“Then I went down to that ugly bar and
I clicked my heels three times just like you said
And I climbed that road to your empty house
The anticipation was a turn-on…but you let me down
‘Cause I stood on that empty street alone
I said, “I’m ready for my close-up now, Mr. Demille.”
I waited for the light but it never shone”
-That Day, Poe

I’ve been working on this for what feels like forever. I think it’s possibly my favorite painting that I’ve ever done.

So.
Much.
Layering.

I don’t have anything else to say about it except, omg yay it’s finished.

Sketch assigned by Aubrey.

According to the NY Times kids these days just don’t get Holden Caulfield.

“Today’s pop culture heroes, it seems, are the nerds who conquer the world — like Harry — not the beautiful losers who reject it.”

…

Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ”

I guess my kind is getting to be rather passé.

oh… I gave in and got a http://twitter.com/pitseleh_

The text in this one is taken from two Margaret Atwood poems. The upper part is from Dream 2: Brian the Still-Hunter, the bottom from Highest Altitude.

Just a random one.

Update: 6/4/2009

Actually, not so random. I’m going to be posting a few of these ones. I like them. They have a different quality from the type I normally post. Subtle and erie.

Someone requested a print of the version that I have of this drawing on my portfolio website. In the process of attempting to make said print available I realized that I had no high res version of the image saved and had to dig up the sketchbook with the original to rescan. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at the full page. This is really old, but it’s one of those drawings that I actually really enjoyed making. It’s also one of the few that i’ve done entirely without references.. which is why it’s so rough, but also why I like it so much. So enjoy another old Aubrey and Arienette page, and if you like it, there’s a print available on the cafepress site: http://www.cafepress.com/ursulaviglietta

It took a while, but I did promise a new page on the Aubrey and Arienette theme. I’ve got some other pages of their story I’d like to finish and post, but I make no promises this time. 

I posted Aubrey’s bio last time, so here’s one for Arienette

Arienette is the glue. In a certain mood, sitting on a roof top under the crescent moon, she might confide to you that she is the center of the whole entire universe; if she stopped breathing, if her heart stopped beating, it would all fall apart. And she would state it with such conviction that you might dare to believe it was true. Conviction is a key word for this girl.

Arienette believes in things. She believes that if she kisses her elbow she will turn into a boy; standing in a crowded train station one might observe as she absentmindedly lifts her arm above her head and contorts the muscles this way and that trying to convince that boney point to meet her lips. She believes that whole deal about stepping on cracks and mother’s backs. Confronted once with a four building long stretch of fractured concrete between herself and her destination was more than enough to bring her to tears. Arienette had a good deal of guilt associated with her mother already, her birth had put the woman into a coma, she wasn’t about to risk careless crack stepping.

She was born in New York, although it’s unclear exactly when. Her father had a tendency to forget so they would celebrate it whenever it crossed his mind. She enjoyed this the year she turned seven three times, but when she was ten for four years it began to feel a lot less fun.

It was never made clear to her exactly how her birth and her mother’s coma had coincided, but she believes the one directly caused the other and no one has ever corrected her. Her parents had met on a MGM lot; her father was hired to operate a spotlight and after 20 minutes training proceeded to almost kill the starlet and her leading man by dropping it from the rafters. He was promptly fired, but the starlet took pity on him and assuredly said, “It’s not the end of the world, you were meant for bigger roles.” After that he had them. He was in every movie she ever made afterwards, all three of them. His favorite was The Sea Rose, where the starlet played a stowaway on a navy battle cruiser, dad played sailor #47, and Arienette played in her tiny tummy.

Arienette’s closest confidants are Aubrey and the Raven. She’s pretty convinced that they’re both figments of her imagination and is aware of the lunacy it would take to actually believe in a talking raven and a cherub, even if they aren’t. But she’s glad to have them, they’re much more amusing to have around than real people.

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore.

Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”

-Neil Gaiman

It’s a recurring theme for me, water, floods, drowning, tidal waves… and so it comes up in my drawings and paintings often. Like this one, that was done when I was barely over a year into art school.

The dream dictionary tells me water dreams are symbolic for your emotional state. Flood dreams represent overwhelming emotion, etc and so forth. That makes sense to me… 

But, I also dream a lot about zombies.