Artistic Process: "The Winners," version 2

After doing the initial sketch (that you will find in the post beneath this one) I decided to add color to the image. I used india ink, acrylic ink and acrylic paint all on moleskine paper. I got a little carried away. The paper wrinkled quite a bit but I've grown to like the effect. I liked the initial black and white image but I was bothered, even though this was a notebook sketch, by the stray pencil and pen markings and the places where, if you look closely, you can see the white out. I'm deciding whether or not to develp this into a bigger piece on canvas panel using acrylic paint and pen. I like the carnivalesque costumes and the expressions on their faces.

Artistic Process: "The Winners," Version 1

I created this sketch in my Moleskine notebook using, pencil, ink and white out.

You Little Freak

acrylic paint and acrylic ink on 8 and 1/2" by 11" board. Click here for more information.

Seven

"A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.” Federico Fellini

This painting is called, "Seven."

I drew "Seven" in my sketchbook, yesterday, with pencil and pen then painted it with acrylic and ink. After staring at it for awhile and hearing the number, "Seven", in my head, twice, I decided to call it that.

Where Do Characters Come From?

You Must Exit

"You Must Exit"
acrylic ink, india ink and pen on 6" x 9" latex impregnated paper. Click here for more information.

Art School: Finding The Best Art School In The World

The Best Art School in the World

Let the content of your dreams inspire the creation of your art. If you can't remember your night dreams engage in conscious daydreams. Some of the best art lessons come from within. Some of the best landscapes, fantastical characters and themes come from within you. Unwrap the blueprints to neighborhoods inside you and build them up with colors, metaphors, blacks and whites. Build them with your words, your clays, your drawings, your movements. Visit those neighborhoods - located deep in imaginative realms - that eagerly await your arrival. At first these neighborhoods may appear dormant, but that's only because you have forgotten to look with your innermost sight.

Look at these neighborhoods, now, with your most powerful vision. See the people that occupy these neighborhoods. Observe the interesting characters. Listen to their unique voices. Hear them tell their stories and whisper to you their poems. Watch them dance and feel how their dances move you. Allow your new, loving, eccentric and most interesting acquaintances to take you into deeper journeys. Have outstanding adventures and when you return from these adventures, record them, by expressing them, using whatever artistic medium you choose. Then proceed to craft these adventures so that those of us who haven't experienced what you have, can feel what it was like to be there, and also become enriched by what you've learned. Craft them in the ways they wish to be expressed. Respect the independent spirit of your creations. Remember that your art is in constant collaboration with seen and unseen forces. Allow your conscious life to become enhanced by your unconscious journeys. Walk your art. Preach it. It's yours. It's ours.

Tiffany Osedra Miller
Bassa Bassa Arts

The Preoccupied House

Image by: Tiffany Osedra Miller

Trees

I've been thinking about trees a lot, lately. So much so that I even tried to make a painting of a tree which resulted in what you see above. Maybe I've been thinking about trees as Fall approaches and I want to embrace the memory of what trees look like in the Northeast U.S. in the Spring and Summer, before they change into those yellow, brown, auburn aging beauties. I think of the tree in front of the house I grew up in which shielded me from people who could see through my window. Never once, did I consider its roots. It died with a rubber tire looped around one of its highest branches thrown up their sometime in the 1980's. I don't recall the incident and forgot about the tubing for years only recalling it in moments when I happened to glance at it on my way out. Oh, how I took that wonderful tree for granted. I think of what trees mean to me as an American. And what they offered to my ancestors in the Caribbean. I now think of them as living and full of magic and spirit - capable of feeling the earth's joy as much as its agony. I hugged a tree a couple of weeks ago. Something I don't do often. It felt good to hug that tree. It felt more like a homecoming. A memory of something I had long since forgotten about nature and all of its silent spectators. It felt so good that I even wanted to kiss that tree. But I didn't go that far. People were watching and this city girl needs to walk before she runs. I didn't even ask the tree its name.

I created a poem about trees, however. Enjoy!

Witness the march
of naked, sodden trees
bark beings with
melodic tree-steps
echoing
falling rainwater.

Let flashes of lantern light
reveal their tree prints in mud:

These green,
greasy haired elders
lounge around verandas
in Summer-times
watered by sweet teas and
drunken soldier lemonades.
Wintertime snow-heads
carry Christmas gifts of pines,
Spring-times offer
churches their palms.

On farms, Cow-Trees milk their lemons
suns bake the cream tarts on windows,
and wiggle worms of apples.

