Lola Jovan Art Musings and Random Thoughts

I Can Do This, I Say

4/29/2024

I Can Do This, I Say

"I Can Do This, I Say" - oil on cradled wood panel, 18 x 18 x 1.75 . Ready to hang. (click on the image to purchase)

So often I dream you’re here and I wake in the middle of a prayer from my muzzled
childhood. Jesus Mary and Joseph, I say, appalled that I’m stuck in 1955 when I need
something profane to see me through. Serrano’s submerged cross. Ginger tea.
The idea that we’re moving between horizons and the Earth is so wise she sends us
Winter and red-tailed hawks when we least expect them. I can do this, I say,
and the planet shifts imperceptibly. From a great distance she appears to be at peace.

-FROM FIDDLEHEADS BY MAUREEN SEATON

A month of Fiddleheads lands us here, with the planet shifting imperceptibly as she/we sees the small beauties in an otherwise difficult life, and knows she can do this.

The things we can do when we think we can do no more astound me. The pain we can endure, the exquisite joy we can feel wash over and through us even though there is pain. The beauty we can see in a world bursting with conflict and crisis and chaos.

Winter and red-tailed hawks when we least expect them - yes. And spring and river otters chirping, wild turkeys calling, crows raucously defending their turf. I can do this, I say.

About the art: beginning with an old acrylic painting and a tub of black gesso, murdering the old painting to make room for the new. Carving back through the wet gesso to reveal a spot or two of the underpainting color. For this piece, I used no inspiration image. Just a color palette and my Planes of the Head mannequin - https://planesofthehead.com/products.php. I sketched a basic shape and features with a small brush and some thinned oil paint. Then the requisite 80 million layers of thin washes - darkening the background, highlighting the face, the flower petals, the hair. Allowing the texture of the original painting to create a kind of old-world crackling of the skin. OH! A walnut-oil laden brush over wet petals to create the dripping effect. A final layer of Gamvar gloss over the dried painting to make the darks sing.

Congratulations to Sara V.H.! Wonder Mike selected your name at random as winner of the April Reader Giveaway. Be on the lookout for your prize package in the mail. And thanks to all who participated! Hooray!

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Her Imagination Tends to Run Wild

4/22/2024

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Her Imagination Tends To Run Wild

"Her Imagination Tends to Run Wild" - oil on cradled wood panel, 16 x 16 x 1.5 inches (click on the image to purchase)

Continuing an exploration of Seaton's Fiddleheads:

Once when you hurt me I slept at a Red Roof Inn. I double-locked the door and tried to
watch talk shows to keep my mind off sounds like someone suffocating someone
in the next room. I thought I saw blood on the box spring and imagined needles and bulgy
veins, there’s something odd, I thought, about someone whose imagination runs this wild.

-FROM FIDDLEHEADS BY MAUREEN SEATON

Seaton's words are visceral and uncensored, off-putting.

She invites us to look at things we might not otherwise care to - especially those things that run through our own minds during challenging times.

Visual art can be like poetry in that way, making us feel squirmy and uncomfortable because we feel stuff when we look at it. I suppose that is part of our jobs as creatives - to invent a way to look at a thing that allows us to approach and sit with it for a moment. Long enough for an aha, perhaps. Or even just an oh.

About the art - another piece created on top of an old one, using the underpainting colors to enhance the background and to cut through some of the foreground. In using the poem as fodder for the art, I used harsh, edgy brush strokes and wedge edges for some of this piece, keeping the colors fairly stark and full of contrast. Some soft blending, but mostly allowing the piece to fill with unrefined texture. Especially important to resist perfecting this one, which feels Seaton's poem so deeply.

It's the last week to enter the April Reader Giveaway! This month we're talking about poems (or lyrics or quotes) that hit you in a visceral way. What's your favorite? Leave a comment to enter - one lucky reader will receive a piece of original art FREE, just for participating. Hooray!

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In the Shimmering Black Soup

4/15/2024

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"In the Shimmering Black Soup" oil on paper, 20 x 20 inches. (click on the image to purchase)

Continuing an exploration of the poem Fiddleheads:

I think I’ll come back to life now. It’s odd to think of something so big we could miss
the elephant we’re living on, like this planet Earth, is she alive and we’re her brain cells,

each one of us flickering, going out, coming back to life? Even Chicago looks poignant
from the top of the Hancock, organized and sincere. Think if we were photographing

Earth, how dear she would be, how we’d watch her shimmer in the shimmering black soup
of the firmament, how alone she’d look and how we’d long to protect her, the way it feels

In The Shimmering Black Soup

to protect a woman at the height of orgasm, the liquid giving, the seawater slide of coming
back to life. When you hurt me, I evolved like a backboned sea creature, translucent

nervous system sparking along in the meanest deep where I was small enough to not care
and my passions ran to swimming, gulping, spitting bubbles back into new oceans.

