Pinup Art and the Abyss

Sometimes, I get girly.
Compared to many of my friends, I'm the daintyest, and it's no surprise that my nickname is "Grandma", but I generally don't like the girly-infantile-cute, probably BECAUSE of it's juvenalia. I like feminine, but when it is mature and spiced with danger.
I draw/paint girls, mainly...as artists have always done, and sometimes appreciate a good swirly cheescake fantasy pinup. My girly nature comes out, and I salivate over dreamy eyes, swirls of hair, and supine forms.
Languourous.
Two painters who really got it goin' on:



Sylvia Ji



Audrew Kawasaki

These are equal parts Keane Paintings, Manga , art noveau, and Egon Schiele. They are the kind of thing I drew a lot as a young girl, but then abandoned because it wasn't grown up enough. Ha. These artists followed their vision, lika lot of underground artists, and just expanded upon it, refined it. Turns out, that's what everyone of our generation likes.
Awesome.
Feast your eyes, and enjoy.

Entirely unralated but ABSOLUTELY MINDBLOWING is this website for a upcoming book called "The Deep" by Claire Nouvian. Every picture is so amazing so beautiful....I probably will have to buy it:

The Deep: Extraordinary Creatures from the Abyss

Reading in the Car

The following is something I wrote in a rediscovered drawing journal sometime last year. It's a good example of the kind of stuff I write in my pysical journal (that is not a ppoem). I think I wrote it while on the Capitol Corridor train on my way between SF (where I lived) and Davis (where I apprentice).

Some History: My family lived in a van and travelled "Blue Highways" style for a year in 1993. I was 13, my brother was 9. I slept in a tent, and Jordan slept in a hammock that went across the front seat of the van. We got REALLY good at reading in the car. I think that year inspired this.
While the essay is meant to be humorous, everything in it is absolutely true. It took me forever to type it, since I can't type. Enjoy!!!

My parents kept pointing things out. Rock formations, giant trees, birds which I saw as nothing more than a faint blip against the green screen of underbrush. "Look!", they'd exclaim, and if they got no responce Pop would reach back and swat whatever peice of me was closest- "Check it out, Kai!" Mom would be aweing and ooohing obediantly, trying to enthuse us into excitement about some new facet of the same old Nature we were living in every day. Jordan and I would stare stonily everywhere but at the new and exciting feature outside of the car, usually down at the huge tomes of whatever fantasy epic we were currently losing ourselves in. In escape from the majestic wilderness and neverending stream of campgrounds we plunged into majestic make-believe lands peopled with elves, often camping elves, but without the very un-epic mosquitoes and nylon tents and mangy squirrels. We would much rather fight an army of orcs with dark-hewn weapons in their scabbards, than listen to another drunken family have a campfire sing-along to Bob Seeger Silver Bullet band.
Obviously, these fantasy novels (the longer the series the better- if we could stack the volumes up to a vertical height that surpassed our knees then we were set) were another thorn in our parents' sides. So blatant in their hollow escapism, so formulaic, we took comfort and laughed at their rehash of the LOTR plot; over and over a small band of outcasts- each of a different race and each with their own special weapon, animal familiar, and cultural prejudices- manage to see through their differences and band together to save the whole world from the encroaching tide of pure Evil and Darkness. Our parents point out a waterfall tumbling along next to the road and the way it has worn boulders into primitive sculptures. Jordan and I are fixed to the pages, car-sickness be damned.
As basically obediant and good children, our small rebellion involves not looking, or, equally bad; not looking and exclaiming. We would numbly not when asked if we saw said feature, then be asked again and again, louder and more angrily, until we explode with an indignant "YES!!" and everyone braces for the upcoming lecture about our ingratitude towards our parents, and the natural world in general, and our future as TV-watching, good-for-nothing, junk-food-eating, Republicans who probably live in the LA basin and don't recycle. Lectures like this are infuriating, as we would all hate to be that person, and no matter how much we deny it- it seems inevitable.
Mom is quiet through these exchanges, sometimes she would try to draw the focus back to the trees that we didn't look at, like she missed the angry tirade, and the mopey kids shooting each other looks of righteous hatred in the back of the van. She would utter a pealing sigh of awe and happiness, as if she was so intoxicated by the verdant greenery that she had been struck deaf for the last 10 minutes. Mom just wanted us to be a close, nice, happy family of innocents. Pop went for a vision of politicaly-savvy, physically-fit group of fearless outdoorsy individuals who make friends and leave a wave of popularity and achievement in their tanned and muscular wake. Us kids dreamed soley of a family where we were allowed to retreat fully into a world of books, could read all day long, in very situation, even during dinner, and never had to engage in any physical activity- even walking.
The world swept by these four, my brother and I missing monuments in the surly indifference of youth,and our parents hanging on every plaque and rock formation like it was the fountain of this aforementioned youth. And maybe it was.
I grow older and find myself magically changed into a dorky adult who marvels at stands of trees, formations of geological splendor, and the simple existance of the grasshopper and the echidna. I find myself excited by going to the zoo, on a camping trip, on a bikeride or by the sight of a tree bursting into delicate plum blossoms. I exclaim to my friends, who call back to me "LOOK! LOOK!" with the same awestruck excitement. And we look and we know finally for sure- that youth is wasted on the young.

