Latest Posts by panic-volkushka - Page 13

Hand of Midas

buttercups

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Dreamed that I died. I immediately came back to life in a new body, but my dead body was just... laying around. I dressed my dead body in a long, navy blue dress. As I carried the body into my room, I thought "Hey! I can use this in my photography!"

As I tried to position the dead body so that I could photograph the two of us, the head on my dead body turned into a cat's head. It kept trying to bite me.

Hand of Glory

bay laurel

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Hand of Benediction

elderflower

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currently sick

dreamed that me and two girls that I went to middle school with were recording a song, reading the lyrics from a dark blue book with glowing white letters. don't remember the lyrics.

dreamed that there was a huge block party going on in my neighborhood, with tents set up all over and one of those janky ferris wheels. I decided that I wanted a milkshake and a burger. Every restaurant that I went to was getting held up by a delusional man with a shotgun. Every single one. Same guy, too. I'd leave and go to the next restaurant and he'd have moved on to hold that store up. I just really wanted a milkshake.

Part of some sort of giant videogame world. Built like one of those marble tunnel toys. Riding the marble down a spiral slide. Giant monster crushing the marble tunnel world. Water is rising faster.

I keep sleeping through the curtains falling out of the window frame and on top of me.

details from "Shapeshiffterrr"

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Look, I'm still alive and making art!

"Shapeshiffterrr"

sculpy clay, acrylic paint, copper wire

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so holidays are coming, which means more work and more family time, also I'm trying to get on testosterone so that's a lot of dragging my parents into therapy, also I'm trying to apply to grad schools, so I don't know how much time I'm going to have for art in the next couple of months.

To tide over my vast hoard of fans, here are my sketches and color tests for the other alien scouts, who I may one day do more complex pieces for.

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the first sketch of alien moon, fueled by boredom during the closing shift.

originally, I gave them really long fingers, but eventually I decided against that.

and also a very silly short comic.

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My scanner is morally opposed to my use of highlighter markers and my camera phone is only a bit better.

A trilogy of night shift doodles in my teeny tiny moleskine.

A fellow artist once told me "I thought you were drawings hands wrong, but I realized that you were drawings hands that look like your hands."

I guess my hands are a bit odd. Most of the joints on my fingers are hyperextended. Most people's fingers taper, with the fingertip being the narrowest. My fingertips are actually wider and fleshier than the rest of my finger joints.

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!~Pretty Alien II~!

Here's the full body version of my Pretty Alien Sailor Moon. The tentacles on the face are sensory organs, but the tentacles on the chest and lower back are limbs. The tentacles evolved as a way to carry one's young and still have full use of one's hands. The opposable thumb on the feet is what gives the impression that Sailor Moon wears high heels. The "skirt," like the "collar," is a wattle that's inflated during mating displays.

I might revist this as a traditional painting...

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Pretty Alien

Ok, so this is going to be the first in a series of pieces. And it has a backstory.

I was working the night shift and it was totally dead and I was super bored and I got to thinking... technically speaking, Sailor Moon is an alien. She's from the moon. So why does she look like a human?

And then I thought, maybe her Sailor Scout uniform is actually what she looks like, but in attempting to describe Sailor Moon's alien physiology, eye-witness accounts were mistaken for a description of a costume, not an actual body.

So, Sailor Moon's pigtails, bangs, and the little whiskers that I've given her, aren't hair. They're sensory organs, like antennae. The red "gems" described in her uniform are actually poison glands, which are brightly colored to gain the attention of predators. When subject to pressure, they secrete a poisonous liquid, kinda like Cane Toads. The "collar" of the costume is actually a wattle that Usagi's species uses in mating displays. It's inflatable!

Kinda like this:

As for the bunny nose and upper lip... Well... her name is Usagi.

The kanji at the top of the image is bi (pretty) uchuu (extraterrestrial) jin (person) and the katakana at the bottom is the phonetic spelling of Sailor Moon.

I'm sure that Kyozuka sensei would be pleased to see that I'm keeping up my calligraphy skills, all these years after her classes.

If anyone with a better grasp of japanese than me has any corrections, I'm happy to hear them.

Nerd rant over.

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Reaching that point in working on a piece where I lose any sense of reality and my brain just chants "I AM A GENIUS I AM A GOD" over and over. Well, working in customer service until 11:30 pm will certainly beat down that overblown sense of confidence. Off to work!

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"Ugly Love"

based on a dream I had about body-swapping zombie boyfriends

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details from "Pretty Bunny/Ugly Hare"

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"Pretty Bunny/Ugly Hare"

acrylic and stickers on canvas board, 14 x 18

Something of a continuation on the theme of "fuck your fascist cuteness standards."

Inspired by the Playboy Bunny as a restrictive concept of American female beauty, the different connotations of the words "bunny" and "hare," and overhearing a pregnant woman discuss her fears that her unborn child would be born with a "hare lip," because that had "just ruined" Joaquin Phoenix's face.

This is the first time that I've really tried mixing a more deliberately stylized look with traditional painting, and I am very pleased with how that turned out.

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I've been listening to the audiobook of "The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science" by Douglas Starr.

It's the case of a French serial killer in the late 1800s, Joseph Vascher, and the development of early forensic science by Alexandre Lacassagne.

Lacassagne worked in Lyon, France, where the morgue was housed on a barge in the Rhône. The reasoning was that this would keep the stench away from the city and it was close to the two largest sources of corpses -- the hospital and the river itself. However, there were problems.

Joseph was a problem child...

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details from "Amateur Psychoanalysis."

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details from "Sharpen and Blur."

