Blog / 2025 / Earth Tones

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

In the 2025 edition of Crime Against Nature this is the mole painting, but in the 2012 version it’s this.

When I was making this image thirteen years ago, I was also working on 55 other paintings at the same time. I had just ten months to make all the images for the book, and, during some of that time, I was preparing for and then recovering from a surgery for my endometriosis. Basically, from the moment I finished it, the brown of the dirt background felt messy and unstructured.

A few years after the original book came out, I did a coloring book version, and, for that, I redesigned the mole image entirely.

When I decided to release a 13^th anniversary edition of Crime Against Nature, I knew I wanted to remake the mole painting, so I used the coloring book design as a model. Starting work on the new composition, I had a certain confidence because my line drawing of the mole had forced me to really think through the background and find a way to make the dirt of the mole’s hole interesting for people to color in.

Still, I didn’t know exactly how I’d adapt that structure into a painting. My technique involves overlapping a lot of translucent brushstrokes, and the coloring page drawing didn’t provide any clues for how that part of my painting would play out, which was just fine by me. I love the way my painting process is full of discovery. In fact, I’m not sure I’d ever paint anything if I could envision exactly what the finished work would look like in the end.

I’m so pleased with how this new mole painting turned out! Rainbows and bright colors are a big part of my art in general, so it was nice to spend some time in the browns in the background of this painting, learning more about the subtleties of these colors and the ways I can make them really sing.

You can purchase your own copy of Crime Against Nature for $35 or download a PDF of the book for free!