Showcase @ P!ay Hair Lounge

All set up for my showcase!

Thanks to the awesome ladies at P!ay Hair Lounge and to my amazing husband and mother who came to help me set up yesterday!

We hit a few snafus - as one often does - like a frame that suddenly broke and a small mismeasurement that threw things off.  But there was no panic and there was much laughter and we had a great time setting everything up.

My Drill Sergeant!

It was pretty fun to play the part of director: I basically outlined everything and told Ian where to drill the hooks, and he did it.  Not only that, he did an amazing job, making sure that everything was level and perfect.  My mom played the hero and ran out to pick up another backup frame from the house when the one "Gamera" was in broke (and when I say "broke," I mean BROKE...the wood cracked, the glass chipped, the nails came out...wotta mess!).

But we got everything in order and it all looked great!  Brig, the owner, told me that it was the "most bizarre" display that they'd ever had up...and then qualified that comment by insisting it was a compliment!  I told her that there was no need to clarify, I DEFINITELY take that as a compliment!

If you make your way to Simi Valley in the near future, the display will be up at P!ay for 8 weeks ('til early October 2012).  The salon is right off of the 118 freeway at Kuehner Ave.  Some paintings are for sale (marked with the price), but some are for this display only.  If you do make a purchase, the funds are very fairly split between myself and P!ay, so you'd be supporting two local "businesses."

Enjoy!


My mom, chronicling the display.  Awwww...thanks, Mom!

ALL DREAMS COME TO PASS

"All Dreams Come to Pass"
by Dani Selvaggio
2011
(sold)

I haven't yet decided if I want to keep this piece in my personal collection or sell it. For the time being, it's for sale...that may change in the next hour or so. Or maybe it won't. Or maybe it'll change and I'll forget to update this blog.

This piece was cathartic for me - I got to experiment with materials that I wasn't necessarily comfortable using...I ended up using color schemes that I typically don't (although you can find the "shock of red" that I like; somehow I couldn't resist that)...and I ultimately ended up producing a piece where I had no clue what it was going to look like when I started. All in all, it was tons of fun. Even my fiancee told me that it was good to see me "doing art for [myself] for a change." It's been a while.

Good to be back, though!

ALL DREAMS update

No pictures today, sorry...I opted to exclude the regular photo or scan because the piece is very close to being finished and posting it now would negate the grand reveal.

At any rate, I'm kind of excited about the way it's coming out. It hasn't been a typical piece for me...rather, it's been very exploratory, which I think is a celebration of coming back to doing art for myself rather than for business. The color scheme is nothing like what I'm used to and I have been forcibly limiting myself to the supplies I find at random rather than waiting and seeking out the supplies I feel like I "need."

The colors are very muted, very indiscernible at times. I used dried up glitter glue that I mixed with a little measure of paste and water and re-stuck (it gave it this amazing chunky texture that was incredibly organic, contrasting with the extremely inorganic feel of the material...awesome!). It was my first experiment with masking, which I only had a toothpick to use to apply. All in all, I was stretching my boundaries and learning to laugh at myself. And, surprisingly enough, the piece was not ruined! It just looks like a beautiful, all-over-the-place, colorful sketch gone awry.

I have decided to finish it up with a few oils (something else I haven't touched in a long time, acrylics being my preference) and I'll hopefully have something to grandly reveal to you in the next couple of days.

"Dreams" In Progress

Some examples of the masking and watercolor-over-the-masking so far. How this will actually work on the cheap-o paper I'm using, I really, really don't know...but that's okay!

The Art is in the Process (otherwise known as, "I destroyed my painting.")

I have this problem when it comes to making art, where I focus on the end result and how to get there. This goes against everything I believe art should be, which is completely process-driven, with the end result being a secondary happenstance. Art should always be in progress, always in flux.

With one of the current pieces I'm working on, "All Dreams Come to Pass," I slapped myself on the wrist before I made any stupid plot notes and decided to just run with it, knowing full-well that this would probably result in the complete destruction of my painting.

It has, so far, and I kind of love it anyway. The ink is bleeding all over the place, the colors really didn't turn out how I envisioned, I have no idea what I'm doing with the masking paste and everything is a complete mess. But the more it got screwed up, the more fun I was having and the less serious I took my expectations for myself. I don't recommend this approach for every aspect of life, but for yesterday it suited the moment and was really very liberating.

I love my painting. It's like a My Little Pony farted all over my paper.

A Million Billion Things

"All Dreams Come to Pass"
by Dani Selvaggio
2011

in progress

Oh, man...sorry for the radio silence, folks.

There was a while there that I was locked out of this account, for whatever reason. This morning I was finally able to gain access again.

I hope to updating this blog a lot more frequently now. I have so many new projects in the works. Some I'm being paid to do (rocks my socks) and some I'm just doing because it's art.

Here's a little teaser of something I'm working on. You can totally see my sketchy notes if you look close enough. I'm hoping that it will be one that I can introduce in a local show sooner or later. The main part of the design was taken from a thumbnail version of a logo I was hired to do - I maintain copyright for all logo design until a final logo is approved and purchased, so when they chose a different version of the logo for their business, I jumped on this one. It kinda just popped off the page for me (and I'm super glad they didn't use it).

The words on the bottom part of the project are from a poem I wrote and have yet to publish. The unfortunate thing is, in the form the poem takes in this image, it would defeat the purpose of the piece to publish the poem now. Why? Because in the soon-to-be-painting, the poem is scrambled. In the actual poem, it's...er...not.

Ahhhh, art...I feel like I'm breathing again.