Women used to be important to culture, important and powerful. Muses, Fates, Furies, Goddesses. Now m
ost are hustling for low paying jobs in the modern age. That is my scenario. This is the Muse Erato, with energy coming from the sun, not sex. I’ve been collecting parts and pieces of her for months. This is a first glance. Many of the elements are from Habitat Restores. The round plywood that makes her face comes from a local speaker maker. The brass spacers and Mardi Gras beads come from the Waynesville Restore. The music stand that is her skeleton came from a trip to the Restore in Statesville. The tubes come from Gregg’s work, and some of the paint is from Animal Hosp. of Waynesville. When you’ve gone from a Muse, to working for .77 on the dollar, you have to be thrifty.
Circle
I need to come up with a snappy title for this piece. It is an interesting thing to work on. The squares grab the paint, and some squares are just painted.
Habitat Restore
This round piece of plywood was for sale at the Habitat store for $0.75. I couldn’t resist, but only got two. Now they’re gone. They came from speaker cabinets. 
I screwed it to the other board to work on it. The squares are mat board, to refer to QR codes. It isn’t taking the paint the way a flat surface would, so it’s hard to stay loose, when I keep running into edges. But as in oils, I do better when I keep adding paint. Now if I could only figure out how to get a pic on FB. I’m a Luddite on dial-up.
Genetik
The progression was collage last winter, painting flowers on small canvases in the spring, and now painting on collage. This one will be primed and the same image of the red daylily will be painted over it. The idea is that when man starts bioengineering and fiddling with plant genomes in order to corner the market on food production, there are unexpected consequences.
Unease-redux
I’ve added more collage elements. The pupil of her right eye is a disc from a computer drive. On the detail you can see my reflection. The blue in her hat is from some heavy paper I found here in the gym. I looked up polymer resin. I wonder if it would preserve the charcoal marks, or just make a big mess. Too expensive to experiment.
NYT article
On Feb. 14 Roberta Smith wrote an interesting article in the NYT. One paragraph resonated. “What’s missing is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand. A lot but not all of this kind of work is painting, which seems to be becoming the art medium that dare not speak its name where museums are concerned.”
I was wondering why art was now a manufacturing medium. Hooray for paint!
Earth
I lightened the Earth and tried to make the tree hold together while still descriing the spirals. 
Tree of Life
More spirals. I need to emphasize the edge of the world at the bottom. Would different colors make this more appealing? Yeah, to who? Am I once again relying more on color than structure? Are my paintings skeletonless?
Edges
I should have taken this photo off axis. I painted the edges. I’m still considering “embellishing” the panel w/ something to emphasize the spirals.
Paths
What if I lay the panels with spirals on the floor? It could
be a path.