Come home soon.
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“Under the Lilacs” by Jackie Mantey // Original image info: Russell Lee, 1941, “Old brown stonehouses, Chicago.”
One watercolor painting = two cool new things 💧💧
This guy is from Augustus Sherman’s collection of Ellis Island portraits. The photo is dated 1906. He’s listed simply as “Romanian shepherd.”
I looked up the May Day celebrations and rituals of Romania (nearly every country’s got some), and this apotropaic one charmed me:
“The entries to the animals’ shelters are adorned with green branches. All branches are left in place until the wheat harvest when they are used in the fire which will bake the first bread from the new wheat.”
To be clear, the fire is to bake the bread.
Definitely only the bread.
Definitely not the sad American co-ed’s bad boyfriend dressed in a bear suit.
ONLY. THE. BREAD.
I had food poisoning the day before my birthday, so I’m just now catching up on life and everyone’s super kind greetings from March 15, usually the best day ever (just ask this little party animal circa 1988).
THANK YOU! It was, shall we say, not a great day this year, BUT, I’m grateful for it all the same.
I think the rest of my 36th year is going to be awesome.
Here are a few reasons why:
Fingers crossed I won’t be sick for that one this year too. 
The journals your mother warned you about!
I have some new artwork published in the latest issue of indie journal Lover’s Eye Press.
Check it out and stay a while. Read the lovely literary entries, explore the other artwork, and listen to the great podcast interview with featured artist E. Hughes.
xoxo
The Rosa Collection is a series of spiral-bound notebooks with printed front and back cover collage designs I made, inspired by the 1799 botanical etchings of Mary Lawrance.
These soft-touch cover notebooks are hard to resist.
Spiral notebook with printed front and back cover of a collage design by Jackie Mantey. Flower etching: Mary Lawrance, 1799, “Rosa Damascena.”
Spiral notebook with printed front and back cover of a collage design by Jackie Mantey. Flower etching: Mary Lawrance, 1799, “Rosa Lutea-Bicolor.”
Spiral notebook with printed front and back cover of a collage design by Jackie Mantey. Flower etching: Mary Lawrance, 1799, “Rosa Centifolia.”
Spiral notebook with printed front and back cover of a collage design by Jackie Mantey. Flower etching: Mary Lawrance, 1799, “White Provincialis.”
Spiral notebook with printed front and back cover of a collage design by Jackie Mantey. Flower etching: Mary Lawrance, 1799, “Rosa Sulphuria.”
Tonight is the opening of the Christmas Show at The Latent Space Gallery in Irving Park!
The show will have more than 50 unique art objects for sale under the gallery’s Christmas tree. Two of my original embroidery artworks and a gift pack of my collage notebooks will be wrapped up all pretty under there. 🙂
The gifts will have the name of the artist who made the work on them (so guests can have an idea of what they may be purchasing) but the contents of the gifts will be a surprise.
Every gift is $300 or less and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to Brave Space Alliance in Chicago.
Come in and buy a gift of artwork, hang out, and enjoy baked goods from Gingham Baking and eggnog. What a Saturday! There’s word Santa might even show up…
The gallery will be open Sunday as well so you can still hit up the tree if you can’t make it Saturday. They’ll have items available on the online shop soon too.
Yay, art! Yay, gifts! Yay, art gifts!
Chicago friends, come see two of my newest pieces in person, plus work from these awesome other artists!
The Fulton Street Collective group show Journey / Explore opens this Friday, December 10, from 7-10 pm.
The address is 1821 W. Hubbard St. (on Hubbard between Wolcott and Wood, and NOT on Kinzie… that’ll send you to the alley, and that’s not where the show will be though perhaps that’s a cool idea for next time??)
Tickets are $5 and there’s a capacity limit (because 😷), so snag yours now!
As the end of the year (aka gift giving season) rolls up with the top down, I thought I’d show off one of my favorite custom embroidery jobs from the archives.
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I recently finished this custom piece for a dear friend. He wanted to gift an artwork to a friend who loved wrestling and wrestling history. He picked an image from this series of photographs by Irving Penn from 1945 and told me to have at it.
The man in this photo is Maurice Tillet (1903-1954), the most notorious wrestler of the 1940s, better known by his ring name, ~THE FRENCH ANGEL~.
If you’ve been to Chicago’s International Museum of Surgical Science, you’ve probably seen a bust of The French Angel.
The plaque there tells more of this man’s story:
“He studied 14 languages, wrote poetry, and aspired to become an actor. However, his dreams were shattered when he developed acromegaly in his twenties. … This disorder is caused by an abnormal production of growth hormone usually related to a benign tumor of the pituitary gland… With his new body, Tillet, an educated man and a lover of the fine arts, felt like a monstrosity. Unable to face a life of constant gawking and humiliation, he decided to make drastic changes and use his condition to his benefit.”
At the end of his life, Maurice was a Chicago boy. He died here, too, of a heart attack that came on after he heard that his trainer died. <sobbbbbbing>
My color choices for his wings and the stars on his belt are a direct reference to the Chicago flag.
I almost put the fourth star on Maurice’s belt too, but I just had to do something about Dorian there…
The angle of her foot, the shape of that heel… oh la la, there’s just so much I love about that aspect of the original photograph. I put the last star beneath it to give Dorian her own special place in this piece.
