listed an oil painting that I completed late last year, with a gothic/alchemical theme. It's one of my favorites, and I'll be happy to offer prints on request but haven't made them just yet.

I also have a number of 8 x 10 and 11 x 15 paintings on stretched canvas that were done for art shows or just my own amusement...and pendants are now available! I have made 12 designs in total and have four more in my shop. Contact me if you're curious about the others and don't want to wait, but I will list the rest very soon.

Original oil painting

"Black Swan Ritual"

9 x 12 inches

Original acrylic painting

"The Golden Dragon and the Unicorn"

11 x 14 inches

This painting was inspired by a scene in a D&D module that I love, X2 Chateau D'Amberville. In the encounter, there is a woman with golden hair asleep in a grove with a unicorn, guarding a box. She is actually a gold dragon that has shapeshifted. You'd never know this is from a D&D module if you weren't looking for the reference, but just between you and me...that's where the idea came from!

Original acrylic painting

"Subterranean Summoning"

11 x 14 inches

Original acrylic painting

"Beyond the Sea of Cosmic Memory"

8 x 10 inches

These two psychedelic paintings (above and below) were in a recent psychedelic art show at Insomnia Gallery in Houston. They have an art show every month on a variety of themes: gothic, gaming, horror, and plenty of other pop culture and art themes. We've participated in at least a half dozen of them so far, including their annual monster art show, cartoons, video games and other topics. The gallery also houses an incredible record store!

Original acrylic painting

"The Source of the Mushroom Vision"

8 x 10 inches

One other thing about these psychedelic paintings: I did them to resemble album covers I'd love to see. The first one in particular is a bit of a nod to the kind of album art that The Fool did in the 1960s for projects like the Incredible String Band's 5000 Spirits of Layers of the Onion album. Just as colorful as possible, with vague overtures toward cosmic and spiritual themes.

Original acrylic painting

"Luna Crystals"

5 x 7 inches

Original acrylic painting

"Octo Crystals"

5 x 7 inches

Original acrylic painting

"Accidents in the Alchemist's Workshop"

5 x 7 inches

Now available as a photo print

"The Unicorn Constellation"

5 x 7 or 8 x 10 photographic print

"The Crone's Secret"

Glass tile pendant

1-inch square print beneath glass on a chain

I have wanted to make little glass tile necklaces for close to 20 years and finally broke down and did some. It is quite easy to do and they are very charming! Each pendant is made of a nice, sturdy, heavy metal and houses a teeny tiny 1-inch photo print sealed in place with a glass tile. I include a basic 24-inch gunmetal chain so you can wear it right away, but feel free to use your own instead.

"The Owl and the Pussycat Went to Tea"

Glass tile pendant

1-inch square print beneath glass on a chain

"Le Coeur et le Serpent"

Glass tile pendant

1-inch square print beneath glass on a chain

"Song of the Witch Girl"

Glass tile pendant

1-inch square print beneath glass on a chain

 In March, I participated in the Thorn and Moon Magickal Market at Avant Garden in Houston, an event that grows every month, and is held the first Friday of each month. I hope to attend again. Prints and pendants were extremely popular there, and I have all of them available in my shop all the time. If you ever see that I am out of stock of something you want let me know and I'll make sure to make a new one for you!

I have lots more art on the way, it's just a matter of sitting down at a laptop and listing it, but who actually sits down at a computer anymore, right?

Sci fi surrealism, rust monsters, and a few more unicorns.

Aside from working on a lot of oil paintings recently, and waiting for them to dry, I have a sort of unthemed mixed bag of things to share for the moment.

 Earlier this month I contributed a piece, "The Sea Corridor," for a greyscale art contest at Jerry's Artarama in Houston. I got a nice set of oil paints for my efforts, and the painting (18 x 24 inch on a gallery wrapped canvas) is taking up a big chunk of art closet real estate here now, in case anyone within driving distance of Houston is interested in making an offer on it. :) Blurry photo with glare courtesy of my perpetually poor lighting conditions and lack of a professional grade photo studio.

The "fish-owl" was inspired by a couple of lines in the book "Babylon" by Rene Crevel, and there are tiny little fishes budding off of the branches that were inspired by lines in "The Goose of Hermogenes" by Ithell Colquhoun, unless I'm getting my surrealist novels confused. I tried to put some of my favorite elements in this -- woods, corridors full of billowing curtains, gliding down a passageway like the famous scene in Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast"...just some things that I like, blended into a sort of collage.

