Telling Secrets

http://www.projekt30.com/telling_secrets.php

My work is featured in this online show "Telling Secrets"

I love telling keeping secrets and I love telling secrets. I love how the secrets find a way to seep out.

Plateau

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea 10x12"

Before I get better at anything, it seems I have to get worse. I've had some artist's block recently.. in a way. What I mean by that is that I've been doing some really ugly drawings. It's weird to to go work for 10 hours, clean the bathroom, make food, and then do a terrible drawing while listening to my Peggy Lee radio station. 

It seems like for the last 5 years or so my work has focused on the glorification of negative feelings. Turning something bad into something beautiful and different. That has been my process anyway, but it does requires a certain amount of self-disgust (which I've had plenty of). 

I'm starting to feel tired. I actually want to feel good things, not just make the bad things pretty. How does that effect the art? Maybe it's time to draw someone else. 

Old Work Inspiring New Work

I just had my hard drive from my old broken laptop transferred to a brand new machine, and as a result, I got all my old pictures back. In looking at some of my older work, I realized that there is a lot there that I want to get back to. Something about the reality and straightforwardness in some of the figures made me really excited, and I'm hoping to make some new work inspired by my older work.

soft ground etching 22x30"

ink and pastel on paper 22x30"

charcoal and acrylic on masonite

linoleum print

gouache and paint from tibet

It's a little known fact that I did learn how to do paintings of deities in Tibet from Monks who didn't speak very much English. It's not really my usual thing, but they were lovely to work with and it was a lot of fun to learn.

I also used to assist a biological illustration class for kids, and almost went into medical illustration. I still have the urge to become a tattoo artist sometimes, and this work seems to relate to that desire more.

Ariel

My princesses are slowly all finding their homes.
"Ariel" has just sold.

Ariel, oil on wood panel, 3x4'

Love and Resentment

                                                 (new painting in progress)

I've been thinking a lot about where I keep my emotions in my body, and how crazy it is that we can bury resentments in our organs and connective tissues. I've been realizing just how much a quiet angry child can store in there, and how is seeps out in unexplained discomfort and uneasiness. I've been thinking about defenses, and how it feels when something has gotten in and realized you were just a sack full of organs; realized that there was no magic or mystery there. Like rotting inside, like worms in your guts, like someone getting too close and trying to open you up for the world to see. Like having a camera snaked through your bellybutton, and having your inflamed appendix removed. Like being examined in front of a room full of family members and strangers. Like being 15 and unconscious on an operating table you'll never remember. There is an anger in me that requires extreme reserve or extreme gluttony. It makes me feel like Saturn devouring his children. I think Goya showed it best-

                                                    Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son (1819)

SHOW IN PITTSBURG

I will be showing several of my small paintings in Pittsburg next week in the show-"Art of Consciousness: Creative Expressions of Spirit" on July 2nd at the International Children's Art Gallery (5020 Penn Avenue). Anyone in that area please check it out!

Drawing in Mirrors

Imaginary Mother

Sometimes when I'm working, I get a phrase stuck in my head, and with the left piece the phrase has been "imaginary mother". It might end up being the title of the piece, or inspiring the title, but we'll see. I see these pieces as mother and daughter.

As my twenties roll on I start feeling the tightening of my reproductive organs, threatening to strangle me if I go another month without reproducing. It's making me think a lot about my life in big, long-term ways. My mind works like this: if you really like something about your life, it'll just be like that until you die. You may as well just fast-forward to the end.
That makes me antsy and makes me question everything.
The imaginary mother isn't comfortable with being done yet.

