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fish and prayer
“I understand once again that the greatness of God always reveals itself in the simple things.”
― Paulo Coelho, Like the Flowing River
This painting is meant to evoke the simple yet beautiful moments that people share on the banks of a river.
The young boy, bent over, watching minnows flashing silvery blue around his ankles. FISH
His grandmother, praying, singing in the morning sunshine. PRAYER
ALWAYS feel free to make me an offer on a painting if you truly love this piece but find it priced out of your range.I am happy to work with you so you might be able to make the purchase.
LISTEN to the song that inspired "fish and Prayer" Jesus Culture sings "the River" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxIj_0VKhg4
NOTE paintings are signed with my name in the lower right corner as well as on the back
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Bird on the Road
Artist's description:
I am intrigued by the silent communication between animals. What is going on
the ram queen
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| The Ram Queen. 36x36 oil ring the bells that still can ring forget your perfect offering- there is a crack in everything that's how the light gets in ~Leonard Cohen |
BadfishStudios Art Blog: Home
bio
Where is your studio located? What are past locations of your studio?
I paint in a studio we built in our backyard which allows me much more freedom and flexibility in making paintings. Prior to 2016, I painted at The Art Explosion Studios in San Francisco.
Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Where do you reside now?
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1964. I grew up in the Connecticut countryside, riding my bike along the tobacco roads with names like bread and milk road. I spent the past 30 years in San Francisco and now live in Hayward.
Describe what your childhood was like. I grew up along the Connecticut shore where my father kept his sailboat and spent my 14th summer picking tobacco for L.B. Hass. The gentle rise of the land crowded with small houses, the morning fog, and windy sunny beach days are all vivid memories of my childhood. The smoky fragrant aroma of BBQ over burning charcoal, the hazy landscape lush and green, dotted with weathered barns had an indelible effect on my artistic sensibility which is concerned with memory, impermanence, and loss.
How old were you when you realized you wanted to be an artist? Was there a particular event or moment when you suddenly knew you wanted to be an artist? I was voted “class Artist” in High School and learned about color, composition and Art History from my mother who taught art at the local High School. While she could rhapsodize about chiaroscuro, she was unable to imagine a person making a living from art. So I studied film and creative writing in College and never picked up a brush until 20 years later. In 2001 I rented a studio in an artist warehouse during a crossroads in my life. While I'd never painted before, I found it to be an intuitive natural expression and by 2002 was selling my work through open studios, local cafes, and consignment galleries.
A collector told me, “Your paintings remind me that I don't have to be perfect.” This tells me my work can inspire someone to expand their concept of what art can do for them. I believe that we can transform our lives, and it is our scars which make us complex and beautiful. This is the impetus behind every mark I make on the canvas: to “transform the mistake”, and to create paintings which are both beautiful and flawed. I believe the positive response to my work is directly related to the incorporation of this message into my medium.
What is your educational background and artistic training? much of what I take as common knowledge, I picked up from my mom. She taught me to figure things out for myself, leave parts unfinished for the eye to fill in and when in doubt, throw it out. I moved to the Bay Area after high school, studying filmmaking and creative writing at San Francisco State University. I graduated Magna cum laude with a BA in Creative Writing in 1988. I'm most concerned with the ability of a painting to impact the viewer by telling a story or conveying an emotion.
Why did you choose your subject matter? I keep Image files in paint covered 3 hole punch notebooks, pulling the subjects of my paintings from a trove of found imagery—stacks of outdated travel books, National Geographic and instruction manuals. I often borrow from snapshots of people caught in action, found in boxes at the flea market.
How did you develop your technique?. Over Christmas one year I propped a still tacky oil painting against a wall with a shelf on it. Unbeknownst to me, my jug of Murphy's oil soap tipped over and the thick liquid, which I use for cleaning the paint brushes poured down the painting. When I returned a week later the paint had eaten through 7 layers of paint. I laid the canvas on the floor and poured a jug of water over to mop up the soap, I found the effect on the tacky oil painting was striking and embraced the distressed aesthetic.I in developing an unorthodox technique of scrubbing my canvases with oil soap and dousing them with water, Int.. and Rustoleum oil based waterproof enamel.Murphy’s oil soap is poured onto the canvas which is tilted to create dripping horizontals and verticals. The soap which is used to clean brushes was an unexpected discovery. It eats away layers of paint in what I call "LIFTS"----revealing hidden colors below. The process is completely unpredictable and requires a fearless leap of faith. By giving up control, this process forces me to stay lighthearted and adaptable to the evolution of the painting,
Who are your major influences? I love the paintings of Gustav Klimt. I appreciate the delicacy of his figures and his bold aesthetic. While I find his work visually pretty, decorative art ultimately suffers its lack of soul. I am more affected by the pure emotion in the paintings of Egon Schiele, Gaugin’s naive use of form and Van Gogh’s intuitive use of color. Francesco Clemente and Dan Mccaw are two contemporary artists I admire.
What artist organizations, guilds, clubs, and/or societies do you belong to?
