GEORGIANNE FASTAIA
BADFISHSTUDIOS
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NEW STUDIO
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ballerina's secret
ballerina's secret 
30x24 oil 09 sold orisha of freshwater & pearl 36x36 soldI am doing a series of abstract ballerinas . If you are interested in seeing my ballerina paintings please email me at badfishstudios@yahoo. I will be sending out a slideshow of completed ballerinas for sale soon.
these photos of my own ballerina girl...inspired my painting, ballerina's secret
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| Evoking the mystery I believe that to make art with all the questions answered deprives the viewer of the joy of participating in the act of creation. I believe the self balances tenuously in the ambiguous, misunderstood spaces between people. Exploring the fragility of our connection to each other is the reason I make art. |
Featured Responses2009 work
5/3/09
salmon leaping in the beautiful world
1/7/09
It's In the Rain
The Floating City: New Orleans After the Flood
paintings about the world turned upside down and the longing for homeIn 2006, I responded to Hurricane Katrina with a series of abstract "flood scapes",' After the Flood. Three years later, I revisit the ninth ward with The Floating City. The impossibility of painting the physical reality of the flood allowed me to focus on the emotional reality of an inexorably altered landscape. My primary goal is to convey the sense of devastation and loss as well as to offer hope for the city of New Orleans.
through June 1st at the Mezzanine Gallery at Arterra
300 Berry at 5th
one block from the ballpark
Arterra is San Francisco's first LEED-certified green high-rise community. The building uses recycled materials and wood harvested from sustainable forests.
erosion 24 x 24 oil 08
reflected 24 x 24 oil 08
Home: GeorgianneFastaia-badfishstudios Fine Art
paintings about the world turned upside down and the longing for homeIn 2006, I responded to Hurricane Katrina with a series of abstract "flood scapes",' After the Flood. Three years later, I revisit the ninth ward with The Floating City. The impossibility of painting the physical reality of the flood allowed me to focus on the emotional reality of an inexorably altered landscape. My primary goal is to convey the sense of devastation and loss as well as to offer hope for the city of New Orleans.
through June 1st at the Mezzanine Gallery at Arterra
300 Berry at 5th
one block from the ballpark
Arterra is San Francisco's first LEED-certified green high-rise community. The building uses recycled materials and wood harvested from sustainable forests.
erosion 24 x 24 oil 08
reflected 24 x 24 oil 08
Home: GeorgianneFastaia-badfishstudios Fine Art
1/6/09
Floodscapes
Reflected City 24 x24 oil 08
About these paintings:
A square with a triangle atop it is one of the first visual symbols a child draws. These naively rendered houses represent our memory of and longing for home. As the series evolved, these symbols of home became more elongated, abstract, and totemic while "the Flood" itself evolved into a metaphor for displacement. My challenge has been to translate this sense of loss and disembodiment into the language of paint-- texture, composition, and color.
I have given each painting a “history” through a long distressing process: scrubbing, scraping, and wiping away to reveal shadows, faded colors, and echoes or ghosts of underlying imagery. This creates surfaces in which most of the information is buried below layers of paint, visually communicating the concept of impermanence, time passing, erosion.
I use composition deliberately to reinforce a sense of our smallness against the "bigness of nature" by placing most of the information in the bottom of the canvas, dwarfed by the sky. Multiple horizon lines shift the imagery into the center of the picture plain, as if floating, with houses reflected in the sky; a composition designed to dislocate the viewer from his normal frame of reference.
The emotional use of Color plays an important part in creating mood. I use a palette of somber violets, green-grays and translucent layers of milky color to convey the quality of light after a storm, the thick saturated air that I recall growing up along the Connecticut shore.
I have given each painting a “history” through a long distressing process: scrubbing, scraping, and wiping away to reveal shadows, faded colors, and echoes or ghosts of underlying imagery. This creates surfaces in which most of the information is buried below layers of paint, visually communicating the concept of impermanence, time passing, erosion.
I use composition deliberately to reinforce a sense of our smallness against the "bigness of nature" by placing most of the information in the bottom of the canvas, dwarfed by the sky. Multiple horizon lines shift the imagery into the center of the picture plain, as if floating, with houses reflected in the sky; a composition designed to dislocate the viewer from his normal frame of reference.
The emotional use of Color plays an important part in creating mood. I use a palette of somber violets, green-grays and translucent layers of milky color to convey the quality of light after a storm, the thick saturated air that I recall growing up along the Connecticut shore.
