Happy Winter Solstice! (with failed cards) →

Every 6 month there is a major Solar event that I dedicate a great deal of my thoughts and efforts to: Solstice. Solstices punctuate my bipolar nature swinging from too much darkness to too much light. To celebrate this awareness I make greetings cards, sometimes more than just one. 

This December I drafted 8 of those Merry Winter Solstice cards, 6 of them you can see HERE.

But 2 of them I had doubts about and consulted with my Inner PR person.

- Too phallic, - she said about one. - In this political climate golden balls attached to a golden penis is the last thing people want to see. 

- This is too dark, - she said about the other. - And what are those little hairs between the legs? Too suggestive of pubic hair. It will upset parents and will ruin your reputation. If you publish this you may never be able to run another successful Kickstarter campaign.

So I didn't publish them when the Solstice took place.

But the effort that went into making them kept nagging me. Now when my Inner PR person sleeps on her soft nest of laurels I am publishing the drawings for you to judge if they are too dark and too suggestive. What do you think?

Finding Hidden Life in Life Drawing

Life drawing is like an exercise - when you don't do it, you lose it. To be in a decent shape, you have to do it regularly. But, like any exercise or obligatory task, it can become tedious. 

This week we had an excellent model, with a beautiful body and inspiring poses. All of us were scribbling feverishly on our papers, trying to put down the lines and capture the exquisite, fleeting beauty in front of us in less than 2 minutes. Then the model took a 10 minute pose that I drew in 2 minutes and I got restless. Of course, it was not a good drawing but instead of trying to get better at it I got bored. As an animator, I am mainly interested in a gesture, not in making pretty pictures. I also don't have a lot of patience. So I stopped at this:

- What else is there for me to draw? - I thought. I had 8 more minutes to look at this pose until change to another. Suddenly, I saw the object the model'd body was resting on. It was alive! With renewed vigor I started to sketch this:

Then of course, I started seeing things every time the model took a pose:

The moral of this story: a little boredom can spur something new into existence. 

Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series Speech (2015)

University of Michigan Penny Stamps School of Arts and Design invited me to give a speech at their Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series on October 25th, 2015 (almost a year ago!).

My speech was called "Sex, Madness and Dentists" but when I got there I saw how many young women were in the audience and felt compelled to talk about my sex in a male dominated industry and my madness in the face of triple difficulty of being an independent artist, being a woman and being bi-polar. Dentists didn't fit in those 60 minutes.

Here's the video of the speech: