Girl in Green

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Young Girl in Green has been one of my favorite paintings ever since I ended up with a fold-out poster of her from some French magazine when I was 11. A few years ago, my brother got me a 1000-piece puzzle of her that I spent the entire Sandy hurricane putting together. And recently I tried to reproduce her through my paper art.

I don’t know that this is a finished piece. I think I might want to go back in and add all the shadows – there’s so much depth that I’ve lost. But I do like her like this too, so we’ll see.

Also it’s quite a challenge for me to work from a painting – it feels similar somehow to the piece I did of my brother’s dog where I had to decide how to treat the shading – at what point does the gradient descend so far into black that I should no longer represent it with color? Anyway, this was a first attempt.

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Models

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Also while I was bored at home recovering, I made some portraits of models from magazine ads. 

The gold hair girl is my favorite – crazy hair is always the most fun to make. 

20140126-154714.jpgThe one of the green girl I donated to my friend’s Marathon fundraiser and apparently it became a new New Yorker’s first piece of art for her new apartment!

20140126-154722.jpg(Gold Hair and Blue Mom are available if you’re interested)

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Fundraiser for Haiti

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After the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, a coworker held an art auction as a benefit and I donated two pieces. My coworker gave me some images from Haiti that I could use. The first is a woman praying – this piece was important for me obviously because of the cause, but also because I hadn’t really thought about framing or negative space before. The second is children on their way to school. This was important because I hadn’t done much with multiple people, and especially with such small people. This was also a diversion from what had really only been pictures of women before. (Please excuse my reflection in the photos!!)

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Pregnant Jen

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A darling friend of mine from Portland was pregnant and had this beautiful photo series done with her husband. I’m not sure exactly how I decided to use one of her images to make a portrait, but I think it might have originated in a facebook comment conversation based on some of my other pieces. Anyway, portraits of people I know are awesome, and I want to do more of them. So cool to think about the person who I’m creating it for when choosing the photo and the papers. I chose the reindeer paper for Jen’s skin because I thought about her creating life within her, and the energy of it seemed appropriate.

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SHAG T-shirt Contest

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In grad school I joined a student group called the Sexual and Reproductive Health Action Group, or SHAG for short (you can just ignore the fact that it should really be SRHAG) (Also did I mention that I went to Public Health school and that my concentration was in adolescent reproductive health? Now maybe it makes more sense). Anyway, they wanted to make a group t-shirt and called for submissions. I decided to redo one of the Brooklyn Girls with what I thought were related images, so you have:

Georgia O’Keeffe for the hair (vaginas)

Map of the world for the skin (global nature of this work)

Adam and Eve for the underwear (sex, humans)

BodyWorlds for the stockings (health, science)

And a green landscape for the boots (roots, nature, harmony)

Then I scanned the whole image and used photoshop to put it on top of a bunch of sexual and reproductive health facts.

Needless to say I won – I have the t-shirt to prove it. I wear it to the gym sometimes.

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