Mud's Journal

See what I did there? It's punny.

Not entirely happy with this one in a few spots. I may rework it some...

This is the smallest painting evar. It's (and I'm just guessing here) about 6 inches by 8. Tiny. I made the canvas last semester when I had some scrap left after building a set of stretchers and it's been sitting around, begging to be painted since.

The text is latin and, assuming I got it right which I probably didn't, should read something like "killing bad guys is still killing people". Malicide is a word invented by the Catholic church during the crusades to explain why it was ok to kill Muslims as opposed to Christians. The word's not used anymore but I think the concept still is. But seriously, haven't we been disillusioned by enough wars to realize that the other side is, as a whole, no worse than ourselves?

I found the word "malicide" and it's history in Mark Kurlansky's short, easy, and poignant book on Nonviolence. I encourage anyone who thinks that war is not always the answer to read it.

I decided to document the stages of this painting's creation. So if you're interested there's more...

( behind the cut* )

*I'm going to try to start using the cut for any post with more than one image. I should also shrink my images a bit to fit the "friends" pages better.

One last piece of art before the school years starts and I make more.

The internet is working today so I thought I'd post one of my paintings.

No photo of the week this week since I was in NYC on monday and didn't feel like posting it late.

I've done two oil paintings in between the last one I posted and this, but I didn't think they were worth posting. I liked this one, though.



Just fopr the record, this is a little more than ten feet long.

Again, the photo doesn't do a good job of reproducing the color or detail. What is it about oil paintings that don't photograph well? I'm beginning to understand why I'm not terribly impressed with so many of the paintings we see in art history.

This photo really doesn't do justice to the color in this painting. The flash kinda grayed the whole thing out. But then it does bring out the texture a bit, which is fun.
So yea, it's another big bug.

I'm rather proud of this painting. It's big, 9 feet by 5 feet, and based off a photo I took that will appear in the photo-a-week thing later. It's actually the second oil painting I've done that I've enjoyed but the first is still kind of unfinished so you don't get to see it yet.