It Chose Me!

An Environment for Fish and Their Bicycles

2010-03-11T10:28:00.001-08:00

An Environment for Fish and Their Bicycles, originally uploaded by Amanda Jane Miller.

This is the companion piece for Offshore Foie Gras. I designed the frame, and my dad built it because I can't eve glue two popsicle sticks together, much less put this thing together.

Offshore Foie Gras

2010-03-08T14:36:00.001-08:00

Offshore Foie Gras, originally uploaded by Amanda Jane Miller.

I made this for the December Buswater show. This was the first time I painted a cut-away image of an esophagus and stomach with a scene inside. There's something about enclosed, protected worlds that appeals to me very much. Maybe it's some sort of pictorial return to the womb. Ha!

A friend of mine bought the piece to hang in his new baby's nursery.

How Dinner Gets Made

2009-11-01T15:40:00.000-08:00

series of vegetarian gruesomeness for the ArtMares Halloween show in Charleston...

watercolors with ink stamps from early fall...

2009-10-29T22:22:00.000-07:00

old & new paintings

2009-09-21T22:04:00.000-07:00

I am done with canvas and plastic paint for a good while.

Clucky

Claque

10 hours of fun for 10 cents

cheap theater nickel dumps

summer art

2009-08-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

These are from almost a month ago...trying out watercolors for the first time in a long time

I installed a donation box below my paintings at Buswater, and made a cool 93¢.

These two paintings can be seen at the upcoming Dog Days of Summer show at Good News Garage Gallery, August 20.

My brother's face

Spring please now thanks.

2009-04-22T07:31:00.000-07:00

It's strange to go into a grocery store and be aware of the consumer demographic the place is targeting. Yesterday, I went to Foodland in what I guess is north Charleston. The frozen foods section was bigger than the produce section, and the frozen desserts section was even bigger than that. There were two whole aisles of candy. Country music piped through the store speakers. As I drew my conclusions about all these observations, I started to feel unbearably self-conscious about myself. What is my target demographic? Anyhow, the store did have RAMPS, which I can't even find at the farmer's market.
The Foodland in Kanawha City plays old-timey 40's music, they keep a real butcher on staff during the day, and it's full of old people. Asshole place on Corridor G sells sushi, wine, and fancy soap, and it's full of assholes (aaand some nice people, including me..buying sushi..sometimes.)

I finished my design for the East End Streetworks banner project. I have no idea if it's what they were looking for, or had in mind, but it's "my interpretation" of the east end...
Beginning sketch:

Finished Product:

AMNATION!

2009-04-10T21:39:00.000-07:00

I made this animation a couple years ago when I first started working at the TV station. It seems pretty chunky n choppy to me now, and the style is so underdeveloped, but watching it makes me want to do something like this again..only better!
Does it not make you want to watch TV and dream of the beach? I seem to have invoked Havana in the 50's as a representation of Sawgrass resort in Florida. hmmm...

old time

2009-04-07T07:32:00.000-07:00

1/2 hour documentary by John Nakashima for WV Pulblic Broadcasting. Appalachian Stringband Music Festival, or Clifftop, is a weeklong party I go to every year.
That's me and our band's awesome banjo picker, Chad, at 20:38. yay!

spring is here, cornchips and beer

2009-04-05T08:41:00.000-07:00

Piping Hot

2009-04-02T07:33:00.000-07:00

Chemistry is often called on to heal the rift between body and soul. The relief that people that people express when a doctor says their depression is "chemical" is predicated on a belief that there is an integral self that exists across time, and on a fictional divide between the fully occasioned sorrow and the utterly random one. The word chemical seems to assuage people of the feeling of responsibility for the stressed-out discontent of not liking their jobs, worrying about getting old, failing at love, hating their families. There is a pleasant freedom from guilt that has been attached to chemical. If your brain is predisposed to depression, you need not blame yourself for it. Well, blame yourself or evolution, but remember that blame itself can be understood as a chemical process, and that happiness too, is chemical. Chemistry and biology are not matters that impinge on the "real" self; depression cannot be separated from the person it affects. Treatment does not alleviate a disruption of identity, bring you back to some kind of normality; it readjusts a multifarious identity, changing in some small degree who you are.

--Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

bone & key

2009-04-01T08:18:00.000-07:00

detail of vanitas...
it's stylistically different from the rest of the painting. it should be it's own little painting...yeah.

Capitol Meat Market

2009-03-31T06:20:00.000-07:00

hehehe

i'm looking for a small stool upon which to sit during times of breakfast & calligraphy

2009-03-27T07:49:00.000-07:00

Lots of calligraphy lately. I learned simple stuff from mama when I was a wee person, and now that I'm not all hung up on Real Fine Art For Art School, I want to learn more. I'm thinking of incorporating calligraphy/text drawings in India ink into the exaggerated still-lifes I've been doing (below.) Transferring all that sumptuous black ink onto soft paper fibers with a metal tip is oddly satisfying. I like journal writing in calligraphy because it forces me to pick and choose words carefully and edit my thoughts in real-time. Plus, I'm more reluctant to write something negative in beautiful script. Good stuff.

Taking a break from painting to do a digital vector drawing for East End Main Street. A large group of Charleston artists will create lamp post banners to be hung all over the East End. Neato! More details go public on the East End Mainstreet website & Facebook page this coming Monday.

