From The Craft Table

Sometimes you have to take a break from drawing all those details and make something fun and colorful. Inspired by by my love of street art and retro video games, I decided to make some Space Invader coasters. The fact that I had a giant bucket of Perler beads was a factor as well. I found the zen of placing each bead calming and meditative. I started with the intention of making a set of four but I ended up making five sets of four. Having all of these great little 8bit aliens in front of me made me muse about throwing a giant 8bit party. I should do that sometime. Anyway gaze upon my neon coasters, any ideas you have about making them for yourself and using them for pasting up purposes instead of home use are not my fault.

Tiny Work In Progress

Several days ago a friend of mine and I decided that we would swap artistic creations. I asked her for a color and a theme and she gave me red and mantis shrimp. She continued to tell me that she found mantis shrimp inspiring because they have the most complicated eyes of the entire animal kingdom and that they could see a much wider range of color than any other animal. I also found that inspiring. This is my progress so far on this fun project:

Sketchbook Update

Here are some things I have been working on in my sketchbook lately. I have an idea for a series of paintings that I have been developing drawings for.

I just have to put this out there because it's on my mind. I know that the shooting in Colorado has nothing to do with me, I didn't know anyone involved and, thanks be, I definitely didn't know the shooter, but every time I see something like this I always feel so strongly about the fact that if you need to express yourself, use art. We all have dark feelings, we all get angry. Lots of people out there feel the need to express shock or horror, that's why we WRITE and PAINT, We scream out punk vocals, or sing a heart wrenching balad. Whatever you have to do, but you make a creative record of your experiences. Hit people with ideas and images not fists and bullets. You will still be remembered and you might actually create something beautiful instead of something destructive that no one understands.

Exercise is good for ya!

I was in the library doing research for my art work and I found a book of drawing exercises and this drawing is what resulted from doing one of them. I had to pick two numbers which randomly assigned me the two words elephant and bathtub. My job was to make a drawing using the two objects and I came up with an elephant feeding his pet fish who lives in a bathtub.it was silly, but exactly the kind of thing I need to get myself rolling again.

Resurrection....

It has been a long time since I have posted a new blog. I could rattle off all kinds of reasons but, honestly, I have no idea why I am prone to letting important things slip through my fingers. Luckily there is grace and there are second chances in this world so I am affording those things to myself and starting again. Over the time that I have been absent I have been focusing on increasing my skills in drawing and painting. I have recovered from surgery and sickness. I have fallen into pockets of depression only to come out of them realizing that I have wasted months of my life. I have a long way to go, but I am still young and as long as I am alive I get to keep trying. That was a lot of personal information, but I started this blog not only to give my creativity a voice, but to exercise honesty about the things that make me a creative person.

I Make My Own Fashion!

I needed a shirt for something and it couldn't be just any shirt, so I decided to make one. Well, I actually made two. One for me and one for my girlfriend. We needed a little boost in our morale when it came to our music. This year was a monumental year for us in that area because, even if it was only a few times, we actually got out of our living room and in front of some people. It was awesome. I can't wait until we can do it again! It will be a little bit though, because I had to have some crazy oral surgery and I need to heal and re-train so that I can sing, but I know that with some hard work it won't be long until I am up on the stage again. Anyway, I made these shirts that say "Still Beating" on them to remind us that: that even though it has been hard and there have been all kinds of unforseen obstacles, we are still in the game. We still have something to say with our music that is important. My heart beats in technicolor!

Mini Comic Assembly Party!

