NEW WEBSITE!

I totally redid my website from the ground up. I am still working out the kinks in it and I will surely update the content down the road-- but I wanted to get something more functional posted. It is much easier to navigate to and through the paintings. That was the most important part. Also they are laid out much better sequentially.

What I am still working on (other than learning enough Java to get it to load faster) is the non-painting content. I want to have an artist statement (which I have to rewrite still) and work in more of a resume & press section somewhere on the site. For now, since the content is still limited, it's integrated in other categories.

I also set up a fan page on Facebook. So if you Facebook, check that out.

That's all. I'm off to the MFA now. Will buy wood panels on the way home for a new project that doesn't involve web coding thank god!

While in Limbo

My entire life is packed in boxes and not at all functional. I can't unpack (let alone paint comfortably) until I get and apartment. I can't get an apartment until I get a day job. And that is not looking at all promising in this economic climate. I'm currently living in my parents guestroom and paying my essential bills with unemployment checks. Basically I am in limbo indefinitely.

So, in order to try and be productive in a way that benefits my art, I think I am going to spend my time rebuilding my art website. Which will allow me to review where I am with my work and get perspective. And it will also allow me to learn Dreamweaver (somewhat) in the process. Which may benefit my getting a better day-job.

My current art website is simple, but I want to make it more navigation-friendly. And I've spotted some errors on it these days that I thought I eliminated. So I want to rebuild the site so that I can organize my work into "series." As I've reviewed my paintings from over the last 6 years, I've started to organize them into categories. I seem to always have several themes or ideas I'm working on-- usually simultaneously.

In my head all my paintings go together. But after the fact I look back and realize they are more schizophrenic than I planned. So I need to edit. For a while I avoided editing because I wanted to show off all the work I did and wanted a big number of total paintings so I can show how hard I work.

I still remember being horribly insulted when a gallery owner asked me if "I was still painting," as if I would just paint a few things I was happy with and then walk away. I'm not like that. I'll stop painting when I die. I don't paint for buyers or shows or galleries. I paint because it's what I want to do everyday.

But I must edit the work I put on my website so that it flows smoothly and has good presentation (in case there are buyers and shows and galleries looking.)

I'll post the other paintings, experiments, and works-in-progress here on my blog and Flickr where things can be less formal.

So a brand new website is in the works. In the meantime I'll post some paintings (done last fall) that I haven't shown to anyone yet since my life took such an abrupt turn and everything I was working on got interrupted.

Website Updated with New Paintings!

I've put 6 new 2008 paintings on my website (as well as my flickr site.)

Take a look!

www.bekkateerlink.com

I reordered the paintings on my website so not all the new one's come up right away.

A new website is coming soon, it's in the design phase and hopefully it will be done in a month or so depending on how busy things are. I want to have something with more involved navigation and paintings separated into different series by theme-- now that the number of paintings is climbing.

And don't forget the Cannibal Flower show this upcoming Saturday. I'll have a piece in it, probably an even newer one ...if it gets finished in time.

Un-updated?

I revised my website again, and undid a few things I did late night earlier this week. I need to stop impulsively starting on projects at 2am (notice the timestamp on this blog, I am seriously crazy and should be asleep now.) So for now the artist statement has been removed, I am once again mulling it over.

Website Updated, for now.

I've updated my website so it has my latest paintings. I also reorganized the order that the paintings are viewed, so the recent ones pop up first (sort of, they're also somewhat ordered by concept too.) I also put a semi-coherent artist statement which shall be revised once I get a 1st and 2nd and 3rd opinion on it. It's still nowhere near perfect. It's hard to write one universal statement to cover every idea in my head and in my work. There's still so much I didn't get into, I feel like I could write a book. It's is additionally hard to write a statement when I'm going through a period where I'm feeling a bit scattered artistically. I had a show a few weeks ago where I saw a bunch of my recent pieces next to each other and I felt they were so different as if they were separated by years and not days or months. I resolved then to be more focused and unified somehow, even if it was just done by a unified color palette. I'm still turning this all over in my head, and I got a sort of unsatisfied feeling in my stomach. I know at some point I'll find my new direction and start a brilliant new series of paintings. For now, I'm loosing myself in music and a bit of poetry as a change of pace.

Try to compose it,
it fails
the center vanishes

the figure
suddenly
nowhere
in sight

or hiding under
scraps of buildings
the columns of a fallen bridge
any thing hard will do
as shield
or carapace

yet nothing stays
everything disperses
you cannot draw this
dust as it rises

excerpt from the poem "To the Far Corners of Fractured Worlds" by Susan Griffin. (from The Gift of Tongues by Copper Canyon Press.)

(I just realized I don't know the protocol for quoting poetry or other published material in a blog. Is it allowed, and how much? I have absolutely no clue, it's such a new world for me. If this has crossed any lines, please politely inform me and I'll remove it.)

holy crap I'm moving

Yes I've been missing lately (though it probably doesn't matter since I have no readers) and admittedly haven't been focused much on art. I've wrapped up most of my recent in-process paintings, photographed them, handed them over to my web designer (who proceeded to not update my website), and turned my attention to getting a new apartment-- one that wouldn't involve my spending up to 3 hrs in the car each day getting to and from work.

So I have found the perfect apartment (as perfect as it gets without thousands of square feet to spill paint in) tucked on the side of a hill in the Loz Feliz/Silverlake area. It is a one bedroom so I will be roommate free and can officially become the crazy artist hermit I am aspiring to be. And once I'm settled and have my art studio back in order in it's new home, I'll start posting pictures and blogging again.

photohardship

I spent the weekend re-photographing most of my paintings I have in my apartment and I'm amazed how hard it is to get clear images. Of course I'm working with limited lighting equipment and space so I expected it to be an up hill battle. If it's not glare or dust or not being able to get the perfect straight on angle-- it's the inability to really be sure of color in the digital image. I did some paintings in 32K tungsten light (using lights that usually give me a headache with glare) and some in cloudy daylight where the glare is minimal but for some reason all the images came out grayish and lacking a certain fortitude. I really notice the difference when the photos are side by side. Perhaps it is something that photoshop could even out-- but since I have spent years taking my own slides-- a task that requires that everything be meticulous on the photography end-- I prefer to manipulate the images in photoshop as little as possible. So it looks like I have some more photos to re-take. I am not looking forward to breaking out the hot lights and going through my stacks and stacks of paintings one by one.

But the upside of me slaving away taking photos this weekend is that I have new images on flickr, many are old paintings (meaning more than a year old) that I haven't posted before. Most of them are either self portraits or portraits of friends.