A year and a half in the making and now Fairyland is in place, ready for its unveiling this Saturday, February 23rd, 2019.
https://www.lancastermoah.org/cedar-exhibitions
Prior to delivery, my workshop was quite a mess.
(images courtesy of Shoebox PR)
But with careful planning and ample experience in moving, the packing up of the work went surprisingly well. I even took satisfaction in the neat and tidy cardboard packages, labeled like so many Christmas packages under the tree.
For all my control-freak fretting the museum staff was incredibly capable and supportive, in the transport and in the installation. I fret and fret and all goes well,so much angst for naught.
An unforeseen drama was the vinyl lettering, the custom font I had designed and posted previously was simply too complex a design to be printed by my printer.
A last minute revision was made with happy results.
Best laid plans…
One of the dramatic transformations has been reimagining the white box gallery space into a personal place of enchantment. I specifically chose rich colors as an antidote to the “good taste” of so many gallery spaces, the blinding white or tepid neutrals . I wanted to use colors that I have lived with all my life, the blue seen above , a “Williamsburg” blue favored by my mother, that is now the wall color in my guest bathroom. The golden walls dense and theatrical evoke an orientalist fantasy and the deep red is beguilingly called Cochineal-how does one resist? I also wanted to play up the primary colors, the workhorse of a painter’s workshop and the nursery of fairy tale loving children.
So from chilling white …
…to something more personally gratifying, and since nearly all of my paintings have Paynes Grey in them , they look pretty spiffy.
To say it has been harrowing is an exaggeration but it has involved a great deal of planning to get this show on the road, in place and now installed. So much of my time and energy has been devoted to this project that I now feel myself bereft of purpose. I feel such a loss, my studio is forlorn, stripped bare of my stuffed friends and my favorite paintings, a wet LA winter has left the workshop bone-chilling cold, I am feeling unable to focus on the simplest tasks. I intend to read a new translation of The Odyssey and instead binge on H.R. Puffinstuff (which I now feel has been a latent influence , unbeknownst to me previously-also it celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year). But for the most part I feel like a ghost, wandering lost, awaiting the next project. I know something will emerge, if nothing else I will set new tasks for myself. I am moving out of the workshop to something climate controlled, clean and with pretty views of LA, plus my husband will be my suite mate. But I haven’t any new real deadlines aside from the final , existential deadline of mortality…that always keeps me moving.
If in Southern California please try to catch Fairyland, it runs through March 31st.
Boondocks Babylon 