Artfest, day three: showing some "Skin"

By the time you get to the third day of class at Artfest, you're usually pretty wiped from staying up late for one reason or another. And you're aware this is your last full day before you head back to reality. People tend to be pretty subdued.

Even my pal Janine and I didn't do much cutting up in our only class together, "Under Your Skin" with Erin Faith Allen. We were to meditate on our personal stories, using photos of body parts and anatomical illustrations as symbols.

I like the old Vesalius-style drawings, where the body is posed "naturally" to show how the various systems work.

Courtesy National Institutes of Health

Combined with matte prints of photos and all my new paints (yay!)...

I attempted to do three pieces at once, mainly so I would focus more on story versus getting things "right." We each chose a word we associate with how we feel about our bodies, and tried to keep that word in mind as we worked.

Not surprisingly, things got fairly intense for each of us, so I'm going to respect my classmates' privacy and not give a lot of details.

I will say the word that came to me was "sanctuary."

I didn't finish any of my canvases, and I may have been getting a little ambitious with three; two would've been better, and I would've gotten the colors a bit more accurate. (See how hard it is not to critique, even when you're happy about the direction of your work?)

But the class was absorbing enough that I wasn't terribly bothered by my sloppy technique or by not finishing. I still took my work to the Show & Tell gallery later that evening. A good chunk of pieces there can't even be picked up because they're still drying and, like Janine's sticker said at the beginning of this post, fragile. Stick around for scenes from Show & Tell.