New Year, New Work

There is no end to my resolutions this year and one of many is the dedication to paint more. I am currently working on two—soon three—paintings and have a few ideas of sculptures I want to carve. I hit the ground running at the beginning of this new year: I resolved to get paperwork in order to officially start my own business, which I believe I will call RLM Studio (or something like that), I am working with a new website client, and I have decided to go back to school in the fall semester for a computer science class and another foreign language (I'm leaning towards Arabic). I still ultimately want to become an art professor, but I want to expand my horizons before I narrow them; I want to build a stable financial foundation before I tackle such a challenging task. Plus, I really enjoy working on websites—they provide endless mind puzzles, which I adore.

Art is still my heart's passion, but there is always time for art if you make time (sorry Facebook games, I've got better things to do). The first painting I'm working on has been around for a while collecting dust because I wasn't very happy with it, but the other day I looked at it again and decided to salvage it. The subject is about bird nest soup, which comes from the actual nests of swifts—not swallows—as sometimes it's called "swallow's nest." Although I hear it's very healthy, I'm averse to the idea of eating regurgitated nest material. In the painting, I felt to express my uneasiness by playing with the idea of a bird nesting in a person's open mouth.

The next painting's imagery has been stewing in my mind for about a year. The subject matter is simple and is comprised of a Japanese Shinto gateway (seen from a low angle) with birds sitting on it and flying over it. I am not sure it will work as a painting, but it made a really nice little relief print. I've always been fascinated with the Shinto belief of birds being the messengers between this world and the next. The gateway marks the divide between the ordinary world and the sacred, and since birds are the messengers, it's natural to find them at that divide. In fact, the Japanese call the gates "torii" and the word for bird is "tori." It has been said that the gate also functions as a type of glorified bird perch (I can't remember where I read this, please correct me if I'm wrong).

I've included pictures of both the works-in-progress in this post. Hopefully they come out as well as the imagery I'm imagining (crossing fingers).