Hope And Flowers

It has come to my attention that there is a new drug being tested in Norway that has shown great promise so far in treating ME/CFS.  To my knowledge, this is the first drug that has shown persistent, repeatable improvement in patients – even going so far as to sending some patients into full remission.  It seems like even the most successful cases eventually needed to have the drug re-administered, by my god, even if it were something we had to have injected a few times a year, to have anything that would help, even fractionally, let alone full remission, would be an absolute miracle.

There is a fundraiser going on to try and crowd-source funding for the next phase of drug trials.  If you can at all help, please do.  Even it’s a few years before the drug trickles down to actually reaching patients, just having that in our future would make such a difference.  I’ll have a bit more to say about this in the next few days, but for now, please join me in giving what you can.   And thank you so very much!

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I’ve noticed more and more flowers creeping into my work recently, and I’m not entirely sure why that is… or if it even matters.  Some of it certainly has a great deal to do with particular DreamWorld characters you will meet in the future, but they are cropping up in non-DreamWorld images too.  I could spend a long time analyzing why that is, but I’m not sure I need to.  Sometimes you just have to let things grow as they will.

I gave an interview recently and stated that I never shoot an image simply for the sake of taking a pretty picture.  They always have meaning to me.  This last photo was the closest I have ever come to taking a photo simply for the sake of beauty, although I knew there was some underlying meaning… I just had to figure out what my subconscious was trying to tell me.  Artists need to have faith in themselves and their visions; if they don’t, who will?

I’d had a vision of a girl holding an umbrella filled with flowers pouring down on her, so I set out to make such an umbrella.  As usual, I had no idea how I was going to do it, but I got started.  I had a good umbrella, and I had flowers left over from a few other projects, including this one.  Even though I almost always manage to buy them on some kind of sale, fake flowers are one of the most expensive props I buy, so I try and mitigate the cost by using them as many times and ways as possible.

In my vision, I very, very clearly saw wisteria hanging down, perhaps because I had recently been to the garden center where I lusted after a very expensive wisteria plant.  But I did not have any fake wisteria.  It seems to grow quite rampantly around here, and I toyed with the idea of simply asking an owner of an overly enthusiastic plant if I could cut some off… but ugh.  Talking to strangers.  Talking to strangers and asking them immediately for favors.  No.  I couldn’t do it.  Have I mentioned recently how shy and introverted I am in real life?  So I buckled down and found some reasonably-priced, realistic looking fake wisteria online and ordered it.

I’d had a shoot planned already with a model who would be new to me, although I knew her a bit through other photographers she’s worked with, Katie Johnson.  (Katie is amazing, by the way.  A charming, fascinating person, an absolutely natural and dedicated model… I would highly recommend her to anyone.)   Katie had recently approached me about shooting together sometime, which I was very keen to do!  I planned a number of concepts for her, including the wisteria umbrella, we picked a day and all was set… until somehow the wisteria was delayed, and it didn’t arrive until the day after our shoot.  Oops.  We still had a great time at that first shoot, and since it had gone so well, we decided to plan another shoot soon after, and bring the umbrella concept to life then.

The cats help the only way they know how; by sleeping on things.

After my wisteria arrived, I set about attaching it to the umbrella.  I ended up sewing some directly to either the frame of he umbrella or he fabric itself, and broke out my trusty glue gun to attach the flowers along the edge.

Hanging bunches of hydrangea from the umbrella to help fill it out.

Note the balancing-on-the-laundry basket move.  The damn umbrella was so awkward and lopsidedly heavy, poised on a curved handle, plus it kept shifting slightly as I moved around…. language was used.  More than once.

More wisteria is hung, and the first bit glued to he edge is on.

Just about done!

Since I was working with a limited amount of flowers, I concentrated them on one side.  I knew Katie’s head would be blocking part of he umbrella, so I didn’t want to waste any flowers there.  And filling it out a little in post is fairly easy to do, if you need to.