Disembodied 30 x 30
remains of new orleans 30 x 30 oil 081/5/09
Flooded Main street
Flooded Main street 30 x30 oil 2008 (sold)
Flooded Main Street is the transitional painting between the two series. This is a realistic painting in a predominantly abstract body of work, however, it was this haunting image which inspired me to revisit "the Flood" theme. My primary consideration is to convey the feeling of desolation captured in videos such as these. I strive for emotional honesty in my work and rely on an intuitive sense of color and an immediacy of gesture to achieve it.
Home: Georgianne Fastaia - BadfishStudios Fine Art
1/2/09
ORISHAS of the CANDOMBLE
priestess
Oxum orisha of beauty 36 x 36 oil 09
Oxum's dance recalls her bathing in a waterfall, and summoning the forces that control pregnancy and childbirth. The young woman possessed by Oxum dances alongside her mother.
Oxum likes beauty, and devotes her life to it. She is also the goddess of love and fertility, and looks after newborns up to the age of about 4. The city of Salvadore in Brazil is believed to be run by Oxum; it is said its people love the good things in life.
bahia salvador procession fesitival of oxum 36 x 36
Oxum's dance recalls her bathing in a waterfall, and summoning the forces that control pregnancy and childbirth. The young woman possessed by Oxum dances alongside her mother.
Oxum likes beauty, and devotes her life to it. She is also the goddess of love and fertility, and looks after newborns up to the age of about 4. The city of Salvadore in Brazil is believed to be run by Oxum; it is said its people love the good things in life.
bahia salvador procession fesitival of oxum 36 x 36
Transforming the Mistake
Artist Interview by Emily Citraro
After Hurricane Katrina, Fantasia did a moving series on the flooding of New Orleans .
GEORGIANNE FASTAIA was born in Brooklyn , New York , in 1964 to a middle class family that later moved to Connecticut . Her mother, a High School art teacher, encouraged Georgianne to follow her passion and live creatively, however, she only seriously began painting in 2001. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from San Francisco State University earning a B.A. in Creative Writing and did additional study in Clinical Psychology at Lewis and Clark University , Portland , Oregon .
A self-taught painter, she supports her 2 year old through her work which has been exhibited in galleries throughout California. Her art is also in private collections across the country, and has been featured in Art Week Magazine, The SF Chronicle, and the July 2009 issue of ELLE Décor.
Georgianne experienced some difficult setbacks in life, including moving from home at age sixteen and working while finishing high school and college. She ultimately found herself enmeshed in addiction, yet Georgianne has managed to find a way to thrive in the face of adversity, and looks back at her experiences with candor and hope for the future, stating that in that painful experience lies " the heart and soul of things" and the raw emotion that defines truly felt experience. It is this wellspring of feeling that draws collectors of her work. These difficult times have had a direct impact on her work as an artist, though not in the way one would imagine: through the process of recovery and soul-searching, Georgianne has embraced both the light and the dark, the painful experiences she inflicted upon herself are not recounted with shame but with a sense of strength and optimism. For anyone to begin painting at age 37 and to be selling work a year later; and with no formal training other than a single college course (with Bob Bechtel) is remarkable. To do so after having spent years struggling to recover from chemical dependency illustrates far more of the nature of Georgianne's strength.
When asked how her life experiences impacted her artistic process in producing her enigmatic and beautifully distressed paintings she had this to say, "I think an artist has to have something to share that is authentically their own experience" Periods of my past had been so self destructive that all the artifice which preserves our sense of self -- education, love, family, everything had been stripped away. The process of recovery required rigorous honesty: a willingness to try to confront the unappealing parts of myself. And it required the willingness to do anything to rebuild my life.” Georgianne has now been clean for over a decade. What she learned is reflected in her painting process - to destroy and rebuild the surface over and over until beauty is revealed.
In developing an unorthodox technique of scrubbing her canvases, Fastaia has embraced the distressed aesthetic. Each canvas is covered with layers of paint...Murphy’s oil soap is poured onto the canvas which is tilted to create drips; horizontals and verticals. The soap which is used to clean brushes was a surprising discovery. It eats away layers of paint in what Fastaia calls "LIFTS"----revealing hidden colors below.The process is completely unpredictable and requires a fearless leap of faith for the artist. By giving up control, this process forces her to stay lighthearted and adaptable to the paintings evolution, while staying sensitive to the moments of beauty as they are revealed.
