Awesome Things

1. Yesterday, Debbie, Josh & I went to the Beachland Ballroom to see the Rumpke Mountain Boys, who were amazing. Even the opening band, JP & the Chatfield Boys, were great! There were banjos & mandolins & an upright bass & a fiddle & a guitar (which underwent 5 string replacements throughout the show), and in one song, the banjo player even played the saw! It was so great.

2. I'll be doing a good amount of silkscreening this week, which I'm happy about. I've already designed 2 repeat patterns, and the next 2 are in progress.

3. In four days, I'll be in the beautiful city of Charleston, South Carolina, enjoying sunshine and picnics and daffodils and Nicholas. And I'll be filming another set of scenes to rotoscope.

4. Today I got to my studio, checked my email, and found that several people sent me congratulatory messages, and links to the Plain Dealer. Here's why: Steven Litt, the newspaper's art critic, wrote about CIA's Student Independent Exhibition. In the Sunday edition. And here's an excerpt of what he said.

Standouts this year include Michaela Lynch, author of a captivating and mesmerizing hand-drawn animation called "Their Ghosts Remain Between the Pages." 

Lasting a few minutes but consisting of hundreds of individual drawings, the work weaves together images of a young woman reading a book with those of a pair of young people on ice skates, a woman riding a bicycle or running her fingers through her hair. 

What's truly astonishing about the work is that Lynch uses line like a scalpel to carve different types of space into the blank white surfaces of her pages. Sometimes she starts with the simplest of linear fragments, leaving it unclear for a moment whether we're looking at the inside or outside of a form -- or whether we're exploring the spaces between people and objects or the spaces inside. 

As the piece proceeds, it zooms in close or pulls away from the action, giving Lynch a powerful forum in which she displays a wonderful ability to draw the human figure at various scales and from a wide variety of angles. 

The images convey the impression that Lynch has used film or video as the basis of her work, but it's the selectivity and elegance of her lines that cast a spell -- and make you eager to find out where she'll go next.

HOLY COW. At first I figured my name was mentioned, and was excited just by that; I definitely didn't expect such a long description with so many wonderful comments. I'm still incredibly flattered, and so glad my work has been communicating all that I put into it. You can read the rest of the article here.