100 copies of each one of my mini comics hot off the press and ready to become little books! I am so fascinated by this particular format. I love how it makes something with so much potential out of a single piece of copy paper. It just goes to show that you don't have to have anything more than a pencil, a sharpie, and a few cents to make a copy in order to publish your ideas. In the future I intend to test just how powerfull these little agents of artistic subversion can be!
It has been a while since I have made a new one, but I hope to remedy that situation in the very near future. I have the outlines for several of them already!
I have to say that these two tiny books, one poking fun at the Swine Flu epidemic, and the other a celebration of Halloween in 2009, have returned so many rewards! I leave them all kinds of places, coffee shops, libraries, book stores, waiting rooms, even underneath windshield wipers and everywhere I go people always enjoy them and often ask for more to give to their friends. My latest experience was at a restaurant where I put one with the check when I was paying the waitress. She immediately went and read it and within minutes she had shown all of her co-workers. They all came out and surrounded our table asking if they could have one too and when I would have more for them to have. People need so much more in their lives than just the daily monotony of work and home and work again, and I feel like I am on a mission to offer people one more little thing that punctuates their daily routine with some joy, or unexpected-ness. What better to do that with than tiny little absurd comic books.

Boo! Celebrating 31 days of Halloween with creativity!

Fall is my favorite season and I love Halloween, so Erin and I decided that we were going to celebrate 31 days of Halloween! I kicked it off by making a "scary" watercolor painting (pictured above). I hope to do a little something like this each day of Halloween, and share it with the world. That way I can use the experience of celebrating as an exercise in creative productivity. You have to document your life before there's nothing left to see. I feel like that is one important reason why art exists.

Happiness Is a Tiny Pair of Orange Unicorns!

One of the things that I do with myself when I seem to be unable to work on my own artwork is volunteer in various places in order to bring art experiences to kids that other wise wouldn't have the opportunity to exercise their creativity. The pair of earrings in the picture I posted were made by one of my mom's fifth grade students from last year. They begged me all year long to do Shrinky Dinks, and finally in the last week of school I was able to gather the materials for them to make shrinkable art to their hearts' content. They were so excited when I also brought jewery findings so that they could actually make something usefull out of them. At the end of the day my little toaster oven was about to give out from all of the shrinking going on! One girl came up to me and handed me the pair of earrings she made and told me that she wanted me to have them as a thank you for coming and spending time with them and doing art projects with them. She told me that she didn't think any grown-ups cared about her until I sat down and taught her about drawing. I found the earrings today after they had been burried in a drawer of craft supplies and they were an amazing reminder of what my life is all about. I may paint, sing, write, ect., for the rest of my life and those things may always be doomed to obscurity, but I am reaching people, even if it is one fifth grader who feels less alone at a time

It's The Thought That Counts

About a week ago I had to go to the hospital to get some tests. I know this is too much information, but it explains where the envelope above came from. They forgot to have me sign the form that says you understand their privacy policy so they sent me one in the mail with a postage paid envelope. As I was sealing it right before I was going to pop it in the mail box and send it on it's way, something hit me. I asked myself "Why do I let all of my snail mail go without taking advantage of the opportunity to effect someone with some art?' Someone HAS to handle that envelope. It has to be opened by a clerk and then passed on to the person that has to approve the form, etc., etc. Why not give those unseen people something unexpected? They open hundreds, or even thousands of envelopes over the course of their careers, so why not infiltrate their monotony with a little something different? So I decorated this one with stars and wrote "May you experience the wonder of 1000 wishing stars." on it. If it looks hastily done and sketchy that's because it is, but it wasn't supposed to be a masterpiece. Just an infectious little idea to make a single moment a little richer for someone I don;t even know.

I Won't Grow Up!... Or Maybe I Will.