I also have prints available of a colorful, surrealist-inspired painting I did a few years ago and kept in my personal collection. This is a 5 x 7 print for sale but I can also make 8 x 10 (or 9 x 12, even) on request.

"Beneath the Green Sky"

"The Lair of the Rust Monster"

On a completely different note, I'm slipping an 8 x 10 print of another of my "personal stash" paintings into the mix this week -- I love D&D module covers from the early 80s, which was my formative era. I liked the art more than anything else really, since I rarely got to play with other people. In fact, check back for a post about those soon. 

"The Shadow and the Candle"

Back to surrealism, this oil painting is also in my personal stash, just a stream-of-consciousness piece I did, of whatever came to mind at the moment that I wanted to see. Subconsciously inspired by my love of Leonora Carrington, in ways I can't quite put my finger on. I'm keeping the original of this, but 5 x 7 prints are available at the link above, and 8 x 10 can also be made on request.

Finally, I have prints up now of a couple of the unicorn paintings that I did last week.

"Beneath the Purple Unicorn Tree" 5 x 7 print

"Groovy Unicorn Room" 5 x 7 print

And soomehow when Easter rolled around I think I neglected to post this picture, that I did for the season. But really, aren't moonlit bunnies suitable year-round?

Thanks for looking, and I hope that my next update will be a little more focused, but really, what's so great about focus?

A dream of lavender unicorns and lava lamps

Like many 13-year-olds in 1986, I'm sure I had my share of unicorns around the house. I know they were all over my school supplies. Glowing white unicorns on a purple background simply cannot be resisted, though I think I was mainly a dragon girl. Looking over the paintings I did in my teens, I only have a couple of unicorns represented, but I have many, many dragons. Here is the best example of a unicorn painting from that time period (1989) that I have on hand:

Edited to add: Another unicorn painting from that time period, which my mom just photographed for me since it is up at her house in NJ. ^_^

I was a huge fan of the movie "Legend" which came out when I was in 7th grade, and had some of the glitteriest unicorns ever filmed, even though their horns bounced a bit. But they were pretty, especially filmed among pink flower petals and dandelion fluff. It remains one of my favorite movies from that era (and I don't like much of anything made after 1975 to begin with!...)

One thing you will never see from me are any of the tongue in cheek "unicorn poo," "unicorn fart" or "barfing unicorn" images that I know are incredible popular these days. Look, I take my unicorns seriously. I like them pretty, pastel and magical. I like them pink and purple and covered in glitter.

With that in mind, I've started a mini campaign of doing some unicorn paintings with simple, colorful images that appeal to that part of my brain. This first one below is already spoken for, but will be available as a print soon. 

"Beneath the Purple Unicorn Tree"

And here we find one in its natural setting, among butterflies and a fairytale tower (the kind from which I can imagine a long golden braid spiraling downward):

"Unicorn Tower"

Now that we're on the subject of unicorns, let's talk about lava lamps. While unicorns might call to mind an 80s girl's room or notebooks, surely lava lamps were a staple of the 70s....and also the 80s for people like me who lived (and continue to live) in a psychedelic past. I was fairly well obsessed with getting a lava lamp, but they were prohibitively expensive when I was in high school, at over $40 if you could find one. One of the first things I bought when I finally had some spending money, was a lava lamp, because I wanted to make sure to have one in my dorm room. 

One of my most-viewed items on Etsy is my lava lamp ghost painting/print, so I know that other people share this interest. In later years one of my moments of glory was managing to have something like four or five lava lamps going in my office at work. I think when I reached that pinnacle, it set the clock ticking on my workplace folding, because once your environment gets that groovy, it can't last for long...

"Spectrum of Psychedelic Spectres"

At any rate, here are six miniature paintings I've prepared on 2 x 3 inch canvas, each with its own personality and name:

"Blue Goo"

"Emerald Ooze"

"Purple Pixie"

"Flame Phantom"

"Sunset Daydream"

"Ghost Globules"

And here is the moment where it all comes together -- the culmination of everything I could have wished for, and still do -- the moment when a unicorn and a pink lava lamp collide beneath a bead curtain. I'm so thrilled by this idea that I couldn't even come up with a good title for the painting! It's dubbed "Groovy Unicorn Room" until I can come up with something better.

I hope that someone's Google search for "unicorns" and "lava lamp" brought them here, because if it has, we are obviously meant to be friends. 