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"Sharpen and Blur"

acrylic on canvas board, 16 x 11

This is one of those pieces that... doesn't really have a deeper meaning behind it. The body is my favorite subject for art, so the way that scar tissue can alter it fascinates me. I realized I'd never done a painting of someone with a facial scar and decided to do one. As the painting progressed, I started thinking of how my great-grandmother described the experience of having cataracts -- she said it was like seeing through layers of veils. So I smeared the hell out of the background and added layers of matte medium over the sections of the image that I wanted to push backwards.

And so that's how this came about.

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Dreamed that my backyard looked into a forest. In the yard, I saw what looked like a large stag.

When I looked closer, I saw that the stag had a human face. It only had one antler, which was held in place by a ribbon. Instead of hooves, at the end of it’s legs were spindly fingers. It didn’t walk with the ‘palm’ flat to the ground like an ape, it balanced on the very tips of it’s fingers, and it’s legs didn’t move, just the spindly fingers.

Had this dream after I had spent the day wondering what I would look like if I were a demon.

Dreamed that I was putting on make up. I used gold liquid eyeliner to write “Jesus loves me, this I know. Yes, Jesus loves me.” across my cheek bones. I put sparkly orange eyeshadow on my eyelids and the end of my nose.

Dreamed about A. R., a boy that emotionally abused me from 5th - 8th grade. He seemed threatening, but also like he was coming on to me. He stood behind me and slipped his hands up into my shirt. I reached back, grabbed him by the ears, flipped him over my shoulder, and while he was on the ground, I stomped on him. Very satisfying dream.

When he bullied (abused) me, teachers and other adults frequently told me that it must be because he had a crush on me. I was very, very aware that was not the case. He never made “positive” sexual remarks towards me, never showed a lick of attraction, he loathed me. And, it seemed, women/girls in general. My therapist had a theory that A. R. was deeply repressed and self-loathing concerning possible same gender attraction on his part. He never spoke of finding women attractive, was blatantly misogynistic and lesbophobic, and actively drove me away from mutual male friends.

Maybe I dreamed of him being sexually aggressive because I’m thinking of myself as a trans boy, recognizing that a male identity means I could possibly be an object of desire for A. R., as I never was in the past. And I still rejected him. And I did what I said, for years, I could have done with half a chance — kicked his ass.

roycevomit said: this looks finished to me, it’s really beautiful regardless.

Awh! Thank you.

That's one of the things that I really like about your art -- you seem to know exactly when to stop. Your pieces aren't overworked or fussy, they feel straightforward.

I have a hard time stopping on my pieces. I keep working them until I look at them and go "Shit, I should have stopped, like, 8 changes ago." I've been trying to work on that, giving myself "assignments" or guidelines designed to limit my obsessiveness.

For instance, in the painting that I'm working on right now, I'm not allowing myself to use brown or black. That means I can only get a certain level of shadows and depth in the image, so that's one thing that I'm not stressing about.

On one hand, seeing an in-progress artwork can be a fascinating and enlightening experience. You can see the steps that the artist takes towards their final vision. You can take comfort in the fact that even the most wonderful piece of art was a scribbley piece of shit at some point. On the other had, OH MY FUCKING GOD DON'T LOOK AT MY SHAME I'M NOT DONE YET JESUS.

"Soft Hands"

acrylic paint and stickers on mat board

12x14

I was looking at a bunch of pictures of 'creepy cute' fashion and I was struck by how... un-creepy all of it was. It was the usual conventionally attractive, cisgender, able-bodied women wearing pastel-color clothes, with the occasional skull or drippy goo thrown in to be 'creepy.' When I saw an image of an ectrodactylic hand, I genuinely found it to be incredibly cute. The skin looked so soft and there were so many different colors in it. I wanted to paint it to show how cute it looked, how anything can be cute, even the bodies and people that others may find creepy or disturbing. Why can't this hand be cute? Why can't disabled or transgender or fat people be cute? I can assure you, they can feel cute and they can desire to be seen as cute by others. tl;dr fuck your fascist cuteness standards.

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a boogie man from my Southern childhood

I distinctly remember, at age five, seeing our family friend Stephen Wade tell the 'Taily-Po' story, accompanied by his banjo. I couldn't find a recording of that, but here's a clip of Mr. Wade doing his 'banjo dancing.'

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This is where the magic happens. Easel, clamp light, many paints, many brushes, coffee, dragon figurine, and laptop set to a constant stream of horror films.

Dreamed that my parents were going to give a power point presentation about my gender identity at some sort of conference.

In the presentation, my mom was contending that I was actually an addict, addicted to the idea of being transgender, and that if I went into recovery like a drug or alcohol addict, then I wouldn't want to transition anymore.

I edited the power point to include a bullet point stating that "the subject thinks this theory is a load of bullshit."

I guess working in rehab is rubbing off on my unconscious mind.

I dreamed that, even though I'm not on testosterone, I grew facial hair along my cheeks and jaw. I was going to visit family and I'm not out to them, so my mother insisted that I shave. Even after I shaved, there was dense, white blonde hair along my sideburns, like the feathers of a baby chick.

"Amateur Psychoanalysis"

self-portrait, acrylic on wooden board, 11.5 x 18

This is the first finished painting that I've done in over a year. It was inspired by the work of Jenny Saville, Francis Bacon, and Nicola Samori. My intention was to create a piece where only certain parts of the image were fully rendered, so as to show the various stages in a painting. In this case, only the left eye, the mouth, and the ear are complete; every other part of the image is left at an earlier stage of painting.

As for the title and the smear of the right eye... I don't know. They just kind of happened. Since the start of the piece, I envisioned the right eye as a smear of white paint. The title is how I referred to the piece mentally as I worked on it.

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"Memorial for a Moth."

glass jar, moth, cork stopper, candle

"Memorial for Nemo."

glass jar, cat hair, embroidery floss, bone stopper, candle

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