The day of our reshoot came, and it was a gorgeously overcast morning, which was absolutely perfect for what I wanted.  Katie was, of course, a dream and we were able to shoot several different concepts before calling it a day.  But not before Katie twirled around with the flower-ful umbrella, flinging shoots of wisteria into every direction, which made both of us laugh pretty hard.

The umbrella took it all in stride, not seeming to mind being spun about. 

After the whole thing was said and done, I finally realized what my subconscious was saying with these photos.  They portray a girl who is carrying hope and life, symbolized by the flowers, with her wherever she goes.  While the umbrella protects her physically from the sun and rain, its bigger role is to protect her soul by keeping these positive qualities with her.   There’s an implied symbiosis between her and the flowers; that each of them needs each other for its life, in a way that can be read both literally and metaphorically.

And as I edited these during a week when I was feeling particularly depressed and had been advised to exercise “self care,” this seemed like a perfect visual metaphor.  Keeping the gray world off my back with a layer of protection, under which heady armfulls of my own, beautiful flowers grow.  Not only was it a lovely metaphor, but working on the photo was cathartic in and of itself, so it worked for me on many levels.

Finished photos and detail shots below!

Perennial Parasol

Perennial Parasol -detail

Perennial Parasol -detail

Perennial Parasol -detail

Perennial Parasol -detail. Katie’s extensive dance background often shows itself in little details like this, which she did all on her own.

Efflorescence

Efflorescence – detail

Efflorescence – detail

Efflorescence – detail

Altadena Blog Interview

Well, this is fun!  I had the pleasure of getting to meet with Timothy Rutt recently, a journalist who writes for the Altadena Blog.  He conduced an interview with me about my art, and it is up, so please head over to his page to check it out!

I’ve got some cool things to share with you guys over the next week! 

Early Morning Birding

Head cold.  Blech.  Last night seemed about 15,000 hours long.  And NONE of the animals would cuddle with me.  That’s part of their JOB as pets; snuggle you up when you feel bad.  Luckily I had this post pretty much written already so I can press “publish” and go back to watching 4 hours of So You Think You Can Dance.

So, let me tell you about my trip to Bolsa Chica!

I knew I would soon be needing a lot of bird images for compositing into photos, so I decided to go somewhere I knew they would be hanging out; Bolsa Chica.  Bolsa Chica is one of the very few remaining natural wetlands in southern California, and I am lucky enough to live within driving distance of it.  Since birds tend to be most active very early in the morning, and since I was making a bit of a drive to get there, I decided to make the most of my trip and get there around sunrise.  My mom also lives relatively close to the wetland, and very generously offered to come along and keep me company, even after I told her how early I’d be going.

Getting up that morning was less than pleasant, but as soon as I saw my first snowy egret, it was all worth it.

Egrets are my favorite birds.  I was realizing that they share very similar overall lines with sighthounds and deer, so clearly I have a “type”   I was thrilled to see not just the one egret but MANY of them.

My mom brought her bird book along and helped me identify the birds I didn’t know.  She asked what I was really hoping to capture (egrets and anything that was flying) and acted as a great scout for moments I probably would have missed on my own.   I was really happy she’d been willing to come along, not just for the useful information and second set of eyes, but for the lovely time we were able to share and catch up on things!  After I had my fill of bird photos, we capped the morning off with a very excellent breakfast at a local restaurant we both love.  It was so fun!

The Chronic Fatigue really dislikes changes in schedules.  Any time I get up extra early or stay up unusually late, I pay for it.  And with this marked change in schedule; not only did I get up so early, I drove a long way and then had the nerve to walk around the wetlands, I felt ill for the next two days and could hardly do anything.  But it was worth it.  A little defiance in the face of disease can be a very good thing, even if you suffer for it.

You’ll be seeing more of these birds popping up in photos soon, so keep an eye out for them!  In the meantime, here are some pretty photos I captured that morning.

Thanks again to my sweet mother for coming along, and letting me take her photo for the blog!  It was pretty cold, so we were both bundled up like this

Love you, Mom!! <3

DreamWorld Sentinel

Another set of DreamWorld photos are done; yay! 

