Danica Phelps

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I learned about artist Danica Phelps in Eula Biss's "On Having and Being Had."  

Income's Outcome is a project that began when the artist Dan ica Phelps made drawings of everything she did with the money in her bank account until that balance was spent down to zero. She drew her son putting a coin into a parking meter, her hands opening bills, boots on her feet, a scooter, her s pushing a grocery cart. When she sold each one of those draw ings, she recorded the income and drew everything she did with that money. The drawings are full of bodies, rendered in long liquid lines, overlapping in embrace, and hands hold ing things, cookies and eggs and apples. "Each time a batch of drawings is sold," she says of the project, "it creates a window into my life where I draw what I spend money on until that money is gone and then the window closes."

Her art is an accounting. When a drawing sells, she records the income by painting a green stripe, a tally mark, for every dollar. Money spent is painted in red stripes. Credit is gray, as it occupies the gray area between earnings and expenses.

In 2012, she exhibited a series of twenty-five plywood panels covered in 350,000 red gouache stripes for the $350,000 she lost in the foreclosure of the home she had shared with another woman, her former lover. The Cost of Love was the title of this work, which included words drawn from a housing court ruling: "animosity," eviction," "mortgage." When she bought the home, she hired assistants to help her paint the 627,000 gray stripes that represented the loan of $627,000. But when it foreclosed, she painted every red stripe herself, which took five months. "It's like letting go of the house, every single penny of it," she told a reporter. "And once I've painted it, it's gone."