- FROM FIDDLEHEADS BY MAUREEN SEATON

Seaton's poem takes us on a ride, sliding into the worst of things, the deepest ocean, the blackest soup and yet leaves us shimmering and sparking, resilient and curious and compassionate.

And that's the trick, isn't it? Shielding our spark, evolving our shimmer so we can see all the beauty and feel compassion for our small selves and our large world and each other in the soup. It isn't easy, and it's not for the faint hearted. But Seaton says of course the Earth would be dear to us if we saw her there in the blackness - and maybe, just maybe, seeing ourselves from afar, sea creature, translucent we evolve compassion for our bubble-spitting selves.

About the art: another piece on artist printer paper, an absorbent and fairly smooth substrate. I learned from prior pieces on this medium to go heavy with the paint, build layers and allow tons of drying time. This figure began as an idea for another queen (I so enjoy painting them) whose crown became heavy, jester-ish, weighted. Sometimes when you follow the paint, these things reveal themselves. Rubber wedge, brushes, fingers, paper towels and chopsticks used in creating this piece. She's been given a coat of Gamvar to deepen the darks, making her even more mysterious.

It's time for the April Reader Giveaway! What poem (or lyric or quote) gives you a deeply visceral response? Leave a comment and you'll have a chance to win an original piece of art - FREE - just for sharing your thoughts. Huzzah! The winner will be selected at random by Wonder Mike and announced at the end of the month.

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Turning Within and Blossoming Without

4/8/2024

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Turning Within and Blossoming Without

"Turning Within and Blossoming Without" - oil on cradled wood panel, 18 x 24 x 1.5 inches. Ready to hang. (click on the image to purchase)

Continuing our exploration of Maureen Seaton's Fiddleheads:

Similarly, when you hurt me, I curled like a mouse behind my third eye. I realize what an
odd thing it is to believe as I do in my third eye and the mouse behind it that furls like a fern

and whimpers like a fern being boiled on a monster stove beside its brothers and sisters.
Poor mouse. The things that make a person odd are odd themselves. Think of DNA,

the way it resembles the rope Jack climbed to secure his future and that of his aging Mom.
Or the way a sudden wave can drag a child under, that addiction to adrenalin, her

siblings farther away and more powerless than she ever imagined, the pure and ecstatic

irreversibility of undertow. It’s odd to come back to life, as they say, she came back to life.
- FROM FIDDLEHEADS BY MAUREEN SEATON

Think of DNA, Seaton writes.

Oh, I do. The things that make a person odd are odd themselves. Oddly, 50% of my DNA is mysterious, of unknown origin, vague shadows of Turkey and Italy and other unexpected lands. An unknown father. A story that died with my mother, before it was ever told. It remains her secret.

It's odd to come back to life, says Seaton. And yet we do, cycling through seasons of turning within and blossoming without, coming back to life when we rediscover lost parts of ourselves and when we discover new parts we perhaps never knew existed. Seaton's words take us down into that dark valley, hinting at the irreversible and then suddenly resurrecting us with a single sentence - she came back to life. Oh!

About the art: beginning with black gesso over an old acrylic painting and carving through the gesso while wet to expose some of the original colors. Once dry, a loose figure sketch in white. Working from the outside-in to further define the figure by using a rubber wedge and walnut oil thinned paint. For the figure and the moon, many layers of thinned paint with broad strokes, keeping it loose. Blending with fingers and a soft cloth. Allowing some edges to remain crisp while blurring others. Carving through the wet paint with a small rubber edge to create texture in the "fabric". Standing (or sitting) ten feet back periodically to keep from losing the gesture of the piece. I've got a small sofa at a set distance from the work in process now. Sitting there and contemplating each piece daily has helped me see better where a painting works and doesn't.

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I Can Do This, I Say

Her Imagination Tends to Run Wild

In the Shimmering Black Soup

Turning Within and Blossoming Without

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I Can Do This, I Say

Her Imagination Tends to Run Wild

In the Shimmering Black Soup

Turning Within and Blossoming Without

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