Chronilogically I am an adult, but in all other respects I feel like a flaming adolescent. For a very long time I thought my refusal to grow up was the secret to life that I had and all those stuffy grown up zombies out there somehow missed.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWii---CKwYHowever, lately I have been evaluating things in my life and I realized something terrifying. If I am to be more than a failure I am going to have to become some kind of grown up. The very idea of it gives me shivers up my spine and makes me a little sick to my stomach. BUT, when I asked myself what I need to do in order to build on my art and my body of work in general, I came up with the fact that I am way to irresponsible with the things that I consider to be my purpose for being alive. I have tons of paintings that sit undone, or haven't even started but are ideas written in a dusty notebook. I have more notebooks full of outlines for short stories, errant chapters of novels, and stubs of would be poems. Then there are my songs, which are the most sacred to me, and therefore the part of my work that I am the most cowardly about. Letting things that are important fall off into space unfinished, and being a straight up coward are what people who refuse to grow up do. Learning to finish what I started and having the balls to face what is truly important are things that a grown up does. So, here I go, one project at a time, I am going to become a grown up. BUT, I am still never going to get old!!! FTW!!!

Unfinished Business

I have this painting that has been sitting around my house haunting me. I started it like two years ago and it just sits there and stares at me like an orphaned child. I have thought about throwing it away many times thinking that the moment for it has past and I should move on, but something always makes me keep it. So, I vow to myself that I will finish it within the week and I never do. Now I am showing it to the internet in an attempt to guilt myself into finishing it, because inevitably if someone sees it on one of my blogs they are going to wonder what it would look like finished. So here it is.

It came from a place in me that I had come to through the utter frusteration I was feeling about some of my other creative avenues. I really felt like my world was crashing down becuase certain things I was trying to accomplish just were not working. So I feel like I sort of have a vendetta against this painting. I have to win the war with it, as a symbol of staying the course to win the war with my other bigger projects.

My New Experiment! This One is Sort of My Baby Right Now!

http://artbananas.blogspot.com/

Everybody Now!!

So, I have this strange uncanny ability to strike up sing alongs in public places. Many times it happens out of me being completely impulsive and I don't realize what I have done until I am singing into my fork and dancing through an all night diner half way through "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and notice that a surpirsing amount of people are singing and cheering. One time in another incident of spontaneous fork singing, I was in a waffle house somewhere between shows on the East coast in december of 06, and I rocked that waffle house in Rockin Around The Christmas Tree and a group of really old ladies came up to me and gave me a 20 dollar bill and took a picture with me, which made me very uncomfortable. Especially because I felt like I had been possessed or something. Well, this sort of happened to me tonight. I was at Waffle House in the small town out of the 70s that I live in, having diet coke, because everything they have there is full of things I don't want to consume, and the restaurant was full of good'ol down home people (you know the type, plaid shirts, baseball caps, overalls, big 80s hair, and Tammy Faye makeup circa 1986). Well, one of these fine folks had decided to operate the juke box and after Shameless by Garth Brooks, and Crazy by Patsy Cline played, God Bless The U.S.A. came on. Upon hearing the first few notes of the intro I was stricken with a flood of thoughts and impulses. I thought, "Wow, these are just the kind of people that would just bust out into this song if given the right leadership." and before I could stop myself I was on my feet with my best gospel tone and low and behold as soon as a few moments of shock went by, the entire restaurant errupted into song. I tried to really play it up and I landed the soaring notes at the end perfectly and looked around the room. A few of the men had their hats off and some other people had stood. They were taking this so seriously, I really just meant it as a joke. Suddenly i felt heat in my face as I became aware of my manipulation of them and I sat back down and shrunk behind my menu. My friend and I had to stifle our laughter as several people approached our table and gave us random comments about being patriotic and singing in church or something. It was after all incredibly funny, but it was the type of funny that comes with a little bit of caustic irony and that is something that people around here don't even comprehend. Occurences like these set off a bomb in my brain, because I am a person that is constructed around a weird paradox. On one hand I am quiet and polite. To a lot of people I seem like a quiet wall flower content to blend into the background. Then out of nowhere I bust out with these vivid, charismatic actions that upon second glance were lurking just beneath the surface the whole time. This paradox is a drowning one, because I believe if I could access more of this vividness on purpose then, my art, my life's work would flow so much more and there would be so much more immediacy and honesty in my work. Well, I am sure all of this sounds crazy, but show me an artist who isn't crazy and I'll show you someone who isn't really an artist.