Self-portraits

Self Portrait, 30"x44" pen and watercolor on paper- in progess

I am the model in almost all of my work, but I don't consider most of my pieces to be self-portraits. Usually I'm trying to embody a feeling in my art, and looking at myself helps to take me where I want to go with the piece. I think the human body can hold a great deal of emotion, and that is interesting.
A few days ago the drawing I was working on gave birth- a piece of paper came out from under the drawing after I had been working on it for several weeks. I starting this piece with the urge to draw something more real- maybe draw more like I know what I'm doing. The piece I have been working on is messy and frustrating, so I began the new daughter-drawing. After a few minutes I realized that I wasn't using myself as a tool in this drawing, I was drawing myself. It's distinctly different, and I like the piece very much. It makes me excited about drawing. I could write volumes about myself and the flesh and the blood and the eyes, but I'll try to let the drawing speak for itself for a while.

unidentified

Sometimes the urge to get something out of my head and onto a piece of paper is overwhelming. So tonight I was there, tearing my crinkled paper and putting it up with duct tape I found in the kitchen.

I had a dream the other night that I kept finding a body covered in horizontal cuts. The memory of picking the limp body out of the dirt was very real. The image of her sliced up legs was very vivid. I don't remember her face or much else about her. The killer knew I would always find her body, so he wanted to kill me too. Things like that aren't as scary in my dreams, because time doesn't always move in  a straight line, it skips around. I was trying to lock him out of my house, and I was trying to call the police without him noticing. I always do things like that, and I can't help but see that I even love being sneaky in my dreams.

Work in progress

I've been working on this piece at home, which has been a lot of fun. Today it reminded me of falling backwards down my friends stairs and cutting the back of my heel as a kid. It was rainy and cloudy like today. All summer sand kept getting in the cut, and it took months to heal. It reminded me of my dream last night, where I pulled a little straw out of my heel. It was folded in half under the skin, and I had been wondering why my foot was bothering me.  It reminds me of my numb sleepy hands and the way they don't work in the morning. We'll see where it goes now..
I see a bunch of wiggly strings getting tied up at the ends.

Sleeping Beauty

Goodnight Sleeping Beauty, This piece SOLD in my last show (coming down this evening). I'm glad she's found a good home. :-)

The Power of Self

So if you scroll down down down down, you'll see my name, Kathryn LaRanger, as an honorable mention in the "Artists Wanted- The Power of Self" competition. It was a good experience, and I'm hoping to do more juried exhibitions/online art competitions.

http://www.artistswanted.org/self/

New work is on the horizon..

SHOW COMING UP 2.4.10 -111 FRONT ST, BROOKLYN: GALLERY 220

Fee Fi Fo Fum oil on linen 30"x35"

Next Thursday, February 4th at 111 Front Street in Brooklyn. This show will include myself and 3 other figurative artists, and should be a really fun event.

http://giacobettipaul.com/

The opening will be going on Thursday- 5:30-9pm

Let me know if you can make it!

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Fee Fi Fo Fum is my latest painting. I still think it could have a ways to go but we'll see-
Blood trapped in the face is a very loaded image for me. It reminds me of being a kid and popping the heads off the dandelions. It reminds me of my humiliation at just being a person, at any hint towards how   alive and seething I was. It's hard to live in a social world with rules and cues you have to pick up on. It's the feeling that I had no idea how to be a person- the feeling that everyone else had someone to tell them the secrets to it- the feeling that I was obvious. They can smell the blood in my face, and I am the giant. The idea that I was the clown. The way I wanted to devour everyone, the way I wanted to be ground up hamburger meat. The way I wanted to reveal all my flaws and guts and shit so that I could do it on my own terms.

political vs personal

When people describe my work as political, I get a little thrown off balance. I think that this is probably because I'm not sure what political means to other people, and what that implies about my art and my motives for making it. My art is intensely personal, and perhaps this makes it political in a way that I am not aware of. However, I am probably one of the least updated people I know when it comes to actual politics, mostly because I find it unbelievably boring and ugly. In my mind politics is a bunch of gross old men feeling very important about themselves, and I couldn't care less. I know that is narrow-minded, but those are the feelings I have about it

 I'm interested in the biology of the body, a person's relationship to eating and excreting, and the way their relationships with other's affect them. It's about how it feels to live in a body that is open and constantly taking in and releasing parts of it's environment. My art is very self-centered in this way, and I accept that this is where my interests are.