Jessica Tanguay's Art Blog

Moved!

2010-10-14T14:35:00.001-06:00

Hey everyone! I've officially moved over to wordpress.com. They're a little bit easier for me to use, and I like their themes better, so here we go:

www.jessicatanguayart.wordpress.com

Enjoy and thanks for watching! :)

Nasty

2010-09-17T12:03:00.005-06:00

A sneak peek at a sculpture I'm working on for my upcoming show.

I'm planning on moving this blog over to wordpress.com pretty soon. I'm having trouble formatting text/pictures on this one, and wordpress is prettier.

first attempts at monotypes

2010-09-05T13:45:00.006-06:00

I'm taking Printmaking I this semester, and I'm already really enjoying this method of working. Here's my first attempts at monotypes. (I'm also working on a woodcut relief print, but it's not really noteworthy yet).

Monotypes involve putting ink onto a (plexi)glass plate, so you can move it around, rub it off, scratch into it, and add more ink as you like. Unlike drawing directly on paper with ink, you don't have to deal with that whole "permanent" problem until you're happy with your image and print it onto paper. It's a really fun, spontaneous way of working.

some acrylic paintings in progress

2010-09-05T13:34:00.006-06:00

A couple paintings I'm working on for fun. I used to paint/draw a lot of weird humanoid monster things in high school, and it's relaxing to go back to that loud, cartoony style every now and then.

I had Dvorak's Slavonic Dance No. 7 in my head, thanks to Allegro Non Troppo.

additional Outdoor Studio stuff

2010-09-05T12:51:00.011-06:00

Here are some finished and/or new things from my Outdoor Studio summer class. We just had a gallery show of all our completed work -- I'm sad that the class is over, but I came away from it with a better appreciation of landscape work.

The jewelry box at the bottom was in response to one of the prompts for the class: make a box of some kind relating to the landscape. You could build it, find it, anything--so long as it had something to do with Wyoming landscape. I made a teeny tiny Vedauwoo and put it in a small jewelry box, which made something small and precious out of something giant (and also precious).

Outdoor Studio

2010-06-17T13:39:00.019-06:00

Sorry for my absence--I've been taking a summer Outdoor Studio class that takes students around Wyoming to experiment with landscape, culminating in a three-day camping trip to the Tetons. Here are a few of the better pieces I did.

oil pastel

in progress: oil over acrylic sketch

acrylic sketches

the biggest surface i've ever painted on

2010-02-15T20:54:00.004-07:00

So I might not post too much more of my series paintings until after I come out with the actual show ... I'd kind of like it to be a little bit of a surprise. I'll definitely post other class work and other concepts, though.

Here's a 5'x3' canvas that we just finished building. I've often bought pre-made canvases (with deep edges so they're a little sturdier)--but once you get a staple gun, a hammer, a tape measure, and at least have access to a miter saw, making a giant (and incredibly sturdy) stretched canvas with nice, thick canvas material is cheaper than buying something of the same size, depth, and quality pre-made. All I had to buy for this one was $12 worth of canvas and $10 worth of lumber. Since it's more customizable, you can let your idea dictate your painting size--not the other way around. Plus, you don't have to pay truck shipping / minimum quantity charges for an oversize canvas like this one.

Basically, I'm a bad art student for not building my own surfaces more often. It's nice to have some pre-made deep-edge canvas ready to go in case I need to get some ideas started quick, but this saves tons of money in the long run, and it looks better in a professional setting. From now on, and especially for this body of work, I'm going to try to go for the handmade stuff.

Here's my new-and-improved painting corner--which used to be a table easel on the ground on a pile of newspaper in our apartment. Mostly obscured by the giant canvas is the nice H-frame easel Kevin bought me. It makes painting a lot more enjoyable for me (and my posture), and now I can handle ginormous formats like this much better. Bought some cheap shower curtains as drop cloths for both the walls and surrounding floor.

If I didn't have the easel, I'd probably have to take this into the classroom studio to work on it comfortably. I enjoy working during class because of the feedback I can get from instructors and my classmates, but if I get the urge to paint at night, I usually don't feel like going to the art building by myself when it's dark, cold, and isolated. Being able to paint at home really boosts the whole productivity thing...and so does being able to make your own canvas for cheap.

bad photos of my painting series (in progress)

2010-02-06T21:37:00.006-07:00

My nude got accepted into the 35th Annual Student Juried Exhibition at the University of Wyoming's Art Museum! It was the first time I've seen something of mine hung up in a nice gallery space, with a tag and everything. Pretty sweet.