All Painted Up and Nowhere To Go!

Last time I posted some sketches of little monsters and I mentioned making a series of little paintings of them, well here are the first three of my series. The first one is 5 by 7 and is acrylic on canvas, the next two are 4 by 4 and are acrylic on wood. Thanks for looking!

A Peek Under The Cover......Of My Sketchbook

I have been working on several different projects. The first two sketches are for a series of paintings that I am working on to hopefully form a collection to be exhibited in a gallery show. The mermaid sketch is part of the long process of preliminary sketches for a huge painting called The Venus of Battleship Island. That painting is one of those things that you see in your head and you know your skill isn't there yet, but you want it to come out really bad, so you just have to hammer away at it, ya know? Hopefully by the end of the process I will have grown a lot as an artist.

The Starbucks Experiment

In my previous post I mentioned the idea of making a sculpture at starbucks using only the materials availbale for free in that environment. Well here is what I came up with. I chose to work only with nutritional pamphlets, and since they had and actually let me use it, I allowed it.


Once I was finished it kind of reminded my of some kind of palace or monument with a long gazing pool in front of it.

The people at the coffe shop slowly trickled over as each one of them gained the courage to confront me about what I was doing. You would think that this kind of action wouldn't really matter to people, but I live in a small place where people aren't exposed to sculpture at all let alone someone executing one in a public place. Some people were amazed that I would do such a thing while others were offended and though I was weird. (make sure to read the word weird with a thick southern accent.) The workers were used to me doing stuff like that so they just laughed and told me that I could only use some of the nutritional pamphlets. All in all it was a freeing experiment. I usually bust out with this type of behavior when I am feeling stifled by having to create art in the limited space at home.

Hi! I am Lynn and I am, well, up to no good!

Welcome to my blog! Be afraid, be very afraid, because this blog is being used as a tool for me to infect the world with my creativity and adventures. This is not a personal blog where I will be yammering on about my life for sentences on end. As much as the world loves to stare at train wrecks, I really wanted to create a space on the internet that put a face on me as an artist. So I will be sharing my work, my ideas about the human creative experience, and commentary on things going on in the world that effect me creatively. That being said, I have a wide variety of things that I believe to be a part of the creative experience. A piece of art can be a painting, a sculpture, a found object, a snapshot, a sketch on a napkin, a single written word, a collecion of words, or a carefully placed object. It could even be something non tangible like a moment between two people, a gesture, a glance, or a reaction. What I tend to gravitate towards in my own work is various creative experiments in order to acheive a variety of reactions from people. One of my favorite media to work with is the situation. I ask questions like "How would people respond to me making a sculpture in the middle of Starbucks using only the materials that can be found in the Starbucks?" or "What will the hostess of a restaurant say if I walk right up to her and announce that I am Gweneth Paltrow and I am on the list?" or even "How will that conservative religious family in the next booth react to me and my friends having a very loud conversation about robbing a liquor store?" (Obvioulsy no liqour stores were harmed in the making of that situation.) These scenarios are things that I have actually done! They make for awesome adventures, and sometimes if you are lucky they make a statement as well.
Sometimes you can create "sitaution art" just by doing something creative in public. For example my friend and I were painting in a coffee shop and a little girl walked in with her mother. She was riveted by our painting. She watched so intently
that we could tell that she wished she could paint too. So, we asked her mother if it was alright, pulled up a chair, and offered the little girl some watercolors. She painted a beautiful picture of a butterfly and a tree. The situation that was created encapsuled some rare grains of beauty and truth.
Of course I work in traditional media as well, I love to paint and draw, I like to make comics, and write short stories and all of that will be covered here. I am the kind of person that views every form of expression like different vehicles for the same art. Song Writing is just as much of a paint brush for me as a polyester fiber number 10 flat. So, if you have found your way here, thank you for looking when I pull a stunt, hearing it when I scream, and joining me when I laugh.