Around each tree
roam the spirits
of black, fallen fruit
once considered strange.
Guilt and resentment
buried in tree-roots
at once being forced to dangle such
doomed jewelry.

Bark tattooed
with the exhalations of lovers
romances written on tree-skin
penned with knives

decapitated bodies
sold into lumber.

Each tree-stem and branch, a system
weighed down with knowledge
from haggard, hooting owls
gargoyles to tree-mouths
shut against its foliage-doors.
Behind it
you'll find yourself entering into
corridors full of sap -
and you'll experience yourself swimming in
the placenta of your roots.

by Tiffany Osedra Miller

Boom Boom Revue (a mini original painting)

Oh my!

I painted this naughty showgirl onto the back of an old 2.0" by 3.5" business card.

Purchase the painting, here, or at least see how much it costs!

Am I A Lion?

                                                              SOLD

Purchase this ACEO original acrylic painting on 2.5" x 3.5" canvas textured paper, here.

Number 26 to Memphis

                                                               SOLD

The Number 26 train to Memphis
hovers above ladder-tracks
laid down by the indigenous
inside of visions in which they saw themselves
climb each rail across the world.
If you board the Number 26, now,
the conductor will drive you through a state
of abandoned, yet occupied railroad cars
fossilized in mass open graves.

Regarding your luggage:

Tourist -
life already stores inside you
the sands of Memphis,
the gyrations of Elvis
the Libations of Africans,
the base desires in your blues,
the post-Lenten carnivals inherent in your jazz.

Regarding fare dodging, the
Members of The Subterranean Indigenous Tourist Board
wish to tell you this:

scavengers and passengers
must and will pay,
scavengers and passengers
must and will pay.

And, if while sleeping in your sleeping car
a gaggle of horns wakes you,
screaming out in a cacophony of sorrow,
open your door to a procession
led by face masked marauders,
their plastic expressions altered
by fire-light from candles.
Join that army of perversely masked
women and men,
raising back into life
the sarcophagus of the world they carry.

Tracks and Tunnels can then
become the open road for
trains traveling over, under and through
the imaginations of
all cities called and not called Memphis.

The original "Number 26 to Memphis" painting is on sale here.

Little Miss Drifter

After weeks of intense bacchanalia, Little Miss Drifter spends the rest of the year hovering over islands with fairgrounds, longing for laughter and masquerade, sensual, spirited adventures, spicy food and revelry. I wonder why no one tells her that carnival ends only when we allow it to? Could it be that she's been the reigning carnival queen for decades and her ladies in waiting have grown tired of watching her engage in dance after dance?

I painted this image of Little Miss Drifter, after I glimpsed her hovering over a small, quiet island on which I sat sipping a rum and coke, while sinking in sand. In hindsight, I could of called out to her, telling her that carnival never really ends, but I don't think she would have heard me.

Your Chaos, My Flow

This image takes me back to my Bronx roots, circa 1980-1981 - some years before Hip-Hop became a worldwide phenomenom. Graffiti was everywhere (I mean, everywhere) and everyone rocked their own style. I was still a child, then, but heavily influenced by the unfettered imaginations and the artistic anarchy.
Purchase this miniature original, Now!

The Entryway Man

From "The Diary of the Titillater" (click link to read Entry #1)

Entry # 2:

I met 'The Entryway Man,' when I began to wonder if human beings contain passageways and portals inside of ourselves that can lead us into places we never knew existed. This rumination opened me up to a series of encounters with a man known to me now as a Portal Porter who preferred the name, 'The Entryway Man.' He emerged from the darkness to add light to my illumination is how I will begin to describe the effect he had upon me. Upon greeting me for the first time, The Entryway Man said this: "The Human Body is the diminutive doorway to the universe of the imagination. Won't you step over the threshold of your small, troublesome frame and instead derive insight and pleasure from your own internal gifts?"

"Hell, no!" I said ,while he laughed for a good, long time at 'this idiot's expense' (as he so-called me while laughing and conducting conversations with himself as if my apparent idiocy revealed to him that I was hardly even there) without showing any of his teeth.

'I prefer vodka or Jack Daniel's or the warm musky bodies of women named anything, to stepping over thresholds,' I said to him when he calmed down and sat down inside the opening in myself he guarded. He watched as I lit sage, forgot what it was then began to smoke it, put it out, immediately, then opened up my Bible to find that a trip to a rain forest over 16 years ago had ruined every single page.



This miniature original is for sale, now!

Statuette