My Historical Creatures

In June of 2020, I had just celebrated a collection of my art in a virtual art exhibit. I was struggling with my color choices on the computer and decided to take to heart a comment made by Will Terry. He said he understood color better because he had painted with traditional paint first. About the same time, I had found the Art Juice podcast. Louise Fletcher, one of the hosts, has a free course she runs yearly called Find Your Joy. One of the class assignments was to play with paint color. I created a Blog Post inspired by her assignment. These couple of influences led me to want to paint. It was a hunger. I had to do it.

I was also working on a manuscript of my own creation at the time (The Monster Under Jacob’s Bed) and I wanted to create a specific monster for what was living under his bed. I discovered I needed to learn more about monsters. I decided to combine the two needs and create another Virtual Art Exhibit: Monsters.

One of my ideas was to make a series of monsters that had posed themselves for their formal portrait. I envisioned that somewhere in a monster’s home, there would be a wall that had all these formal portraits on it. I decided to create that in my house.

Thrift stores near me in the summer of 2020 were still not opened. I started scouring Facebook Market Place, Craigslist and the like to find fancy frames. This was a time of contactless exchanges of money for frames and meeting outside fully masked to look at the goods. I finally decided that I had enough frames and set about to curate them. I used painters tape on my floor to mark off the size of the section of the wall I was going to use. Then I arranged frames until it looked good. I measured each frame’s position and attached them to the wall. My husband liked the arrangement so well, he suggested that I not paint the paintings and instead we put pictures of us in the frames and keep it on the wall.

In the fall of 2020, I opened my Monsters Exhibit. Unfortunately, I did not have these paintings done. Some of the panels had been toned but no images were on them yet. So I covered them will paper and used it as an event during the Exhibit to see what was coming next. In the video of the unveiling of the frames, I had value studies of some of the smaller paintings and color studies of the larger ones.

After the exhibit was over, the panels sat untouched. I didn’t do much with them.

Instead, I chose to paint more of the alien paintings that came out of the Monster Exhibit. In the fall of 2021, I opened an Alien Exhibit. I thought, perhaps, that I would be done with the aliens after that exhibit, but I was surprised that I had more aliens in me. Facebook friends had suggested ideas for aliens that never came to fruition. I had sketches I loved that I didn’t have time to complete.

As 2021 came to a close, I was frustrated. My life goals said I needed to move onto picture books. I have several ideas and some manuscripts waiting for me to turn my attention to them. But these aliens kept asking for me to finish them up. And then the monsters, sitting upstairs in my laundry, sewing, crafting, vaulted ceiling extra studio space piped up and said, “What about us?” The Medusa was especially persistent.

With no clear path, 2022 has become the year to finish up the dreams from 2020.

I did more alien paintings (Grampa’s Tractor, Alien Prayer, a series of aliens at the library, and more). Then last month a couple of young men came to my house for the first time. All of my aliens looked down on them. And one said, “Wow, you sure like eyeballs.” That is when I knew I was done. I still had one more alien painting I needed to finish (Alien Shepherd) and I was done. Unlike last year, I feel peace about being done with aliens. I might do the odd alien here and there, but as a series, I am done.

Today, I finished 2 more Monster Portrait paintings and decided to hang all of them on the wall. There were still nail holes from 2020 when I hung them up the first time. (Although I had to scroll through Facebook to find a video of the unveiling to remember which hole held which frame.) Medusa is still not done. She intimidates me just a little bit. I had her looking great and then I messed her up. So even though she was on the list to tackle today, I chose to hang up all the paintings instead.

I plan on finishing my Medusa and then creating a postcard packet of all the Historical Creatures (I think that sounds more sophisticated than Monsters.) When they are ready, you’ll be able to find them in my store.