I had the chance to shoot Paul Telfer, who looks startlingly like you would imagine Superman would look in real life.  When I was casting the role of the Sentinel, Paul immediately came to mind.  He just looks like someone who would be more than capable of keeping you safe, in this world or DreamWorld!

You might recognize Paul from his recurring role on NCIS,  and recent appearances on Body of Proof and Vampire Diaries.  In fact, you can catch him on Vampire Diaries on their season finale on hte 16th!  Make sure to set your DVR.    He is also just the nicest person; charming, interesting and he really brought his acting skills into play for the photos.  He was a joy to shoot!

DreamWorld was going to need a protector; someone who would watch over you as you sleep and keep the nightmares at bay.  As I started thinking about how to visually portray this, I again associated one’s ego with eggs (although I actually conceived and shot this before Lauren’s photo).  It seemed very fitting; the intrinsic fragility of eggs, combined with their promise of life, growth and change… a perfect metaphor for the human soul.

For them to work in the photo, they were going to need to be much, much larger than an average egg, so I turned to the internet.  It proved really quite difficult to find suitable eggs; everything was either far too small or far too large (and also cost far too much).  Eventually though, I came across some plastic eggs at a party supply site.  They were all the wrong colors, and the package came with many more than I needed, but they would work, so I purchased them.

Once they arrived, I set about painting them.  I started with a few base coats of a pearly blue acrylic paint… I love this paint, it’s actually the same paint that I used to cover the dresser at the foot of my bed.  It’s just gorgeous.  Being covered in the paint immediately made the eggs look less like toys and much more magical.  I added in several more layers of different colors and textures, finishing them by spritzing them with water and then spraying on a light haze of silver spray paint.  The paint wouldn’t adhere where the water was, so it gave the eggs a slightly speckled appearance, which made them look like authentic eggs.

Painting eggs

More painting eggs

Paul came over and the weather gods must have been favoring me, since it was a gorgeously overcast afternoon.  Cloudy, overcast days are my very favorite, both personally and for shooting in.  I scooped up a mess of pine needles, generously provided by the little pine grove in front of my house.  Creating a nest out of them brought back fond childhood memories of building just such nests at parks which I’d sit in, pretending to be a bird.  Happy memories!

The painted eggs got loaded into the nest, along with some moss I’d found just to give an extra little dimension of realism.  Paul posed with them and was such a pro!  Shooting all three photos probably took twenty or thirty minutes, and then we were done!

I can never shoot anything without an animal appeared unexpectedly in it, as my neighbor’s dog Mei Mei demonstrates.

Mei Mei bomb

I felt like I’d done a good job with the photos when I had a nightmare a few days after I’d finished them, and imagining the Sentinel guarding me in my sleep helped calm and comfort me.  Please enjoy the finished photos and detail shots from each image, and feel free to imagine the Sentinel is guarding your sleep too

Sleeper’s Sentinel

His Flock Of Little Birds

Prayer For The Frail

Smoke birds

Smoke birds

Smoke birds

A Joy Too Great

“[Molly] stood very still, neither weeping nor laughing, for her joy was too great for her body to understand.”

-Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn.

I have wonderful news

Today I signed a contract with Conlan Press.  Yes, the company who publishes Peter S. Beagle’s books.  This partnership started a few months ago, but I wanted to wait until it was official to announce it.  Not too long after I’d posted When Spirits Weep, a self portrait which was inspired by Peter’s book A Fine and Private Place, I received an email from Connor Cochran, Peter’s publisher and manager.  Connor asked if I would be interested in joining forces and working with them, and possibly on some upcoming projects of Peter’s.  I had to read the email several times to make sure I wasn’t dreaming or imagining it.  Once I was sure the email really was real, and really was saying what I thought it was saying, I burst into tears.  Sobbing, noisy tears of joy.  As soon as I could compose myself, I wrote Connor back saying yes, I would be interested.

You all know how influential Peter’s works have been for me.  How they inspire me, not just in my art, but they help me navigate life.  I spoke at length about this just the other day.  I would have been excited to have been approached by any publisher, to get to work with any author.  But to have it be Conlan and Peter is just beyond anything I could have dreamed.

