More Valerio Vidali

Polaroid Kid

Barn Owls

From a google image search.

Living Room Shows

, originally uploaded by Jon Donnell.

For the past little while, Erin Sprinkle and her roommates have hosted a somewhat regular music series in their living room. This is  how I became aware of some of my favorite local bands. Here's a photo of Plains playing with South China's Jerusha and Jeremy Robinson. Check out these *stellar* bands:
Plains
South China
Selbyville
Hersey State

Interview: Kreh Mellick

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing artist Kreh Mellick. Mellick received her BFA in Illustration at Maine College of Art and spent two years on fellowship at Penland School of Crafts in the mountains of North Carolina. She recently returned from an artist residency in Iceland, and now lives and works in Asheville, North Carolina.

Mellick’s drawings are sparse. Instead of backgrounds her pieces have expanses of white, upon which she paints thin, spartan figures in greys and blacks and sometimes reds and pinks. Occasionally there are animals—zebras, horses—but many pieces contain only human figures, often women, simply dressed and with opaque facial expressions. Basically, the drawings are stark, making me think of seascapes, fog, barren landscapes and tough, weathered people. Despite the simplicity, or perhaps because of it, the figures in Mellick’s pieces are full of character, and the emotional weight in her pieces is consistently strong—they are often quite tense. The patches of floral pattern that burst out here and there serve sometimes to temper and sometimes to enhance the wild, moody, stillness of the works.

Captain's Wife Photo Credit: Elizabeth Hartsig

I'm really taken with your characters' hair. In Ghostly Hair Pull, one figure has braids wrapped almost like bandages around her head. She is pulling at the long gray hair of another figure. In Captain's Wife, the captain's wife has incredibly wild, thick, wind-blow hair. It really shapes my sense of her personality. Can you talk a bit about hair in your art?

The hair is really a part of the characters themselves. I never really plan the drawings before I sit down to draw them. I generally start with a face and everything that comes after is a just an attempt to find what will be the most honest interpretation of that character. In the captain’s wife, her hair is about texture and building depth… it had to be that way for her flat face to have life and to pop from the paper. In Ghostly Hair Pull, I love big braids because the length of hair represents time passed. This character is the ghost in this piece, and her long hair more or less represents the things she has seen over time.

Ghostly Hair Pull (left) and close-up (right)

The ghost is doing the hair pulling?

Yes, the ghost is in red, which I was using to represent ghosts for a little while. Like in machine diagrams in old books; in the diagrams black is used to represent the constant, while red usually signifies the moving piece or a dashed line. So in one series of work, the black characters represented the living and the red was the un-constant: the ghost.

Clare Rojas: Banjo Paintings

Clare Rojas 008, originally uploaded by joy of a toy.