Natalie25929's Comments (26)

This cat is so awesome! It looks so good in person. Well done!

This is one of the most adorable things I have ever seen! I love its face and posture. And the quote is perfect especially for the Pie home! And it's orange—our favorite!

NAT! How beautiful and fun! I love graffiti art! I have a collection of "street art" books that I will show you the next time you are at my house. You did a great job employing many of the key elements often used in graffiti tags—bold, overlapping letters, ombré effect, a combination of solid colors and gradation, rainbow coloring, angular shapes and arrows, and speed! You have to be quick when making graffiti to avoid the cops, haha. I can teach you some other techniques graffiti artists use, like stenciling, wheat paste murals, and stickers. Your Uncle Ben is a wizard with spray can paints and airbrush (Pap Pap, too) if you'd like to learn how to make some large graffiti tags on plywood or cardboard sometime. Google "Los Angeles graffiti towers" to see how graffiti artists recently organized to protest an abandoned construction project of luxury high rises by using graffiti tags. Graffiti art is often used as social protest to highlight injustice and areas where the government and corporations fail to upkeep their social contracts with the urban population.

Your furry friend has such an interesting coloration to its coat. It reminds me of a cross fox or African wild painted dog.

What wonderful textures and colors! Your love of animals really shows!

Beautiful! Love and acceptance always!

I like your exploration of positive and negative shapes, mirroring, and primary colors. It has a lot of energy. It reminds me of parkour. I would like to know what you were thinking about while you were making this. You might enjoy Matisse's papercuts and MC Escher's Birds & Fish.

Nat this is a great collage of all things you love. I especially like your signature “I love you” hand sign coming out of your paintbrush.

I really like this cat and her expression. I think she’s thinking “can I really eat in the living room?” Love the 3D effect.

I see this drawing showcases your many loves - the paintbrush, your love of cats, and your signing yhe I love you! Your kind heart shines through.

Love it! The cats look great and I love how you used different line thicknesses. Way to go!

Love this cat, Nat! So creative!

Love that you added the wood pieces to make your cat! Meow!

Is this your hand? How cool! We should do henna tattoos sometime. I also found out about this thing called Inkbox. They sell temporary (two week) tattoos that you can design yourself and also tattoo markers. We should try it sometime.

I can see that Emmett was the inspiration for this piece of art. Drawing and painting birds is one of my favorite things to do. I would like to draw and paint Emmett with you sometime.

Now to look at this as a piece of art. The girl has big dark eyes which might communicate her sadness at being lonely. But she is smiling which means she is hopeful and maybe finding some enjoyment being with herself. She stands upright with her arms along her sides which shows she is confident. She's tilting slightly to the right. She made need a V8, haha, but I really think that shows her unique way of looking at things... a little off-kilter provides new ways of looking at things and a different and often much needed perspective. It looks like she is wearing a crossbody bag, which to me signifies that she is an adventurer... she is a girl who is going to go places, see exciting new things, and make new friends. Her clothes are cheerful, colorful, and bright, whereas the background contrasts in its darker colors. The background takes up more space than the girl suggesting that maybe the environment is overwhelming. It might show that the girl is perfect just the way she is, and that it's her environment that needs to change, to be more welcoming and friendly. I like this girl. She looks cool.

"The Lonely Girl". I relate to this piece, especially when I was in grade school. I had some social anxiety and wasn't a typical girl so I always felt a bit on the outside. There's an expression called "wallflower" which means a person is on the sidelines of a social activity, standing along a wall, or off by themselves. I was a wallflower, and sometimes still am. I would want to let this Lonely Girl that she will become less lonely as she grows up. In high school and college I made lots of friends that I felt understood me and were like me.

I bet Lou served as some inspiration for these prints of you. I love how you made his tail curl. He's confident and cool cat! The horizontal lines make a great background. I like how you varied the thickness and freehanded the line... that adds liveliness and energy to the piece. It looks like you were also experimenting with complimentary colors which helps your prints to pop. I'd love to make prints with you sometime. Maybe we can do in a Natalie Art Camp this summer.