I am a Precita Eyes Muralist,l Center public arts advocate, a Visual Aid Grant recipient, contributing writer for The Painters Keys and a guest reviewer at Art business.com.I was awarded a grant for the Hillcrest Elementary Mural Project by Phillips 66 corporation was honored hist the painter John Neto at his request
What major shows or publications have you been featured in? I have had many successful exhibitions I was invited to exhibit my work at the International Art Fair with Sandra Lee Gallery in 2010 and with Nieto Fine Art in 2011. My work has been featured in Artweek Magazine, The SF Chronicle, and three of my paintings were featured in the July 2009 issue of ELLE Décor magazine. in I was voted fine art studio online featured artist and was the subject of an article by art critic Brian Herman.
As an artist, what is your mission? I believe that the role 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.
"My Process
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| STAGE ONE |
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| STAGE TWO |
(detail) added light blue scumbling,tightening and defining overall design, keeping to a limited palette of warm pinkbrowns
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| FINAL STAGE in the LIFT PROCESS |
INTERVIEW
Georgianne Fastaia interview in ARTEASER
Born into a Sicilian family in Brooklyn, Georgianne Fastaia had a middle-class upbringing in Connecticut. As an art teacher, her mother's influence kept the family very arts oriented and weekend treasure hunting in flea markets left a lasting appreciation for the dilapidated. "I kind of like the immigrant experience [...] I have that work ethic that I think comes from, 'Hey, I've got the opportunity, let me do something with it' she says.
A self-described "loner" in school, Fastaia developed a passion for reading and literature. However, a tragic misunderstanding with her parents caused her to leave home at 16. "Right then and there, I wasn't having a normal childhood, like going to the prom. I was already thinking, 'How am I going to survive?'"
After high school, Fastaia hitchhiked to California and worked multiple jobs to put herself through San Francisco State University, ultimately graduating with Magna Cum laude. Though she had been fond of sketching while growing up, Fastaia took only one painting class with Robert Bechtel. Her love of reading, which had driven her to San Francisco in the first place, prompted her study of creative writing instead:
"My refuge had been in books. I loved Jack Kerouac, I loved The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. [California] seemed like such a free place, it seemed in line with my personality [....] That's where I was going, as soon as I could"
Amidst the challenges of supporting herself through school, however, Fastaia had a life-altering encounter that left her battling addiction for years. Ten years ago, she successfully extracted herself from dependency, which required deep introspection and deconstruction of her existence:
"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"
Painting proved to be a critical new heading as she navigated farther away from her past. Despite minimal formal art training, she took up a small studio at Art Explosion and began experimenting with supplies that had been discarded by other artists, scrubbing the canvases with soap and creating a unique texture:
"The process is completely unpredictable and requires a fearless leap of faith […] By giving up control, this process forces [me] to stay lighthearted and adaptable to the paintings' evolution, while staying sensitive to the moments of beauty as they are revealed"
Over time, she continued to develop her technique of layering paint and then scrubbing away parts of the surface with Murphy's oil soap. The process has become her own form of story telling:
"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."
Indeed, catastrophe was a notion both familiar and inspiring. After Hurricane Katrina, Fastaia did a moving series on the flooding of New Orleans, recalling her own encounter with Mother Nature in New England:
"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 gray"
The devastation and destruction left by both storms parallel some of Fastaia's own turbulent story. Many of her subjects appear desolate and as weathered as the canvas beneath them, reflecting the toll taken on life by such catastrophes:
"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"
Guided by her own journey from tragedy to joy, Fastaia explores notions of transformations that emerge from these catastrophes. Ultimately seeking an uplifting message, she embraces the distressed aesthetic to create raw and emotive images:
"I think an artist who is really serious has to have something to say, has to have something to share that is authentically their own experience"
Having started a new chapter in life ten years ago, Fastaia finds peace in producing her enigmatic and beautifully distressed paintings:
"I produce a lot of work quickly because I feel like I wasted ten years [... Creating art] is a pure, creative exchange, and I feel blessed to be able to do it. I really appreciate my life now"
ARTIST STATEMENT Floodscape Series : After Katrina
The Floating City of New Orleans is a series of abstract floodscapes inspired by images of the Ninth Ward after Katrina. I did not set out to record the reality of the flood but rather the emotional aftermath of an inexorably altered world. Painting is intuitive, suggestive and, for lack of a better word, poetic. I strive for emotional honesty in my work and rely on an intuitive sense of color and an immediacy of gesture to achieve it. Each Flood-scape is meant to affect the viewer on a visceral level.
The changed landscape reminded me of a Christmas spent in the Salvation Army during the ice storm of 1972. The heavy creaking branches of the trees encased in ice is a memory that brought beauty and tragedy together for me, in the same moment.  |
A square with a triangle atop it is one of the first symbols a child draws. These naively shapes represent our longing for home. As the series evolved, these symbols became more elongated and totemic while "the Flood" became a metaphor for displacement. My challenge has been to translate this story of loss and disembodiment into the language of paint-- texture, composition, and color.
I have given each painting a “textural history” through a long distressing process: scrubbing, scraping, and wiping away paint 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 third of the canvas, dwarfed by the sky. "Houses in the air" plays with composition in a unique way. I used multiple horizon lines to shift the imagery into the center of the picture plain, as if floating, a composition designed to dislocate the viewer from their 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 white to convey the saturated air and quality of light in the aftermath of storms.
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| Add cConnecticut Tobacco Barns 40x40 oil SOLD |
“Connecticut Tobacco Barns" is extraordinary. It is apparent that Georgianne Fastaia has the wherewithal to paint her innermost visions. 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.” Darrell Baschak 2009
FASO Featured Artist: Georgianne Fastaia
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