Georgianne experienced some difficult setbacks in life, including moving from home at age sixteen and working while finishing high school and college. She ultimately found herself enmeshed in addiction, yet Georgianne has managed to find a way to thrive in the face of adversity, and looks back at her experiences with candor and hope for the future, stating that in that painful experience lies " the heart and soul of things" and the raw emotion that defines truly felt experience. It is this wellspring of feeling that draws collectors of her work. These difficult times have had a direct impact on her work as an artist, though not in the way one would imagine: through the process of recovery and soul-searching, Georgianne has embraced both the light and the dark, the painful experiences she inflicted upon herself are not recounted with shame but with a sense of strength and optimism. For anyone to begin painting at age 37 and to be selling work a year later; and with no formal training other than a single college course (with Bob Bechtel) is remarkable. To do so after having spent years struggling to recover from chemical dependency illustrates far more of the nature of Georgianne's strength.
When asked how her life experiences impacted her artistic process in producing her enigmatic and beautifully distressed paintings she had this to say, "I think an artist has to have something to share that is authentically their own experience" Periods of my past had been so self destructive that all the artifice which preserves our sense of self -- education, love, family, everything had been stripped away. The process of recovery required rigorous honesty: a willingness to try to confront the unappealing parts of myself. And it required the willingness to do anything to rebuild my life.” Georgianne has now been clean for over a decade. What she learned is reflected in her painting process - to destroy and rebuild the surface over and over until beauty is revealed.
In developing an unorthodox technique of scrubbing her canvases, Fastaia has embraced the distressed aesthetic. Each canvas is covered with layers of paint...Murphy’s oil soap is poured onto the canvas which is tilted to create drips; horizontals and verticals. The soap which is used to clean brushes was a surprising discovery. It eats away layers of paint in what Fastaia calls "LIFTS"----revealing hidden colors below.The process is completely unpredictable and requires a fearless leap of faith for the artist. By giving up control, this process forces her to stay lighthearted and adaptable to the paintings evolution, while staying sensitive to the moments of beauty as they are revealed.
After Hurricane Katrina, Fantasia did a moving series on the flooding of New Orleans .
She explains, "During the ice storm of 1972 we had to evacuate the house. My family spent Christmas in the Salvation Army. What I remember clearly about this were two very contrary ideas coexisting; this awful disaster somehow also held within it a natural beauty that I had never before witnessed, it was as if the world had disappeared into shades of grey. From an early age I was aware of things having many layers.
I seek to reveal these layers which give depth, history, and complexity to my forms. My route is a process which goes against all standard painting instructions; never mix oil and water. I am actively seeking to create “catastrophes” on the canvas and to work them slowly until their beauty is recognizable.”Whether her subjects are rooftops rising above flood waters, or solitary figures alone in their deepest beliefs, they are unified by her treatment of the canvas; a testament to the power of transformation.
BadfishStudios Art Blog: Home
musical accompaniment works in progress
the lifted veil,
the inability to soothe my child's pain
the series has been an elusive trickster unforthcoming,
hard as lifting rocks to find one good thing
MUSICAL ACCOMPAINMENT
influences,inspirations and musical accompianment to the series poor wayfaring strangers
WORKING NOTES / WAYFARIN STRANGER
For those interested in how a painting gets from here to there. I created these paintings in the late summer of 2009 for the opening of Coda after putting my daughter to bed, between the hours of 8pm and 4am. Alone in the drafty studio, I don two pairs of pants and extra socks and am most productive then, without interruption.
I created a playlist of songs I listened to over and over: The Wayfarin Stranger soundtrack consists of as many versions of Poor Wayfaring Stranger as I could find, Jack White’s live version (obsessively), Mad world, Lou Reed’s Perfect day, and pretty much everything by Jeffrey Luck Lucas.
JULY 20 2009- the lifted veil,the inability to soothe my child's pain....the series has been an elusive trickster: unforthcoming, hard as lifting rocks to find one good thing
In this series I use gesture, color, and texture to explore the places where the broken and the transcendent meet. The paintings are unified by an emotional use of color, and by heavily worked surfaces which almost appear to have sustained water-damage. I re-use old paintings, actively "distressing" the surface by adding then scraping away layers to give each painting a history: histandingwoman.jpgdden then revealed, just below the surface. The way I work with paintings is to respond to what is evolving before me via the chance effects created by this process. My hope is to affirm a more authentic concept of beauty while making paintings which retain an evocation of mystery.
BadfishStudios Art Blog: Home
the inability to soothe my child's pain
the series has been an elusive trickster unforthcoming,
hard as lifting rocks to find one good thing
MUSICAL ACCOMPAINMENT
influences,inspirations and musical accompianment to the series poor wayfaring strangers
WORKING NOTES / WAYFARIN STRANGER
For those interested in how a painting gets from here to there. I created these paintings in the late summer of 2009 for the opening of Coda after putting my daughter to bed, between the hours of 8pm and 4am. Alone in the drafty studio, I don two pairs of pants and extra socks and am most productive then, without interruption.