For the moment, I can say that Conlan will be marketing and selling images of mine; both ones that have a direct connection to Peter’s work, and others that they simply enjoy.  This is just the very tip of the iceberg, but I will save announcing other collaborations as they arise.  It is extremely safe to say that I am over the moon with excitement about ALL of them.

I am struck quite mute by the greatness of my joy and excitement, so I will leave you with some images collected on Pinterest which express my feelings better than any words could.

No creatures can express joy as purely and vibrantly as dogs can.  I am very excited to see where this partnership leads. 

Beagle Birthday!

Close up of In The Lilac Wood

This photo and post was supposed to go up over a week ago, but some MAJOR computer problems which ended in having my entire operating system having to be reinstalled slowed me down considerably.  (Let me briefly insert a shout out to my Computer Guy; Ara at Crown City Computer.  He knows his shit and is more than reasonably priced.  No one else touches my computer; I totally trust him.)

I had planned on releasing these to coincide with both Peter S. Beagle‘s birthday on April 20th, and the launch of the Last Unicorn cross-country movie screening tour!  The tour is going to be amazing; not just will you get to see the fully-restored gorgeous film on a huge theater screen, but Peter will be there to do signing, a Q&A, and they’ll be selling more Unicorn merchandise than you can imagine.  Check the official tour site to see if they’re coming near you; you can write to them if you’re area isn’t listed, and there are a number of ways you can help out with it too!  I was very sad to have not been able to dash up to San Francisco for the inaugural night, but with any luck, the tour will find itself in Los Angeles before too long

While nasty, external, computer-virus forces made me change my plans, I’ll still release this photo in honor of Peter’s birthday and the start of the tour!  Happy birthday, Peter!!

I wanted to take some of Unicorn and bring it into DreamWorld, so I decided to build a special corner just for it.  The evocative first line of The Last Unicorn reads, “The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.“  So, I decided to build my own lilac wood.

I pondered over ways I could do this, hopefully without spending any money, as I was quite broke.  It happened that I already had a large supply of beautiful fake flowers, which I had purchased for a different DreamWorld photo, and I also had several yards of a nice gray/green fabric.  The fabric would be a nice backdrop, and I could smother it in flowers.

Assessing what I had to work with

I debated between sewing or hot gluing the flowers on, and decided on hot glue in the end.  Sewing would have assured no damage would have been done to the flowers, and a very easy removal process (since they would all eventually have to come off to be used in the projects they were originally intended for) but would have been a much more labor-intensive and time consuming process.  Being short on time, I went with hot glue, thinking that I’d mostly be applying it to the flower bases anyway, which you won’t see much of in this photo, or the other photos they’d appear in.  With that solved, I started with gluing a healthy covering of leaves to the fabric.  I wanted enough on as a base so that as little fabric would be seen as possible.

Gluing leaves on.

The couch became the holding area for my flowers, which I sorted roughly by color.  I was trying to minimize the use of the white/creams and pinks, since it is a lilac wood, but I knew I’d end up needing at least some of them, both to cover my whole backdrop and to give it a more natural variance.

Flowers sorted by colors.

It became apparent that draping the fabric over the coffee table was just not going to work; I couldn’t see enough of it at once.  I was carefully planning where the different colors of flowers would go, and being able to only see a segment of it at a time wasn’t working.  So Geoff helped me move the coffee table and I took over the entire living room with leaves and flowers and fabric.  Geoff is always extremely good-natured when I do things like this, which is fairly often. 

I started simply placing the flowers where I thought they should go, and when I felt more confident in their placement, upgraded to hot gluing them on.  I knew I wanted one side of the finished photo to be a bit lighter and pinker, and the area behind where I’d be standing to be more dark and purple, so I tried to at least roughly stick to that plan.

I also have to say, my cats both showed heroic self-restraint in not trying to eat all the flowers.  They should be commended, as I’m sure it was no easy task.

Byron did try to help several times, but that’s just being polite.

Hot gluing continued until I had my whole backdrop covered!

