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.

New framed art!

                                                  Restraint 22"x30"
To me, this piece is about holding it together. Like a towel being wrung out, but trying not to spill any water. Like holding your breath when you hug someone.

REVIEW: AUDREY KAWASAKI

I give her somewhere between 3 and 4 Stars- Very niiice(in my best borat voice)

This piece (image from audrey-kawasaki.com) "My dishonest heart" was featured in Audrey Kawasaki's  latest show(which opened last night). I knew of her because my painting teacher in college, Chris Wright (also had her as a student), recommended that I look at her work. Last night I finally got to see the work in person, and it was a really fabulous show.

To me, this show was fabulous because it was art that looks good(less common than you would think), and it's being done by a young talented lady with an stylized figurative approach.

I relate to her work very much, even though I think we're kind of doing the same thing in opposite ways. Her work is so very pretty that to me it's almost just an example of how pretty a person can make a piece of wood. I love to be aesthetically pleased, so I like her work. They are delicate paintings of girls that look like sleepy, rosy-nosed kittens with dew on their cheeks. She throws in the occasional organ(see above) or skeletal reference, but it's all done in such a clean precise pretty way that it doesn't phase anyone. I think that's cool.

My main issue with Kawasaki's work is that it is so easy to read that I find myself moving on fairly quickly. The work is so clean that I feel like once I've admired it for a few minutes, I start looking for the next piece. The drawings themselves are very straightforward, but she paints them in a very mysterious, luminous style, and I think that is what makes them so desirable.

Yum. Good job.