Making Circles

Just found this short animated film. Great sound effects, and the story is very cute!

I have been knitting obsessively lately. Ever since I started working with my hands again a few months ago, I’ve been obsessed with keeping my hands busy. Maybe I’m trying to make up for lost time since I haven’t made much of anything over the last few years…

My new Etsy shop is up, and I now have 19 items I’ve made in stock! I’ve already received an order for a few pieces of custom jewelry (yay!), and have just posted a project I’m really excited about: the Celebrate Your Scar Custom Pendant. You send me a picture of your scar, and I’ll make a sterling silver pendant immortalizing it.
Here’s the pendant I made from my infamous scar:

You can read more about this piece in particular here

I am so happy to be making things again! It has been way too long!

My new Etsy shop, naida’s notions, is up and running! I’ve already posted a few pieces of my hand-crafted jewelry as well as a few drawings. More to come soon!
Check it out at www.naidasnotions.etsy.com!

I just finished making this little movie…

floss from Jessica Singerman on Vimeo.

I’d forgotten that work on a painting gets tougher as you go. I just wrapped up my third day of work on the painting I started 2 weekends ago (I wish I could work on it more often, but work has ramped up lately). The more elements to work with, the more difficult it is to know what to do with them…

It’s my first time working with a grid, and I’m finding it challenging to figure out when to stick to the grid’s structure and when to let it go. The work I was thinking of when starting this piece was Agnes Martin’s.

This is one of her paintings, “The Peach.” It wasn’t this piece in particular that I was thinking of, but rather her work in general. It’s calm even in its structure. Her grids, because they are pale and a bit ethereal, don’t seem rigid.

I work much more slowly than I did in the past. I am spending more time looking at the painting and reading what it is it needs in terms of color and mark. Working with the grid gives an instant balance, but it stays static unless I keep throwing off the balance in small sections of the painting. It’s difficult to find what the painting needs to work as a whole. Right now, there are a lot of shapes in addition to the grid, so the painting is quite segmented. Do I leave the grid exposed? Will its structure be visible no matter how much I cover the lines that form it? How do I allow the structure of the painting to develop if I simultaneously break down the initial structure of the grid?

Tim and I went to a Halloween party last night dressed as smurfs…

Somehow, quite a few people recognized us as smurfs. I thought white tights and shoes would help us look a little more convincing, but Tim wasn’t too keen on that, expecially the tights. So we had to rock the sweatpants.

Today was a really good day. We got up early this morning, and after doing some work, I painted for a couple of hours. It was great. Although I’ve missed painting for a couple years now, I haven’t been inspired to paint anything, and today I actually put on canvas some ideas I’d been thinking of for quite some time. I discovered that all the time I spent working in acrylics has really affected the way I now paint in oils. (To give a little background, I began with oils years ago, learning to paint traditionally, and switched to acrylics when I my work became non-representational in graduate school.) What is funny is that the way I painted in acrylic was akin to how I used oils in the way I mixed and applied color, and people often had a hard time telling what medium I used. Now, going back to oils, the way I paint has been affected by the way I worked in acrylics, and the way I’m applying paint is more playful than before. It is just so nice to push paint around, and I am finding oil more satisfying than acrylic because of its texture and color.
Anyhow, I’m posting the progress on the painting on my site. You can see it here. I figure posting progress keeps me accountable, so I have to finish it!

Tim just sent me this link to an article that poses some interesting questions on contemporary drawing and art- Read it here

I took a much needed day off the bike today. Lin and I played with clay out in the courtyard this afternoon. I haven’t modeled the human figure in so long, I was a little rusty. But man, is it nice to dig my hands in the clay. I tried to make a portrait of Tim, and realized after a while that my memory would only take me so far… luckily, Tim walked by just as I thought to go get him, and he happily modeled for me. Jim documented it-

Jim gave Tim and me a cd of images from the weekend- I particularly like this one of Tim cornering nicely:

and this one just makes me laugh because I look so serious (as usual) on my bike:

I don’t have a good poker face-

jim just finished putting together this little movie of tim and me at the race today-

see it here