Yay!

Since the photo was going to be a self portrait, and since I do not look like a unicorn (sad, but true) I wanted to include something that would be a nod toward unicorn-ness, beyond the white hair.  Taking a cue from Amalthea’s forehead mark that looks like a flower, I crafted a little flower amulet with an amethyst-colored crystal in its center.  Simple, but quite pretty!

You can’t really see what a pretty (and sparkly!) purple the crystal is in this photo, but I can promise you it was beautiful!

With everything created, I set out to take my self portrait the next day.  I absolutely love our house, but it is small, and it can sometimes be challenging to take photos inside it.  After weighing a number of factors (including the important one where the cats want to play with any backdrops) I decided to set up in the bedroom.   I used masking tape to hang my flower-covered backdrop, and even with the TONS of flowers covering it, it remained light enough to stay up.  The camera was perched precariously on a hardcover book in the middle of the bed, and every time I sat down to change the settings, it moved slightly, so this was far from an ideal setup, but I managed.  I used my new lights and gels, using a blueish gel on one and a purple gel on my hair light.  I sat on the stool, which helped keep me pretty consistently placed.  Overall, it was a bit crude, but it worked!

My “studio.”

I took several shots bringing parts of the backdrop closer to the camera, to give a greater sense of depth to the photo, holding the butterfly in various positions and flipping my white wig around.

With the how of the photo’s creation done, I’ll talk a little more about the why.  I’m sure you are all very familiar with me talking about what a monumental impact The Last Unicorn has had on my life.  It inspires me both in art and in life.  I identify strongly with the characters, but perhaps most of all with the unicorn, feeling trapped in a dying body not her own.  With my constant health battles, I often feel a prisoner of my body, that my soul must have been designed for some different kind of housing.  Yet it’s through the unicorn’s entrapment in her human body that she grows and becomes greater and deeper.  She learned to love, she experienced heartbreak, she knows regret.  Even returned to her true, unicorn body, she carries those lessons with her… and while they have made her a better and more complete being, they were not without pain.  It’s a heartening story for me to remember and think that one day, I will see how my trials and suffering have changed me into a more complete being too.  I hope

The butterfly, like the one in the book.

The finished amulet, attached with garment tape.

A red, bleeding rose over my heart, touching on the pain and heartache the unicorn endured.

The hair wind-whipped into a horn-like shape, giving off a bit of a glow.

I hope you enjoyed hearing more about how and why this photo came to be!  And a very happy, if belated, birthday to Mr. Beagle   I hope he realizes how many lives have not only been touched but utterly changed for the better because of his writing.

In The Lilac Wood

Walking Dead On The Hero’s Journey

I had the great pleasure recently of shooting with Lauren Cohan, the very talented actress many of you will know as Maggie from AMC’s The Walking Dead, which has its season finale this Sunday!  She was also a special guest lead in this week’s episode of Law and Order: SVU.

I’d had a couple of concepts in mind to use with her, so let me back up a little and take you through the whole creation process.

I’ve been reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces, by my idol Joseph Campbell, in which he really delves into his concept of the Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey, aka the Monomyth, is the story outline that all classic stories, folktales, myths, fairy tales and most popular movies of our day follow.   I will let him describe the basic Hero’s Journey in his own words: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix… it’s easier to find examples of stories which are not variations of the Hero’s Journey than those that are.  And of course, the actual Journey he proposes is much more complex than that brief blurb could touch on; there is the Departure, Initiation, and Return, each of which have six or seven individual steps.

I’ve found the Hero’s Journey to be a fascinating concept ever since I first heard about it.  And as Joseph Campbell wrote so heavily, and influentially, about dreams, myths and the importance of both in our modern lives, I knew his work would color much of what DreamWorld is becoming.  Recently I decided I would like to do a sub-series in DreamWorld portraying each of the steps along the Hero’s Journey.  It will be a challenge, and a long journey of its own, but I felt it would make an important contribution to DreamWorld.

