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The Deer/ Original Painting on Wood Panel

$5,000.00

The full story of the deer

I so believe in omens, whatever name you want to give them. For me, they usually involve animals. And sometimes they come at me in quite dramatic ways, unfortunately. This one happened when I was standing outside my studio in the spring taking a smoke break and enjoying the sun, when a gunshot came out of nowhere. I live in what I would call residential-country. I have an acre and 1/2 of land. There are houses all around and my kids play outside (they were at grandma’s at the time). A police officer then rolls up my driveway to inform me he had just shot and deer on my property. I was taken aback and still in shock. He caught me smoking pot, something that had just become legal in Michigan. So, let’s just put it this way—I didn’t ask questions. The officer left without saying more, and I was left with a body ( I assume the deer had been hit by a car first). I knew I was meant to watch over this deer. This piece was inspired by what I saw over the next few months. I collected fur when that was all that was left, and a few days later an old oak tree fell on where the body was. When I made this piece, I mostly thought about how humans interact with nature. How we impact it with our actions. And how the cycle still wants to happen, even though our impact created a ripple. How fragile nature is. How beautiful and perfect it is. How broken we are.

The deer is made out of the handmade watercolors that I make out of my grandmother’s antique jewelry. It has embedded crystals, moonstones, beads, glass, and a lot of 24k gold. The piece is 3 dimensional. A real cicada husk was embedded and gilded with 24k gold leaf, and the fur of the deer that inspired this piece was used in it, as well. The piece is sealed to protect the organic components.

Painting is not just jumping in and painting, and voila!, it is a masterpiece. Any artist will tell you, there is a lot of prep involved in each project before it is made.

I start by finding a subject. I have a collection of specimens, and if I don’t have an actual specimen, I will spend days scouring the internet and looking through my book collection. I also take a lot of photographs for source material. I need to have a good feel for the subject, and I need to be able to visualize what the subject will look like in the painting. This takes research.

I like to say that I am a little like Larry David. I don’t like to write the script down before I start. An important aspect of my process is improvisation. I have to be able to visualize the subject of my painting before I start. But once I start, I respond to the piece with intuition to create the external composition.

Then the fun starts. Painting and adornment with 23k gold leaf. I will do some process videos in the near future and go into more detail about that soon!

I have been asked so often lately about my materials. I have a really hard time answering, because my material list has gotten rather complicated over the last year. I don’t think I can answer the question in one post, but I will try to start talking about it more here and there, starting now.

I guess today I would like to prelude the question with some background. I was a painter, then I was a printmaker, and now I am an artist. I am an alchemist. I am a witch. And that is how I look at my process and materials.

Why the moon? Because the moon is something that we all share. No matter where you are in the world, we all live under the same moon. Ever beautiful, like a jewel in the sky, uniting us.

I started painting simple references to moons with my insects, to give the paintings movement and imply environment. In my mind, the insects are all striving to reach one place, the source of light. Striving for the light is something I think a lot about, when painting. To me, all of my insects are either moving towards or away from this light. You decide.

Last year I made a collection of solitary moons, and I can’t seem to stop painting them! Like I said yesterday, it is one of the things I need in my studio at all times. The moon is part of my story, and it is part of yours too.