The Aborigini of Australia have a beautiful art form in dotted painting. Originally they drew dots in sand, or painted them on rock or on their skin. The dots and imagery they created with them had special spiritual and sacred meaning. In the 1970s, they began dot painting on canvas. In Mexico in the 1940s, the Oaxaca people began painting whimsical animal carvings with intricate patterns often made of dots called Alebrijes. They are very detailed and super colorful. Alebrijes Claude Monet was an Impressionist Painter. He has a painting at the D'Orsay in Paris called "Coquelicots" that he painted in 1873 of his wife, Camille, and son, Jean, walking through a poppy field. His wife and son appear in the painting twice, perhaps to indicate motion or time passing as they walked. Anyway, the poppies are red "paint spotted". Georges Seurat and Paul Signac were impressionist painters who painted in a style called Pointillism where they conveyed light, color, and imagery through with tiny dots and marks. Abby really likes the panting "Place des Lices" by Paul Signac at the Carnegie Museum. Camille Pissaro and Gustav Klimt also painted flowers with "paint spotted'. Jackson Pollock splattered and drizzled paint in large abstract expressionist paintings. There is a really fun Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama, who is know as "The Dot Lady". All of her paintings, installations, scultptures, and even the clothes she wears are patterned with dots. Painter Chuck Close has dyslexia and an impairment called prosopagnosia which means "face blindness"—he can't recognize faces. He overcomes this challenge in his art by breaking peoples' faces down into very small bits... often circles, shapes, or thumbprints inside of squares or diamond shapes to make really large scale "pixelated" portraits where the heads are as bigger or bigger than full-sized people.

Beautiful, Natalie. I love the horizontal brushwork of the blue in the background, and how you allowed the white to show through blue. It's very expressive. I like how when things are abstract and expressive, it can be interpreted in so many different ways. I see a school of tiny fish going into their coral reef home. I see fireworks exploding into the sky. I see tiny flowers and buds bursting into bloom. I feel happiness breaking through sadness. There are many artists who played/play with "painted spotted" and splatted and dotted. You might enjoy looking at the work of these artists:

I love you, too!!! ?????? Great job on the tattoo!

Love it! ?? Reminds me of a bird I know. ????

Psychedelic, man! The patterning reminds me of the Haight-Ashbury San Francisco district where hippies gathered and created art, music, and fashion in the 1960s. I love the personality of the font you created for your name! It looks like your name is surfing a colorful wave, also very Californian. The hippie vibe is accentuated by the peace symbols and “ban the bomb” symbols that you incorporated. One little tweak: look up the Mercedes-Benz logo and the “ban the bomb” symbol. One little line makes the difference between the two symbols. They are often confused. I have done it myself many times. Luckily, it’s a quick and easy fix! One way to remember the difference is that the trunk has two branches with Mercedes-Benz (two words) and three branches with “ban the bomb” (three words). Is the purple shape lips with a “smile for miles and miles”, a feather, a leaf, or…? All possibilities add to the free spiritedness of your artwork.

This piece has a very strong composition. It is iconic in that the black area is centered. There is weight to it. The balance of the white and black positive and negative space is dynamic. I like that the black area both looks like an outline or shadow of a person (like a peg doll or vintage Fisher-Price Little People toy) and also like a keyhole that sometimes people peer through to spy on others. I like that we don’t know if the figure is the watcher or the person being watched or the hole through which they are being watched. It leaves a lot of room for the artwork’s viewers’ interpretations. For example: The watcher could be an unknown shadowy figure with the darkness conveying unease or threat. Or the watched person could have their back turned and be unaware that they are being watched, or the darkness could reflect that they are angry at being watched or turning off their light as to not be clearly seen. So many stories can be imagined. There is also a lot of depth and brushwork within the black area which reminds me of the abstract expressionist painters, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. I can’t wait to see what you create next!

This is both creative and poetic, Natalie. Remind me to show you the art of Jackson Pollock sometime.

Awesome! Peace, girl! ??