In Painting III, we're supposed to put together a body of work -- a series that we could put on a gallery show with. I'm doing about 10 pieces revolving around themes of conflict and tension, using scary or beautiful things I saw when I was a kid as the "setting". Here's the first two paintings of the series in progress (done out of order...)

This is a sculpture sitting out on I-80 of a tree. I saw it briefly in passing when I was a kid enduring a drive through Nevada to Utah. I thought of this tree when I was thinking of tension ... about how this interrupts what would be unbroken Salt Flats landscape. It looks jarring, even cartoony in its odd, unnatural colors and shapes. I've heard it called "Tree of Life", "Tree of Utah", and "Tree of Metamorphosis". Here are some images of it in real life.

This is one I just started about an hour ago, so it's very rough -- a close-up of a bee's abdomen and stinger (patterns combined from a honeybee and a wasp). I like that it seems like an abstract painting, but it's almost directly from natural reference. Originally, I thought I'd have the bee be red and black, but leaving it white seemed to look creepy and more what I had in mind.

preparing for show submission

2010-01-11T08:46:00.012-07:00

I'm trying to get three good pieces together for submission to a juried show. I thought I should submit my figure painting, my coffee still life, and my "erupting tree" as a good sampling of the variety of subjects I like to do.

To get the pieces gallery ready, I need to either frame the paintings or paint the sides nicely with a solid color. Since framing is expensive (and unnecessary for a contemporary show, in my opinion), I'm opting for painting the sides.

The tree painting's sides are a 1:1 mixture of alizarin crimson and ultramarine, and it blends pretty nicely into the violet background of the actual painting. This is my only hand-stretched canvas, so the edges are much deeper than the other ones (which are W&N Deep Edge 1.5").

My figure painting's edges (you can't really see the color in this picture) are some weird, complex mix of Indian red and yellow, alizarin crimson, ultramarine, naples, cadmium deep, burnt umber and white -- I have no idea how I replicated it twice for two coats. I think it works pretty well with the main image since it combines all the most prominent colors I used.

I've heard you're supposed to go with a neutral or neutral-dark color for your paintings' edges, but I thought a really deep, vibrant red (cadmium deep + a tiny bit of alizarin crimson and cadmium light) would pull the coffee still life together nicely.

I'm impatient (to a fault) when it comes to painting, so having to do a lot of waiting and second coats was a new experience. Next, I have to install wire on the pieces for hanging and actually think up some titles for them.

still life

2009-12-14T13:18:00.006-07:00

In progress, out-of-class project.

One of our coffee cups on my funky ottoman. I thought it looked really cool when I'd pour creamer into the coffee and it would look all swirly and cloud-like -- so I'm trying to put that moment in there.

First assignment in painting class: still life in an area of the painting room.

We had to bring in elements of our own, so I brought the cloth, playing card, and apples.

abstracts / non-objective paintings in progress

2009-12-14T11:56:00.005-07:00

I'm continuing work on this painting that I "finished" a while back. (original painting)

paintings of people in progress

2009-12-14T11:28:00.021-07:00

This is kind of an example of the "Disney cover art" style I'm trying to get away from.

I think it turned out as kind of a caricature of her rather than her exact likeness, but I've got plenty more chances to do portraits, so I'll stick a fork in this one and move on.

A more abstract painting I'm working on using my boyfriend as a model. The photo is pretty terrible, but I'm intending to give it pretty dark colors in the background, have ivy creeping out onto the walls, and make everything look like it's made out of the "wrong" material, if that makes sense--for example, I want the hands and arms to look very gnarly and similar to tree branches, the body to be made up of oily, magma-like bubbles, stone skin, etc.

This was our final project for painting class--my favorite to date. I'm still refining the cloth in the foreground and figuring out her hair, but I was pretty pleased with how everything turned out.

Before we went into two-hour sessions with the model, we had a fun quick-study class where we just did gestures. Painting from live models is awesome -- I'd love to take a class just focusing on that.