New Work!!! Sweeet!!!!!!

Damn! My Life is Only Worth 26 Cents!
Bad things happen to people.
Pennies are supposedly worthless, one cent wonders that no one cares about. Sometimes I see people toss them to the ground or keep walking as a penny sits on the street, waiting for someone to pick it up for their savings bank. I even tell the cashiers to keep that one extra cent because I personally feel like I don't need it.
I constructed this acrylic painting and collected pennies from the date of my birth to last year. Memories in a way are like pennies. We wanna forget that the awful memories are there, but we can't help but remember. They are supposed to be just as worthless, but it's those events that make us feel that way. I have the worse short term memory ever, I forget where my keys are almost everyday!!!!
So for each year, I wrote something good or bad that occurred in Sharpie marker. Like the beginning for October 7th, 1983, "I was born in a USAF Air Force Base Hospital in South Carolina, fatherless......." Yet all of the memories are like wounds to me, never healing scars. Pennies get old and tarnish, but what happens to memories? They fade and disappear as of they never happened. My mom would often tell me things that I forgot and she would say, "how can you forget that? I'm older than you and I remember."
The body is an instrument here, the glue that holds these memories together. But why not the painting of a head? Of a brain? Why a half naked body? Why bloody red? I'm using my own self, my own haunting thoughts, I feel like the body is where most of these memories take place. My boobs have caused me a lot of pain and grief either from menstrual cramping, the men who can't look at my face, or the other weirdo things. The red slashes on the stomach represent my many childhood belt lashings and the ugly stretchmarks that maw me. It's an indication that just because some scars have seemed to go away, they never truly disappear from one's existence.

Love in the Afternoon Series
The first two drawings are one whole piece that have conversation with each other. The first part is a self-portrait of me indulging in chocolates that have a romantic cover. They are called, And Then He Kissed Her Chocolates (insert breathy sigh). I have this thoroughly engaged face, lured in by what is on the TV screen and by the very piece of chocolate about to consumed. The world outside of TV is mundane, monotone, and kind of lifeless (that is if the chocolates weren't there) and inside of the TV is vibrant, lively color. It's like I'm saying, "I wish I was inside of that Life's Good flat screen instead of out here in this seemingly empty b&w room?" There's a sense of hopelessness and the longing to escape from real-life.
The technical errors!!!!! Hands, shirt fabric, and the faces all need work, but I'm almost finished. Hahahahahaha!!!!
Funny, Tien and I watched "The Incredible Mr. Limpet," a half- live action, animation movie. So very cute and sad. A simple man made a wish. He wished to be a fish.



So I was drawing the "Birth of Romance," a large scale oil pastel drawing of a couple standing in a romantic pose on top of a shell with African land animals on both sides of them instead of the angels and the woman holding a robe in the real Botticelli "Birth of Venus" painting. I decided to make a small drawing for Secret Artworks reusing my favorite Botticelli painting as well, to take take a break from the large work. This colored pencil drawing entitled, "Birth of the Negress" is 5x7 inches and quite simple, a fully hipped, Afrocentric woman standing on the shell, but not looking modestly humble. There is an elegant allure about her, an assurance and powerful authority that her beauty is not just on the outside, but is inward. She is intelligent, wise, and even a little sad.
Okay, I definitely need to make something a little more uplifting in the studio, lol!!!!! :D