Very fun night, lots of people! I have post-hostess syndrome: I said “hi” to so many people and had so few conversations, everything is kind of a blur. But it was awesome, and packed with people who gave me flowers and kisses on the cheek, and told me how great everything looked. If you’re in the Seattle area and didn’t make it to the show, you should totally go and have a drink, the art will be up at Liberty until August 1.
Here are a few photos:
Me and Dani Cone, owner of Fuel, three fabulous coffeeshops in Seattle:
A lovely lass reading my Artist’s Statement:
A friend of mine asked me to post my artist’s statement, so here it is.
Hands are an extremely rich subject to draw. They have so many layers of meaning. As tools, they play a role in practically everything we do, but they have much more character and significance than that.
When we speak of someone’s hands, we often mean this as a metaphor for a person’s character. Hands are very telling. “Working hands.” “Piano player’s hands.” People fall in love with other people’s hands. Drawing a person’s hands is like drawing their portrait – in some ways hands reveal as much about a person as their face does.
The larger paintings depict iconic sexual gestures, ways we use our hands to signify sex acts. I painted them in a very simple style, with simple lines. They are meant to be universal (in our culture, at least), not a specific person’s hands.
The smaller paintings are sexual hand positions, ways we use our hands to perform sex acts. These paintings are from photos of my friends’ hands as well as one of my own, captured as I walked around a party while they, playful extroverts, gamely grabbed and mimed for the camera. [see previous post!! -ed.] Since I intended the paintings to be portraits, they have a lot more detail than the large ones (the shapes of the nails, the wrinkles on the knuckles). You can infer your own ideas of personality traits from each one. You may even do that unconsciously (tentative? aggressive? honest?).
This series has been a blast for me. I love drawing hands. They’re not easy, and it’s been an exciting challenge, especially since I work with as few lines as I can to describe shapes and volumes. It’s also exciting for me to paint on a large scale, since most of my work is usually relatively small – to make a sweeping paint stroke with a big brush, using the arc of my arm.
My intent in much of my work is to depict sex and sexuality in a positive, playful way – explicit, without being literal or graphic. I think of my work as similar to burlesque – playful, teasing, leaving some information tantalizingly hidden. In this series, some of the images might even be considered raunchy (I hope!). But they’re just hands. The rest of the story is up to the viewer.
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