Angela N. Hunt

But still slogging through Broken Rainbow. I’m at page 238 as of last night with 27+n pages to go (n = missing scenes needing to be written).

I won’t make my deadline today.

*sigh*

It is what it is. Deadlines get blown. I just need to kill it dead and I will probably do so (knock wood) this week. But it’s a wee bit demoralizing. And of course, Life in General does not care that I am on deadline. My girls want their Momma, my husband has this weird thing about wanting to spend time with me, and my sister apparently likes to talk to me. Never mind the rest of my family. And y’know. Cats.

So I keep slogging. It’s a substantially stronger book for this edit. It has been brutal and my editor has more than once pissed me off, but only because she’s been right. This is why editors are important. The key is that even when they piss you off, have a big enough dose of self-respect and self-reflection to *listen.* Editors aren’t the enemy. They’re there to make you better. Always. I’ve never talked to a single editor that wasn’t striving for the best book possible.

It doesn’t mean you have to agree with them all the time.

But for the gods’ own sake, it does mean you have to listen.

I don’t know what I would do without my editor. Ree, Madam Editor, this one’s for you.

This is from a shoot I did with the Mad Model back in 2006.

2006. Wow. Really? *checks date again*

Yeah. Really. Wow. Okay then. It does not feel like it’s been that long.

This was a very strange shoot. I rented a very strange studio run by a very interesting gentleman. Got a boatload of great photos, including the one that is in the Kinsey Institute’s Permanent Collection, “Cherub”. We worked for over five hours and by the end of it, we were rung out. The building had no AC and was hot as hell inside and not much better outside on the roof.

This was getting on in the day. In my head, it wants to be the book cover for something…

Nudes by Angela N. Hunt
$32.95

Naked women. Really, do I need to say more?

I do?

All rightie then.

*settles in comfortably*

I did not start out with the intent to photograph naked women. It literally just happened. The first time the Mad Model and I ever got together for a shoot, a session that *I* thought was just going to be a portrait shoot, it took a completely different turn when I turned around, camera in hand, and found that she’d taken off all her clothes and was naked in my front room.

Yeah, I stood there like a dumb ass for a full minute. Bless her heart, she did *not* laugh her ass off at me. I sat my ass down on the hearth. And I shot.

And I got my first negatives back and fell in love.

Everyone is a mystery. Everyone. Somehow, when someone is naked in front of you and you turn the camera eye on them, if they are willing? Small miracles can occur. It’s not all puerile and juvenile. It can become transcendent. Light falls on human skin in ways that it doesn’t on anything else.

When the light is right, we glow. It’s not an optical illusion. Or if it is, don’t tell me how it’s done.

I think it’s the soul.

Only when we are naked, sometimes, just sometimes, we allow ourselves to be fully revealed. It’s a gift. I don’t take it lightly.

So, the edit on Broken Rainbow is owed at the end of the month at the latest. If I get a little over eleven pages edited a day, I’ll make it.

But it means that pretty much everything else has gotten backburnered.

Eh, it is what it is.

The Ant is heading to Chicago this weekend. A cousin’s son is having his bar mitzvah and she’s off to wish him well. I do not envy her Chicago in August. However, it means I’m somewhat on my own this weekend. The husband is in Crunch. It should be entertaining to see how I survive, having a deadline and all to accomplish. Pray for me.

So, yeah. Photos and paintings will be scarce for another week.

Oh, and the husband keeps asking me what I want to do for my birthday.

I don’t know.

I’d like to go dancing, but my current group of friends are not into dancing. Which makes me sad. I used to dance frequently, specifically ballroom with the occasional foray to the 80s clubs in San Francisco. I miss dancing the polka with John and waltzing with Ray. I still need to learn to tango and my swing is atrocious. My cha cha though ain’t half bad. Some day I will learn how to do a natural and reverse samba roll.

It just doesn’t look like it’s going to be this year.

So what about you, my darlings? What are the sorts of things you like to do for your birthdays?

AsyouknowBob, I’ve put up a selection of the black and white photographs from the Alice Assassin series over on Ye Olde Etsy. They are metallic c-prints, which to those of you who have no clue what I’m talking about, refers to a specific type of silver gelatin print. In person, it’s not unlike looking at super glass enamel car paint. It makes black an incredible glossy black and grays a silver quality that is unmatched in other print formats.

In short, they’re sex in print form. It’s also how I prefer to reproduce my work now. Giclees are fun and I’ll probably return to them at some point, but for sheer glorious, this is an artifact I want to *lick*, metallic prints cannot be beat.

Right now, I’m behind the eight ball on edit deadline for Broken Rainbow, so we’re on brief hiatus before more prints go up. But that doesn’t mean you can’t buy one now.

Check ‘em out.

Alice
Limited to 25 Prints
$125

I went to work on photos last night.

Photoshop refused to load.

I had to shut down the entire computer at that point. Not the Beast’s fault. Clearly a software issue.

*sigh*

It was really the punctuation to a rather hard day. The cats have taken it upon themselves to leave bodily fluids of every description on every surface they can find. No one can take Lou or Speckle which breaks my fucking heart. So I’m getting them the full set and spectrum of shots and chips and letting them outside. Because keeping them indoors is destroying everything I own and making me want to cry on a weekly basis.

Yesterday was the first time ever in my life that I wished I didn’t have pets.

Oh, and my husband broke his leg and walked around on it for two weeks. Yeah. That happened.

The edit continues to be a slog.

The press continues to accrete mass.

But I haven’t painted in weeks and I haven’t looked at photos and that part of my brain wants to scream.

Send an assistant with a bottle of Patron. I’ve got a lot of work to do.

So a few years ago, I did this little painting just as an exercise for the joy of it and set it aside.

The Mad Model found it amongst my canvases when she came down for a visit one time and immediately absconded with it. It hangs in her office. What’s funny is that I completely forgot she had it until I went up a couple of months ago. And there it was.

It’s a tiny jewel of a painting, if I say so myself. And I’m thrilled that the Mad Model owns it.

Current Paintings for Sale

Reminder: I’m going to be deleting my Imagekind account as tomorrow. If you want prints from there, buy ‘em now.

Angela N. Hunt – Open Unlimited Edition Prints

I wish I could say that I had these awesome experiences of inspiration and that’s where my art comes from. The writing. The paintings. The photos. Yeah.

That’d be nice.

Truth is, almost everything I’ve created started out small, as tiny thoughts, that then acreted ideas, that gathered people or words, until the next thing I know, I’m running away from the avalanche shouting, “Where the hell did that come from?!”

The Enchanter’s Theorem came about because I was tired of splitting my personality in two as a writer and I asked myself, “Why not write an espionage thriller with magick in it?” My paintings started because I had a dream after my father died. That one dream has spawned a whole series I’m still painting. My photos have more than once been inspired by nothing more than the Mad Model showing up, opening her suitcase and saying, “What do you think of this?” and showing me a prop. Film ideas are too often inspired by tequila.

It’s no science. There’s no trick. It’s just art. If I had to describe my process in one sentence, it would be this:

I just show up.

Because really, that’s all there is (at least for me.) You show up. You do the work. You keep an open mind and an open heart. Somewhere in the maelstrom that we call Life, you make art.

It’s pretty cool.

The Sky Warning
Limited Edition Print
$125

And here’s the next of the limited edition prints from Alice Assassin now available.

The cloud as hand? Unintentional and not digitally created. That was just there. Sometimes you phone in your weather request and the gods of photography come through for you.