It's been a while...

2009-03-24T22:31:00.000-07:00

Between playing lots of music, working out a lot, and spending every other free second I have painting, there's no time to spend sitting around on the internet. It just doesn't seem that important sometimes, which is a good thing. But I do like to keeping a blog and sharing stuff with other people...
Here's my most recent painting, finished (maybe a little over-finished) last night. I'm stoked!

In a cruel twist of fate, I got either a stomach bug or food poisoning last Sunday, which caused me to vomit a big pile of shrimp I'd eaten a few hours before. I had to finish up that giant prawn with the seabug refuse still steamin' in the trash can.

eeewwwww

Now's your chance to say thank you for throwing your shoe!

2008-12-19T09:42:00.000-08:00

We don't condone shoe throwing, but we prefer it to war.

gingerly gathered and delicately arranged expensive beans of ornate design and mysterious origin

2008-12-15T09:27:00.000-08:00

I have had two days of not having to produce anything or meet any deadlines. Excellent.
The Buswater art show in Charleston was, I thought, nearly the best group showing of work I've seen since I moved down here. It was great to see work in person from so many artists who (mostly) live and work here.
Jamie Miller (linky) and Todd Griffith (linky) put on the show. It was a comfortably relaxed good time with lots of wine and smiling faces.

I dug this work by Stacy Leech

and Rob Cleland

and I liked Betty Gay's resin molds so much that I bought three of them. They're like adorable little inedible petit fours.

I was going to give them away as gifts, but now I want to keep them. I just don't know where they can hang without being assaulted by my cat. She is awful. She urinated on me this morning. Anyway...
I didn't get photographs of a lot of the pieces I liked, including Jamie Miller's paintings and Heidi Richardson Evans's digital collages (linky!) and Vasilia Scouras's collages, which my dad couldn't stop talking about. I should have bought him one, heh. I am amazed by the sphere of everyone's creative pursuits that participated in the show.
I was uncharacteristically satisfied with 3/4 of the pieces I showed. yay! Some bits and pieces of visual vocabulary I've been working with for some time now are finally starting to resolve themselves and come together. So I may finally put them to bed soon, and move on.
Chicken & Cake; Feather & Bomb:

Fish & Bomb:

I need better quality pictures.

We played a show at Taylor Books, which went well I think, aside from this guy that always shows up and loudly solicits us with right-wing politics. We opened up for The Hellblinki Sextet on Wednesday at The Blue Parrot. They put on an amazing show, and I only wish more people had showed up to hear them--Listen! I thought we played well, but sometimes the creeky old traditional music doesn't go over with drunk Charlestonians. And then there was the even-creepier right-wing dude that solicited us for posed group shots of the band, and then got pissed when we didn't oblige.
We seem to attract a lot of right-wing folks, which is perfectly fine, but if I have to listen to that crap one more time...
I digress.
There's a new Vietnamese place in South Charleston! linky. The pho with meat is awesome, and although there's no vegetarian items listed on the menu, they'll make you something w/o meat if you ask. And it will be delicious, yes!

Supposedly there's a Jamaican place coming soon. Go get you some coconut juice.

Mental cobweb dusting blog post update.

2008-12-09T08:24:00.000-08:00

The past five months have been chock full of fantastic. I went to Clifftop and wound up in a documentary about the festival by John Nakashima while playing fiddle with Chad. Still looking for video of that online somewhere...
I painted a mural on the Habitat for Humanity Restore
And it was voted #1 by the folks who came out to the unveiling. yay! I got some cash and a hefty gift certificate to the restore. how in the world will i spend it? wacky chandeliers? sacks of old cutlery for to make jewelry with? oh boy.
I visited an old friend in Pocahontas County, where we hiked through some fields & picked apples for pressing into juice. We took the fruit to a farm where folks were taking turns working a late 19th century press that had been restored by the farmer's grandpa in the 1920's. The juice was better than anything there ever was.

Aaaand I continued a collage/illustration series from where I left off in college:

There's another giant picture pages post on the way to document the fantastic Buswater show, music playing, and vietnamese food eating.

Love,
A

Cabbage!

2008-12-08T21:51:00.000-08:00

The sight of this cabbage is ehxhilerating!

and again :)

Everywhere Rus

2008-10-29T10:06:00.000-07:00

Yellow Liquid 01

2008-10-28T22:28:00.001-07:00

Stan Sporny

2008-10-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

I wrote an art review for a show that Marshall University Professor Stan Sporny currently has up at the
Callen McJunkin Gallery.

He passed away unexpectedly after I wrote the review (or maybe before, I'm not sure.) Either way, I did now know of his passing when I wrote it, nor did I ever formally meet the man. Everything I knew of him, I got out of his work. Mostly what I took away from his work was a palpable feeling of peace and solitude in the woods. That he died while hunting alone in the woods indicates that he was very skilled in representing exactly what his life was all about in his work. His work possesses that coveted "intrinsic meaning," as he was able to communicate a specific meaning, quite concisely, with his painting.
I am getting to know his body of work further, and his death is clearly a very sad loss for the art community.
Read the review, and check out his work at: http://stanleysporny.com/

memorial site:
http://stanley.sporny.org/