As I’ve been reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell has been taking us through the Journey one step at a time, using examples from mythologies and religions all over the world.  Crossing The First Threshold  is the moment where the hero is given his first real challenge and he realizes there’s no going back (eg, taking the red pill).  In illustrating this step, Campbell talks about a story where a thunderbolt in one’s belly is used as a metaphor for a person’s essence.  It is their soul, their spiritual center, and it is what gives them the strength and intrinsic ability to overcome the challenges the Journey will throw at them.  I loved that image, so I set about figuring out how to incorporate it into my photo.

While I puzzled out the thunderbolt, I decided to start working on two pieces of my Hero’s costume; a crown and an amulet.  I made them both in a very similar easy, quick way, starting with some cardboard from a cereal box I had finished recently.

I had a large deer-head necklace that I’d been wanting to use for a while, and I thought it would make a beautiful center to the amulet.  I doodled a complimentary shape on the cardboard, traced the shape onto a piece of paper, flipped it, and gave myself a very symmetrical base.

Next I started working on the crown, using the same doodle-trace-flip method to give myself as much symmetry as possible.

Pinning and gluing the crown pieces together.

Once I had the basic shapes down, it came time to wrap them all in aluminum foil.  I just smooshed it on, not worrying about making it smooth, since having a bit of texture was going to actually be good for my purposes.

Foil-wrapped cardboard.

The next step is one I remembered learning as a kid from a library book which taught you how to make your own toys and crafts; pirate coins in this case.  Smear black paint on the whole surface, then rub most of it off with a paper towel.  The paint will stick just in the cracks and crevasses, giving a much more authentic, aged, weathered look to the pieces.

Post paint.

I added a couple of hair combs to the crown to help it stay it Lauren’s hair.  Then came the fun part; decorating them both!

I knew I wanted to use the deer necklace on he amulet so I twisted it on with a few wires, so I have the option of taking it off and using it somewhere else later (as I almost certainly will).

At the bottom is a decorative piece from a hair pin I’d gotten as a teenager and never got rid of after it broke because it was pretty. I am SUCH a magpie, but it can be a handy curse.

I dug into my bead stash and found a bag of purple and orange beads of various sizes and shapes which I thought would work really well.  I began hot-gluing them on, which is not the way to do it if you wan something really solid and lasting.  I did not.  I wanted it to hold together long enough to shoot, then be easy to take apart and use the beads again somewhere else.

Done and done!  Now on to my thunderbolt/soul piece.  I do not recall the exact chain of thoughts that led me down this path, but something about the word ego and its similarity to egg made me want to give the soul an eggy, oval shape.

This one I started with a cardboard oval, cut from more of the same giving cereal box.  I covered it with foil, then glued lot and lots of little scraps of lace (left over from my lace leaves) to give it a little dimensionality and wrapped the whole thing in plastic wrap.

Plastic-wrapped soul egg.

I painted the outline with some soft purple paints, darkening the color gradually around the perimeter.  And lastly, as a nod to the “thunderbolt” part of the story, I topped it off with a sparkly, snowflake-shaped ornament.

All that was left was the glue the egg onto a length of wide ribbon to make a belt of it, and there I was done!

The day of the shoot arrived, and Lauren was fantastic for everything; a trooper and such pleasure to shoot!  I suspected that Lauren’s acting ability would lend itself well to my concepts for her, and she did not disappoint; she was wonderful

Me trying to explain the whole concept of the Hero’s Journey, its history, meaning and subtext to Lauren… my models all have to listen to me pontificate a lot. She bore this with good humor… or rather, humour, in her case, since she’s British.

The ubiquitous Calantha bomb of the talent; she manages to work herself into the background of most photos at least once.

 

This time Calantha not only photobombed us, but she decided that my laying on the ground to get the angle I wanted was irresistible and she HAD to lay down with me.

She decided I was boring, so she took a nap.

I have another photo to work up still, but I’ll be posting those later.  Editing just this one was tough enough; I put well over 50 hours into it.  I’ll need a little break before I get to the rest!  But for now, here is Lauren Cohen Crossing The First Threshold of the Hero’s Journey!

Crossing The First Threshold