Dragons, and some dungeons

Dragons were kind of where everything started when I began painting in 1986 just before I turned 13. Although they weren't the absolute first thing I ever painted, they were definitely one of the main subjects along with unicorns and would-be D&D characters. Well, after about four years of that, by the end of high school my interest in surrealism and color and more abstract art took over for a long time and I mainly painted surreal alien landscapes.  But one thing I really miss from being 16 or so was the way that I used to do relatively large paintings, and patiently work on them for a long time, getting lots of details in as I figured out exactly how I wanted to paint.  After having a dream last night about a bunch of large-ish paintings that my dream-self forgot that I did, I thought I'd get a few larger canvases and revisit that old style.

"Opal Dragon's Eyrie" is my first dragon painting in many years, though not too big, at 14 x 18 inches. It's too big for a regular scanner so I had to take a photo (above) and a series of scans (example below) but I'm very happy that I was able to snap back to 1989 and indulge in my old subject matter, with a little less clumsiness of brushstroke. I still don't technically know what I'm doing, but I'm glad that I'm still 16 at heart somewhere.

My mom has been kind enough to take some photos of paintings that I still have around her house, so here are a couple from 1989, which I consider my "peak" year for doing 16 x 20 fantasy paintings with intense detail. I don't know that I really named paintings back then (I barely do now...) but I am really terribly fond of this one of cave adventurers. There's something very satisfying about working on the details of a big pile of treasure, or on a dragon's scales.  These were inspired by my childhood loved of first edition D&D (or AD&D) which I almost never played with other people but certainly collected a lot of books and accessories. Poring over them and creating characters and storylines was very satisfying even without actually playing the game.

Here is another dragon that I have a soft spot for! I was very happy with the way I did the crystals, at the time. This might have been 1990 or still 1989.  These frames were all made by my late grandfather...I wish I had learned to make them myself too, it would be incredibly handy! I did do a little woodworking as a young thing, but nothing practical, I'm afraid.

Below is a golden dragon in a snowy landscape that I am also very attached to. I would like to have the patience to do a forest like this again!

Finally, for laughs, here is a much earlier attempt when I was trying to work out exactly how to use a paintbrush.  I think that I came a long way from those early attempts to the ones you see above from around 1989.

More nostalgia on the way, I have dozens more paintings to share - including some that are no longer in my collection...alas, I should have just held onto them all, I'll never be 14 again!

At the edge of the universe...

I have a post about books in the works and some more features to do on artists whose work I enjoy...but first a little something from the vaults. I did this painting two years ago (I thought it was one year ago but then I remembered that 2007 also existed) basically for myself but I'm kind of knee-deep in art around here so I put it up on Etsy today, as I flail around looking for attention.

"The Black Tower at the Edge of the Universe" brings together a lot of things that I love -- a glistening dark tower carved from onyx or ebony, rising from a precipice that falls off onto a chaotic cosmic swirl, with a rainbow waterfall cascading into the abyss. Psychedelic streams of color and a dark, apocalyptic theme in an impossible world. Anyway, that's what I'm into!

Meanwhile I experimented with putting a "Retweet" button at the top of the page and just putting one post on each page, to keep things neat and tidy. I'm very much in the learning process here of how to use Blogger so any advice or tips are always appreciated, if something isn't working or looks confusing or cluttered. I mean, the entire internet looks cluttered, really, these days. I'm leaving the pumpkin background for now, I'm always all about the pumpkins!

Ghastly ghost flowers

This summer, it has been unusually rainy in New Jersey -- it rained almost every day in June, and July was unseasonably cool and damp as well. One of the results of this downpour has been the proliferation of every type of mushroom in the woods. And among the strange collection of yellow and brown amanitas, jelly molds and fungus, death caps and destroying angels, a strange flower blooms.

I walk in the woods almost every day that the weather cooperates, even if only for a few minutes, but I have never before seen the elusive Indian Pipe in one of my favorite walking places, though I have looked for them in the darkest shadows among the mushrooms. Pale and waxy, they resemble mushrooms themselves - a tiny cluster of pale white stems bearing drooping bell-like blossoms. Flecked with the dark soil from which they erupt after a heavy rain, they seem to favor woods like the one I frequent, full of birch and beech, pine and poplar.

Among their other names are ghost flower, corpse plant, and fairy smoke -- quite a poetic plant! With that in mind I imagined that at its roots a wan fairy might lie in wait beneath the earth. I will probably do several paintings on this theme, but this is the first. I haven't decided whether to offer her up for Etsy or eBay yet, but I wanted to share her right away.