I created a playlist of songs I listened to over and over: The Wayfarin Stranger soundtrack consists of as many versions of Poor Wayfaring Stranger as I could find, Jack White’s live version (obsessively), Mad world, Lou Reed’s Perfect day, and pretty much everything by Jeffrey Luck Lucas.
JULY 20 2009- the lifted veil,the inability to soothe my child's pain....the series has been an elusive trickster: unforthcoming, hard as lifting rocks to find one good thing
In this series I use gesture, color, and texture to explore the places where the broken and the transcendent meet. The paintings are unified by an emotional use of color, and by heavily worked surfaces which almost appear to have sustained water-damage. I re-use old paintings, actively "distressing" the surface by adding then scraping away layers to give each painting a history: histandingwoman.jpgdden then revealed, just below the surface. The way I work with paintings is to respond to what is evolving before me via the chance effects created by this process. My hope is to affirm a more authentic concept of beauty while making paintings which retain an evocation of mystery.
BadfishStudios Art Blog: Home
barns in the middayu sun soldwaiting for godot
feeling much better, paintings coming along
.Working notes: for those interested in how a painting gets from here to there. I created these paintings in the late summer of 2009 for the opening of Coda after putting my daughter to bed, between the hours of 8pm and4am. Alone in the drafty studio, I don 2 pairs of pants and extra socks and am most productive then, without interruption.
I created a playlist of songs I listened to over and over: the series soundtrack:--as many versions of
I created a playlist of songs I listened to over and over: the series soundtrack:--as many versions of
Wayfaring Stranger as I could find, Jack White’s live version obsessively, Mad world, Lou Reed’s Perfect day and Jeffrey Luck Lucas.
The paintings are unified by color palette and emotional overtone-which is why the painting of three Monkeys looking expectantly upward is included among the other strangers, “going over Jordon, ... just going home.
just a perfect day
feeling much better, paintings coming along.
the you tube clips are the music i listened to while creating the series. listen. you will get a glimpse of the feelings conveyed through the music to the paint.
"Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,
your path struggles on through incomprehensible mankind.
All the more futile perhapsfor keeping to its direction,
keeping on toward the future,
toward what has been lost.
Once. You lamented...
What was it?
A fallen berry of jubilation, unripe.
But now the whole tree of my jubilation is breaking,
in the storm it is breaking,
my slow tree of joy.
Loveliest in my invisible landscape,
you that made me more known to the invisible angels." Rainier Maria Rilke
this sound sad as my heart
BadfishStudios Art Blog: Home
the you tube clips are the music i listened to while creating the series. listen. you will get a glimpse of the feelings conveyed through the music to the paint.
"Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,
your path struggles on through incomprehensible mankind.
All the more futile perhapsfor keeping to its direction,
keeping on toward the future,
toward what has been lost.
Once. You lamented...
What was it?
A fallen berry of jubilation, unripe.
But now the whole tree of my jubilation is breaking,
in the storm it is breaking,
my slow tree of joy.
Loveliest in my invisible landscape,
you that made me more known to the invisible angels." Rainier Maria Rilke
this sound sad as my heart
BadfishStudios Art Blog: Home
sorrow
my joys are equal only to my capacity for sorrow. in this deep well are the waters in which i swim to meet a shining and vibrating light, my constant companion through long nights. the job of the artist is to translate with conviction and clarity the inchoate longings we all feel for that which is authentic and true:to unravel the poetry of the soul.
"Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! "
— Eugene O'Neill (Long Day's Journey into Night)
— Eugene O'Neill (Long Day's Journey into Night)
priestess
Oxum orisha of beauty 36 x 36 oil 09
Oxum's dance recalls her bathing in a waterfall, and summoning the forces that control pregnancy and childbirth. The young woman possessed by Oxum dances alongside her mother.
Oxum likes beauty, and devotes her life to it. She is also the goddess of love and fertility, and looks after newborns up to the age of about 4. The city of Salvadore in Brazil is believed to be run by Oxum; it is said its people love the good things in life.
bahia salvador procession fesitival of oxum 36 x 36
Oxum's dance recalls her bathing in a waterfall, and summoning the forces that control pregnancy and childbirth. The young woman possessed by Oxum dances alongside her mother.
