Gingersnap

It is the end of January. I'm twelve weeks away from the untitled senior show and was ill-advised to stop with the self-portraits and chocolate syrup paintings on paper. Since my thesis paper is solely on appropriations of romance novels and soap opera obsession, I am going to continue my drawings (maybe some paintings)of those and creating a 45th Anniversary Commemorative Magazine for Days of Our Lives - it will contain stories, drawings, pictures from the fan event, and an essay. So it's back to the drawing board peoples!!!! :D

First was the watching television self-portrait and now here is the in-progress reading one. I am planning on making strawberry syrup paintings to coincide with the television portrait because those chocolate syrup drawings are supposed to be with this reading one. The chocolate syrup is about making fictional characters brown in the historical romance context and the strawberry syrup (they don't sell vanilla syrup, lol!) is about capturing the TV actors who though play a role, they are real people. There are only three African Americans on Days of Our Lives and so there will not be any use for chocolate syrup. Plus, they aren't front burner stories either. I just have to figure out what this all means in the long run!!!!

I have been doing a lot of work for the upcoming senior thesis show. It happens to be the week of April 19th-23rd. That's just 13 weeks away!!!! I've retained my interest in romantic themes and appropriating romance novel covers. My idea is that there will be small litho crayon drawings of woman (no longer will there be portrayed female/male relationships) on a digital background of different African landscapes. The idea is that there is a lure about my unrequited love about traveling to Africa and making art that centers on that fixation. These pieces are about my own wanting to go into the unknown, explore an innocent, untested passion and not listening to the terrifying fears of my brain, but the longing in my heart. Africa is the male and I am the pure, unadulterated woman. Plus I will be working on a two large scale self-portrait drawings installation about the engaging in the act of enjoying the genre- one is watching television and the other is reading a novel. These sel

"In my current art work, I wanted to not only address and undermine stereotypes which have hounded me my whole life, but I also felt the need to express concerns about women’s attachments to escapist romantic fantasy. Up until age 17, I had lived in the “bad part of town” alongside hoodlums, drug dealers, and promiscuous young girls. At my predominantly African-American high school, one in every three girls were pregnant or often engaging in sexual activity by graduation. The few students I had any relationship with at all had referred to virginity as a vile disease that needed to be given away to the first availably interested man. It’s also strange that these same students viewed Africa in as a region that is the source of the world’s ugliness and ignorance. Immediately, I knew that I had to break away from these negative associations to find my own identity. Other African-American artists convinced me that Africa was a place to treasure. By making art about the fantasy of actua