bad photos of my painting series (in progress)

My nude got accepted into the 35th Annual Student Juried Exhibition at the University of Wyoming's Art Museum! It was the first time I've seen something of mine hung up in a nice gallery space, with a tag and everything. Pretty sweet.

In Painting III, we're supposed to put together a body of work -- a series that we could put on a gallery show with. I'm doing about 10 pieces revolving around themes of conflict and tension, using scary or beautiful things I saw when I was a kid as the "setting". Here's the first two paintings of the series in progress (done out of order...)

This is a sculpture sitting out on I-80 of a tree. I saw it briefly in passing when I was a kid enduring a drive through Nevada to Utah. I thought of this tree when I was thinking of tension ... about how this interrupts what would be unbroken Salt Flats landscape. It looks jarring, even cartoony in its odd, unnatural colors and shapes. I've heard it called "Tree of Life", "Tree of Utah", and "Tree of Metamorphosis". Here are some images of it in real life.

This is one I just started about an hour ago, so it's very rough -- a close-up of a bee's abdomen and stinger (patterns combined from a honeybee and a wasp). I like that it seems like an abstract painting, but it's almost directly from natural reference. Originally, I thought I'd have the bee be red and black, but leaving it white seemed to look creepy and more what I had in mind.