Abbakiss and the Tiger, Teaching, and the Studio

Abbakiss Up at Play

Abbakiss and Cloud in Yurt

  I want to give credit to the artist Robert Longo for the tiger in my dream about Abbakiss.  Though I woke up in terror, the imagery was amazing.  In my dream I looked out the front window to the lower corral and saw, through some bushes, the curled up form of a tiger.  As I was watching, Abbakiss appeared at his usual trot.  I watched his little back end moving toward the tiger and could feel his curiosity.  Just as I was about to

Abbakiss and Cloud at Play

Teaching at The Albuquerque Museum (me, front right)

scream out, I woke up.  The images have been floating in my head all week as well as the abruptness of the ending of the dream.  So how did Robert Longo's tiger get into my horse pen??  Well I was teaching my weekly teen class at the Albuquerque Museum where our final 5 week project is in progress.  I googled Longo's site hoping to find his "Men in the City" work and found a series of very formidable tigers staring straight at the viewer.  The drawings are a rich dark charcoal, very detailed, and very "real". And that is how Robert Longo's tiger appeared in my dream.  Actually, I am very excited about the project my teens are executing for their final artwork which I named "A Visual Storyboard".  We are working on 4 ft square boards coated with gesso and Absorbent Ground that are the structure for unique self-portraits of each artist.  I took 86 photos as the group posed one by one with Robert Longo-like poses. The students were amazing as they struck their stances. We were very   excited as we examined the images. I am having the images printed out in black and white at an almost 3 foot size to be adhered to their boards as a starting point of the project.  The developing sense of the project comes from my own investigations and work with figurative elements, digital images, acrylic grounds and real people.  I often find my studio work seeping into my teaching projects and I love the migration of ideas from my studio to my student assignments.  My own work is progressing in my studio as I finish the last of my 3 Marina Semyonova pieces. Marina S. was a Bolshoi dancer who I discovered in the New York Times obituaries.  I often peruse the obits because I learn about great people who have left this world who I did not know existed.  I also googled her and found some amazing U-Tube videos that came from old films taken of her dancing and teaching.  I downloaded the videos and worked from stop-gap images.  These are the first large works (54"x 42") that I created working from acrylic grounds, pigment, pastel, marker,  pencil and spray paint.  As I experimented  with the grounds and media I began to find my way. These pieces began over a year ago and can be seen on my web site http://dianerolnick.com   The Teacher #2 is the last one I am finishing and an updated version will be on the site shortly.  This week has slipped away so fast and I hope to discuss more about my photography, digital integration of mixed-media and new ideas in the next posts.  Enjoy the weekend and watch out for scary tiger dreams.