Oxum likes beauty, and devotes her life to it. She is also the goddess of love and fertility, and looks after newborns up to the age of about 4. The city of Salvadore in Brazil is believed to be run by Oxum; it is said its people love the good things in life.
bahia salvador procession fesitival of oxum 36 x 36
come see the beautiful world
Paintings celebrating the Orishas
Afro Carribean Mothers of Saint
New Abstract floodscape series
The Floating City: New Orleans After the Flood
paintings about the world turned upside down and the longing for home
In 2006, I responded to Hurricane Katrina with a series of abstract 'floodscapes' After the Flood. Three years later, I revisit the ninth ward with The Floating City. The impossibility of painting the physical reality of the flood allowed me to focus on the emotional reality of an inexorably altered world. My primary goal is to convey the sense of devastation and loss as well as to offer hope forthe city of New Orleans, rising.
on display on the mezzanine gallery at Arterra through May 25th.
Arterra San Francisco's first LEED-certified green high-rise community.
300 Berry at 5th one block from the ballpark
ORISHAS OXUM
 Paintings celebrating the Orishas
Afro Carribean Mothers of Saint
  The Orishas are considered |
Oxum the orisha of sweetwater 36 x 36 oil 09
Oxum's dance recalls her bathing in a waterfall, and summoning the forces that control pregnancy and childbirth. The young woman possessed by Oxum dances alongside her mother.
Oxum likes beauty, and devotes her life to it. She is also the goddess of love and fertility, and looks after newborns . The city of Salvadore in Brazil is believed to be run by Oxum; it is said its people love the good things in life.
Oxum's festival Candomblé practitioners believe that every person has an individual orixa which controls his or her destiny and acts as a protector. Each orixa represents a force in nature and is associated with certain foods, colours, animals and days of the week
. The girl with her toes painted yellow for Oxum, the little sun, and the word for power—axé— Procreation, beauty, riches, love, and fertility. The mistress of jewels and fresh water. This is Oxum
bahia salvador procession fesitival of oxum
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Who is Alice Shaw ? review of (auto ) biography at gallery 16
faceprint of my colors
makeup on paper
saw in thirds from magic tricks seriesfloating spoon from magic tricks series
envelope 2009lipstick , envelope
$10,000
palm readingblack printers ink with readers notes
tea leaf readingteacup, cigarette butt
the real alice shawtea photograph, my past left
landscape right
Who is Alice Shaw?
review of Auto (biography) at Gallery 16
There was palpable excitement in the crowded room as people hovered around a table, dropping five bucks into a jar, waiting to get their handwriting analyzed.
I was intrigued by the invitation,, "Alice Shaw has employed others, such as a handwriting analyst, an astral chart expert, a reader of tea leaves and a psychic, to tell her information about herself …then taken what she has learned from these sessions and made artwork in response.
The show was part documentation of this process—her original handwritten show proposal and the letter the handwriting analyst wrote in response, a palm readers scribbled notes upon her handprint, a teacup and the notes “ future health problems”, childlike watercolors and photos of the artist in various personas, interspersed with pairs of photographs and prints expressing dichotomies.
The first piece that caught my eye was face print of my colors, made by pressing paper onto her made up face….faint and wrinkled like a mounted skin, ghostly, yet still bearing the imprint of the artist.
in that sad fleeting visage; mystery.
On my second tour around the gallery I focused on the photographs; distilled, mature, enigmatic, coming finally to a watercolor series of illustrated magic tricks suggesting things are not always what they seem.
On my second tour around the gallery I focused on the photographs; distilled, mature, enigmatic, coming finally to a watercolor series of illustrated magic tricks suggesting things are not always what they seem.
I returned to a framed envelope with a lipstick kiss on the back. Why I wondered, in a room full of artworks priced under $1000 was a lipstick kiss on the back on an envelope priced at $10,000? The difference in price was disjointing and made me consider the possibility that the price was an intentional artifice, a clue requiring that I pay attention.
The envelope, mounted in a simple black frame, incongruously almost, freezing in time, that particular kiss: until it became a symbol of a kiss which contained the promise of entering into another, and through them the hope of becoming complete; of understanding the unknowable you. Consider that most tricky of mirrors, love. The desire to be seen through the eyes of another, as much an illusion in the quest to know ourselves as a Russian woman reading your palm.
(Auto) biography uses our own fascination with ourselves to lure us in, as if through her exploration of identity we might be let in on the secret.
A friend commented that the work was hung too low, unevenly and looked unprofessional. My impression was that this was a deliberate choice serving to put the viewer at ease, by making the presentation more accessible, like a model with a chipped tooth. In their imperfection you recognize their humanity, as such I felt the way the show was curated beckoned the viewer to an intimate place, as if whispering, "You can be yourself here." We have our handwriting analyzed, see if we can predict the color of the next gumball out of the machine before we realize she’s winking back at us, as if saying; you don't really believe that stuff, do you?
comment and photos by georgianne fastaia for www.artbusiness.com
apologies for the flash/glare
alice shaw
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