The New Year brought some good news with it! I woke up on January 1st to find that my painting Jo has been accepted by the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles into this year’s juried show! I’m so grateful that my work has been selected for the Illustration West show, and it’s an honor to be included once again. Thank you, SILA judges, for the great start to 2010!
Happy New Year!
I have just returned from ringing in the beginning of our new decade with family and friends, and I thought this might be the appropriate time to post one of the last pieces of 2009. Fittingly, the subject of this illustration is a party scene.
This illustration was commissioned by Saint Mary’s College of California, and art directed by Bob Ciano, who was a pleasure to work with once again. A couple of months ago Bob contacted me to create a theatre poster for a Word For Word production of three short stories by Virginia Woolf at Saint Mary’s. Each story takes place at a party, and they were presented together on the stage as selected moments from the famous fictional party of Mrs. Dalloway.
Being that I am a literary-minded person with a great interest in theatre, this project was exciting to me on multiple levels. It was my first chance to read any of Virginia Woolf’s work, and I was entranced by her use of language, particularly by her repeated references to water. Each of the three stories center around a different woman’s experience at the party, and each of the women is at some point caught in a struggle, swept away in a social situation that rises out of their control, and left struggling – almost drowning – in a sea of necessary propriety and social expectations.
The entire story created a wonderful opportunity to play with watery colors and an aqueous environment, and I really enjoyed exploring all of the possible concepts in the sketch process. Sometime in the future I may come back and edit this post to share some of the thumbnails. The final piece was well received, and ran as a theatre poster advertising the show’s run during the end of November.