Zina and Rose

Many people seem to be coming back to Santa Cruz/The Bay Area, and this makes me secretly happy. Rosey and Tom are moving to Oakland, so Rosey can go to CCA (I am so proud of her! That was my dream after high school) and tom can be his usual intreguing handsome DJ self. Ha. Rosey is very elegant, and a wonderful photographer that I am lucky enough to have posed for multiple times in the past. Some of these pictures are on her website along with beautiful shots like this:

Rosemaya Marie Lakos, my oldest friend


JJ and Renee just moved back to Santa Cruz, as did Sam, and Matt Hogan. I am happy to go visit Santa Cruz now and have an even wider selection of wonderful people to try to see. It's hard to fit it all into a 2 or 3 day period.

BUT Zina Denevan, my sister, my girl, my blood and bone, is moving to Detroit with Sasha her BF, so that he can teach at Wayne State. This is hard to take for me, though I support her in everything. Zina is like pure essence of Santa Cruz (stay tuned for dorky solliquoy); she looks like a surfer girl with her long white-blonde hair, she eats organic food that she grows herself, she has a tight and complex family, she is biligual and incredibly smart. In each of these traits I can draw parallels to Santa Cruz as a surfer town based around the beach, as a healthy haven for eco-conscious life with an agricultural past, as a place that was colonized in the 60's by back-to-the-land hippies who made strange and wonderful families, as a town of equal parts Mexico and America, and as the place nourished and supported by UCSC.
I'm sure I could do this sort of similie for everyone from Santa Cruz, because we are all formed by it, but still....I am basically going to miss her. I wish that I saw her more since I moved away, but whenever I go back we just pick up like we don't live 3 hours away. I tell her everything, and feel so good doing it. She is the kind of person who really listens when you talk, and asks questions I never even think to ask. It's conversation that crackles and moves and matters....
here I go again.

Crooked artworks

mimicry, originally uploaded by kai smart.

I have gotten a 4 line reply from Kevin Willis, who put on the art show on Saturday that happened in LA. I guess that Tall Totam Pole was a success and raised $3000 for the Downtown LA Women's shelter! Yay!
Also, I sold two peices. So I made the cost of shipping back, and hopefully other good things will arise for me personally out of this. I was happy with the amount of work I put out, and hiw great it looked once it was framed. If nothing else sells I think I will put the paintings on Etsy, or have another show.
I put a gnome doll on Etsy, just to feel out if any other folks like gnome dolls as much as me. Hehe.
Hey! I love gnome dolls!

Salome tat

What if you got tattooed with this. I'm sure Gustav Moreau mean for it to be printing on a diaphanous veil, but wow...wow.
Salome

Eating Ice Cream and Drinking Hot Tea

The night comes down like a wet blanket, sky weeping, the black ground sudenly slick and shiny.
It was hot and swampy and humid, now it's raining. Riding my bike home through air infused with the scent of cut grass and giant yards of blooming roses, I decided that being that we live in a delta, we are actually in the California equivalent of the deep South, albeit a very white deep South.

I go to lunch with Jess every day, and we talk about art nearly the whole time. It's refreshing and wonderful, I can be as effusive (is that a word?) and gushing (there has to be a better word than that) as I want to be, and she understands. I want to collaborate with her (I mean, I already am, in that she asks for my opinion and I draw stuff for her tattoos....shhh.. don't tell the customers) on art, I want to draw the background of a painting and she draw the foreground and vice versa. I haven't felt so inspired about working with another artist since I met Alani in 4th grade and we would spend hours drawing with our matching Pentel felt pen sets. We would draw women's heads and rotate pen colors for the eyes, and hair styles "straight, curly, free" over and over again. Which is essentially what I am doing now..hahahaha:


These are for the Tall Totem Pole show. I did ten works total. If I sell two then I make the money back I spent on frames and shipping. Which was a lot. That's why art shows tend to suck a little(just being a lazy artist here). That's why original art is really expensive, but reproduced art is not. A lot more work goes in than just sitting down and painting (or in my case inking) the picture.
I continued with "the Girls" series that I was working on; miniature imagined portraits of sweethearts and lost loves. Formal, colorful, and miniature, in an attempt for affordability. I sold all but one of the original series, so I am trying new stuff with a spin. I'm using ink and brush, and they are very fairy tale-inspired. Women metamorphose and take on animal attributes. They are also very Japanese tattoo-inspired, especially the work on Zack Mosher. Stark black brush lines against the white paper. I love brushes, they have always been very easy to manipulate for me, and everything looks so GOOD.

I also tattooed my friend Meg, rather unexpectedly. She came up for a wedding and showed up at the shop right as Jess's last appointment didn't appear. We had talked about me designing tattoos for her long before I ever knew I was going to get to learn to tattoo. So she was game and had a photo of a succulent, and I made a drawing and we were both nervous, and I tattooed her then and there.

We are going to do linework succulents on her lower arms in colored ink...then a wreath of cherry branches and blossoms on her upper shoulders. All delicate, all linework. We may throw in some bees, and perhaps a bird (she wants crows, but I would have to find a way to make them work with the blossoms. Actually the juxtaposition of the pink and black feathers might be striking) as well.
She said that she will get tattooed excusively by me. That she will be my work of art. Which will be awesome. Meg is taller than I, beautiful, and has a long neck and a face like an old-fashioned doll. I can take her to conventions like a extremely hot walking billboard! (*evil laugh*)

I looks like a Magnolia because I did it.