Welcome back!

Thanks for the sincere welcome, everyone! You may notice that I haven't posted a post (?) to this blog for at least a year and a half. I could sit here groveling to you all, trying to apologize for my lack of attention to your existence and your need to be blogged to, but I am going home in an hour and I'd like to wrap this up quickly so I'll just be frank with you. No need for lies here! The truth is I went out for a half gallon of milk on a Wednesday morning and was abducted by a group of confused fundamentalists who thought I bore a slight resemblance to Jesus Christ. We do have similar hairstyles and 65% of them were under the impression that he also had blue eyes (they took a vote in front of me), but personally I don't really "get" it. Some of the younger female fundamentalists thought that perhaps he was really a woman, but others stuck with the tried-and-true Jesus stereotype. They seemed to lack a cohesive image of him but were desperate for something to do in the middle of the week so away we went to a basement apartment in Somerville. Yes, that's right, I was right here this whole time! Unfortunately they wouldn't let me blog, or escape, and instead insisted I do a lot of readings from the bible, making me alternate my intonation to try and get the voice "right." Fortunately I am a very forgiving person (so was Jesus!) so after several months when I had finally managed to convince them I was now very late on a rent payment and they let me go, I quickly forgave the whole incident and spent the rest of the year and a half equally between the mall and on vacation.

So now I'm back into the swing of things. I have been creating bunches of art over the past year, and now host it at my real website that I paid for unlike this:  Ashleyfreeland.com. I display everything I like once it's finished, and am totally and definitely available for commissioned paintings. I just now realized that the website is rather static because I have a day job and cannot paint all day, so I will try to update this blog with drawings, unfinished paintings, and other art-related bits of amusement. In related news, anyone in the Boston area is invited to come to Brickbottom Artists Association's 24th Open Studios event this weekend! It's Saturday and Sunday from noon to six, and I will be showing a bunch of paintings in it. Additionally, if anyone's appetite needs spoiling, I just bought chocolate chip cookies, crackers, and wine for the show.

The two-headed cat awaits you!

More ducklings (shinier!)

I've taken such a liking to these sticky little guys that I decided to try painting them in gold and bronze. (It was hard to get a good shot so I took two photos.)

I am for hire and am willing to negotiate what you would like to pay me with.

I painted this the other day for my friend Melissa's jewelery stand in the Mass Market craft show. I don't know what Mentha Shine means and I keep forgetting to ask her. It's fairly simple, but had I not done it a full two hours before the show after sleeping for four hours and drinking forty-seven beers the night before, I could have elaborated a bit more. Apparently I accept jewelery as compensation, so you could probably also bribe me to work for you with:

• Food
• Beverage
• Compliments
• Air conditioning units

The Weekly Dig Introduces Up-and-going Artist Ashley Freedman

Make Way for B.P.

by Ashley Freeland

I did this one in ink one Saturday night with a bottle of wine, and decided to send it into the Weekly Dig the next night. To my astonishment they returned my email the very next morning and asked if I'd like it to be in the Dig This calendar section of that week's publication. If you don't know what the Weekly Dig is, it is Boston's premier arts and entertainment weekly magazine and it swears a lot. They were pretty excited about it too, and unfortunately the excitement got the best of them and they were unable to proofread any of the paper. So I ended up being cited as Ashley Freedman. I was filing for a name change when they decided to publish a correction the following week. A very triumphant, exciting moment in my life indeed.

Most of you from Boston are familiar with the city's deep connection to the book Make Way For Ducklings by Robert McCloskey. We are so enamored with the precious little ducklings that we had a bronze statue put in the Boston Public Garden. As a reaction to the B.P. oil spill, I covered them in oil, to show how the horrific event can tarnish a city. Copyright, copyright, copyright.

By standard definition, I am now a famous artist

Which brings me to to my next topic - cruelty and greed at the hands of small, adorable children. The theme for this month's art exhibit at Space 242 Gallery is Good vs. Evil: Superheros vs. Villains. Since I like to ruin surprises for everyone, here I am reproducing the three pieces that I will have in the show starting June 25.





"Lemonade Stick-up"
gouache and ink on paper (because gouache is really fun to say)





"Sodaboarding"
gouache and ink on paper

"Puppy Fight to the Death"

gouache and ink on paper

Though I can't take all the credit for the conception of these paintings. What am I saying? Of course I can. Oh alright, one of my friends helped me come up with the central theme, which is a display of good versus evil in the sense that children, who are assumed inherently good, staging criminal and immoral acts, and adorably so.

"Vacanti and Friends"

By the way, all of these are totally copyrighted so don't even think about it!!
medium: gouache on rodent

I did this for an exhibit April-May at the Space 242 Gallery in Boston's South End. It was hung beside the bar, but I swear I did not take any kind of personality test to have it put there. The inspiration was Charles Vacanti's famous Vacanti mouse, or "earmouse" as it is popularly referred to. Since I am a very famous scientist myself, I took the experiment a bit further and engineered a nosemouse and a mustache mouse, and finally painted the resulting mice. In addition to being very attractive and revered among the mouse community, they are quite obedient, and so I frequently let them play in the backyard of my apartment by themselves. The mouse with a human mustache has contributed immensely towards ending the plight of men who cannot grow mustaches by making mustache transplants available to men 13 and over whose faces do not reject the transplant.

Welcome to the Arts Bog!

Yes, you probably are in the wrong place. This is the first, but not necessarily last post on the new Arts Bog. I wanted to post some of the recent paintings I've done, but it didn't feel appropriate posting them to any of my writing blogs, where I comment on things that are of very little value to anyone. I thought art deserved its own page, where it wouldn't have to share living space with ramblings about traffic lights and hangovers.

Why the title? Well for starters, Arts Blog was taken.* Close enough. It gives me a theme to work with. Art floating around in a bog - at least a bog is a tangible thing existing in nature. Where are you going to find a blog in nature? Look around you right now (please turn away from the computer), do you see any blogs sitting around you right now? If someone showed you a bear, a medium-sized body of water, and a poinsetta, would you be able to identify which is most similar in nature to a "blog"? You would not, because blogs are not found in nature, or inside of a Wal-Mart. They cannot even be scientifically engineered in laboratories.

Also I hoped someone trying to locate the "Arts Blog" would misspell and accidentally, serendipitously, and regrettably end up here instead. If this is you, I'd advise you to stick around. Snacks may be made available!

All art is for sale, unless I decide I don't really feel like selling it to you. If interest level is high enough I may also become available for sale to the highest and most attractive bidder.

*I hadn't meant to imply that http://artsblog.blogspot.com was taken, but I love the fact that it is, and it's taken by an actual kid named Art, who posted once in 2003 because his sister (or mother? Omitted.) reads his personal diary. We never did hear from Art again, so I think we can safely assume that he was killed by his sister in late 2003. In light of this tragedy, I think we should let him keep this small corner of the Internet, and not complain to Google and have them hand over the blog name to me.