Latest Series

Wednesday, 9 a.m. Acrylic on Canvas, 46"x46"

Thursday, 5 p.m. Acrylic on Canvas, 46"x64"

Saturday, 4 a.m. Acrylic on Canvas, 46"x76"

Sunday, 8 p.m. Acrylic on Canvas, 28"x46"

After 14 years of painting other people and abstract ideas, my latest series of paintings are autobiographical, illustration-based pieces exploring my past. They were painted in the last few months  with acrylics on raw, unprimed canvas. Since I recently moved to a new, larger studio, I now have the space to paint on a large scale and it has been liberating. These paintings depict memories of distinct moments of my life the way I remember them when I think about them today. The passage of time has altered the way the actual moments appear in my memory and turned them into scenes frozen in time - snapshots in my mind. These works seek to capture each memory at its most intense moment, because such moments have come to define the emotionally charged nature of my life.

salon des refusés

My painting, Shelly, from my last blog posting, will be a part of the Salon des Refusés 2011 show at Gallery M Squared on W. 19th Street in the Heights. The show opening will be Friday, July 1st from 6:30-9pm and the show will run until Saturday, July 9th. Here is the link to the gallery's website with more details about the show:
http://www.gallerymsquared.com/calendar.php.

In order to qualify for this show, my artwork had to be rejected from Lawndale Art Center's The Big Show. Salon des Refusés 2011 is patterned off an exhibition in Paris in 1863 where famous artists (among them Cézanne, Manet, Pissarro and Whistler) who were rejected from a similarly well known type of show, were offered a place to exhibit their work by Napoleon III who insisted that it should be the public who was the judge of the art. It is in that spirit that I invite you all to be my judges...

reconsidering gender

Finally! The latest painting in my series on transgendered individuals. As alluded to in my last post, I'm using a technique that employs layers of color and features blotted lines in this 24" x 30" acrylic on canvas painting. It is titled Shelly.

This series focuses on a theme that is new for me: Reconsidering Gender. The inspiration for this series is the idea that, while sex is a biological reality that greets each of us at birth, gender is a sophisticated construct that is instilled in us by our cultural upbringing based solely on our biological sex. My paintings depict people who are challenging traditional norms of gender.

The other three paintings in this series are more suited for a mature audience. If anyone wishes to view them, please email me at ana.c.champion@gmail.com and I'll send you these images.

the victorian lady

This painting represents a new direction in my work. I was inspired by photographic images and decided to play off the images by incorporating my knowledge of color combinations into these paintings using the blotted line technique (see a few blog posts below). The finished piece is 36"x48" and is painted in acrylic entitled The Victorian Lady. First I took the original image from a magazine photograph and transferred it onto tracing paper. I then used ink to make the line drawing on a small scale and projected it on an opaque projector to a large scale. The background was painted very flat and smooth while looking at the original image. (That is why the two images do not line up perfectly.) I chose colors of the Victorian era to compliment the feeling of the image. Next I will take the concept one step further and make a series of paintings based around a theme.

cai guo-qiang's odyssey

photo by Douglas Newman of Cai 

Last week I had the incredible opportunity to volunteer to work with the Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang on a massive gunpowder drawing he was commissioned to do for the Arts of China Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. As a volunteer, I cut stencil out of cardboard that he drew so he could spread gunpowder over the stencil and onto specially prepared hemp paper panels. I worked Monday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings. The piece is made of 42 panels approximately 8 feet high by 5 feet wide (my estimation).

After the cardboard was cut out and the gunpowder was applied by Cai, fuses and dried plants were added then lit on fire inside the warehouse where the art was created. An explosion and smoke followed - all was caught on live streaming video that I watched from the comfort of my apartment. Here is a link to the ignition ceremony: http://www.culturemap.com/series/cais-odyssey/

The resulting gunpowder drawing will be on permanent display at the gallery as a backdrop to its rotating antiquities collection. The finished piece will be revealed this week at the opening of the new gallery. It was an unforgettable opportunity to see another artist at work and to participate in the creation of such a massive piece of art.

I am currently working with ink and brush on a new project as I was inspired by the beauty of the brushstrokes Cai made and the references to Chinese calligraphy. I hope to paint on a small scale with ink and brush then blow the images up on a projector and paint them much larger. We'll have to see how it comes out!

superman at tradition bank

I entered Superman in an SAO (Student-Alumni Organization) show and got in! The show is currently running at Tradition Bank on Montrose Boulevard across from Glassell. Here is a photograph of the painting in situ. I am really excited to start the year off with a bang.

My intermediate painting class is going well and I will soon post my first three paintings from that class as soon as I have my studio set up to take photographs - I just moved apartments so my studio is still a work in progress. Thanks for your patience with my work. And thanks always for your support!

matte-tastic

Here is a photo of my work up on the upstairs wall at Glassell. These two pieces were created using matte medium (which is basically liquid plastic) to create transferred images from inkjet printouts. I had so much fun creating these pieces! To do these I printed out images of pop singers, in this case, Ke$ha and Lady Gaga and poured the matte medium over them. I let it dry for 24 hours, then washed off the paper in the sink. The resulting images are a bit blurry and oh-so-matte-tastic.

For this one, I pixelated a photograph of Ke$ha in Photoshop and then used poured sheets of matte medium in bold colors that I then cut into squares for the background image. For the hazy overlay I poured matte medium over the actual photograph of the pop singer as I described above. I also made a $ out of matte medium using a magazine image, since she has that symbol in her name, and glued it onto the top of the piece. It's sort of a collage using a variety of matte medium techniques. The image is 9x12" mounted on a piece of Bristol board.

The other piece features Lady Gaga in what I'm calling a mash-up of two images. One is a pixelated version of Lady Gaga and the other is the pop singer herself. Both images were manipulated in Photoshop. I then printed the images out on my inkjet printer, poured matte medium over them, and let them dry overnight. After washing the paper off, I cut them into strips and glued them to a piece of 12x9" Bristol board leaving the edges raw.

My instructor liked the pieces so much he immediately hung them on the wall outside the classroom at Glassell where they remained for the rest of the summer semester. Pretty cool stuff. I'm going to have to explore this technique some more and see where it takes me...