But seriously Sam and Steve are artist beyond their humble surroundings. Sam has won a number of awards and produces whole works ranging from thirty second commercial spots to a thirty minute short film.  Sam gave the kids a quick demo on his process as an animator and shared a number of his films with the group.  A small group of children wound up hanging out with Sam all afternoon. Creating a rather Dadaist film that appeared to focus around some sort of teleporting car thief who is also Darth Vader. One rather industrious student asked to experiment with a few figures and his own digital camera. An hour later Sam and I walked by to see how he had progressed to find a rather impressively choreographed four frames per second fight scene. Mind you this was accomplished in an hour, with Legos and a rather common digital camera.

Steve Stringer quickly rose to the top of the list of most impressive people I have ever met. If you’ve looked at a car in the last 50 years and thought “Damn! That car looks good!” odds are good, Steve Stringer had a hand in designing it. Yeah. This guy was responsible for at least parts of vehicles such as, Corvettes created between ’61-’67, the original Viper, and the final Shelby Cobra-Mustang created under Carroll Shelby.  Oh yeah, Steve was on a first name basis with Carroll Shelby. This man knows more about the automotive industry than the Ford President who spoke at my graduation.

My workshop was pretty well received though the crowd seemed less than impressed with my brief explanation of the lithographic process and the survey of printmaking history that I offered to support my presentation. It was the first time I have ever tried to teach printmaking to a group of people rather than just one on one. It was exhilarating to see what the kids soaked in and was surprised by the ones who really grabbed a hold of what the process could do.

For the project portion I taught a very simple process that I have been experimenting with to create monotypes, but I made the kids create a relief project out of it. You take craft foam that kids cut up to make craft animals and other 2-Dimensional things with and draw on it with water soluble markers. Apply gentle pressure to a piece of paper and you have created a simple though surprisingly accurate monotype. You can also cut shapes or carve into the foam with a dull blade to create a relief shape or a stamp for repeatable printing. As I said I have been creating monotypes with this process at home in my spare time. I am still in a research stage but I plan to create a new body of work with this process once I explore all of my mark making possibilities.

Camp was a blast and the week culminated with an exhibit of the kids work. Right now, I am working on moving a selection of their work to the local public library for a summer long display to help promote the event for next year. Now that this project is done, life has slowed down a bit. Once the Earl Thomas Conley concert passes tomorrow I will spend my time waiting to hear back from potential employers and getting down to enjoying my summer despite this insane heat, but more on that later. Stay Classy.

Braintree Farmers Market 2012 Commemorative Poster

On June 16th the Braintree Farmers Market hosted by Sustainable Braintree will be opening for the very first time for the 2012 season located at the Braintree Town Hall, One JFK Memorial Drive, Braintree, MA.  The market operates every Saturday from 9 to 1 thru the end of October with an indoor Thanksgiving Market on November 17th.  This will be the fourth season for the market and I’ve been coddling it along since it’s inception.  The market has grown considerably since 2009 and it has become a treasured community event that offers something for everyone.  All of the products are locally grown and made right nearby and all the farmers and vendors work hard to deliver the highest quality and greatest assortment of goods.  If you’re in the neighborhood or looking for adventure-please stop by-it’s worth the trip!

This year I created the Everything Under the Sun design which will be featured on posters and decals as a means for the market to raise funds for its operational costs.  Stop by the Market Managers tent and I’ll sign a limited print-run poster printed by my long time friends at Image Resolutions.  They print all the signage for the market and they do a cluckin’ awesome job!

5 Women monotype

The South Shore Arts Festival 2012 starts on Friday, June 15th and runs until Sunday, June 17th on the historic Cohasset Commons, Cohasset, MA.  My original monotype, 5 Women, will be on display in the Members section of the exhibit.  This piece was inspired by pre-Colombian art and the the juxtaposition of color and paint texture.  Each figure has its own personality and  illustrates a wide variety body types that translate to the present.

This monotype has been included in this exhibit thanks to my devoted artist friend Trish Berube who’s been schlepping my art all around the South Shore while I recover from a shoulder injury.  Trish will have several pieces at this event as her work is truly outstanding!

This venue also has plenty of local crafters where you’re bound to find something you like.  Two of my favorite jewelry makers participate in this event-Look for Jewelry by Sage and Freebird Designs-enjoy.

Since then, only one trip, and she now is sleeping peacefully.

I was supposed to do all sorts of art/business-related stuff like go to a reception at the Gatehouse Gallery and meet Amy mid-way (there), so she could get her work back. I am opting to stay home and monitor Prudence, and in the meantime, do art and related stuff.

I decided a couple of weeks ago, that since I am revisiting earlier painting ideas with success, that I should re-explore printmaking. I soaked some paper and started 4 monotypes. I found 2 tubes of ink that are good that have to be at least 20 years old.

She is off to the box again-and I really hope it isn’t her kidneys!

Maybe good art this week-end. But, I will be home.

Mixed media drawing: male nude.

Last week I spent a couple of days doing some training in Renaissance drawing techniques but earlier in the week I finished this piece which had started out as a smaller drawing in my sketchbook. I was working within a specific size, which is my printing plate for monotypes because this will eventually become one of my large colour monotypes as well. I struggled with it for a while because I couldn’t get it to fit the space, but I took some time out to study some of Egon Schiele’s drawings and it gave me the confidence to distort the body quite considerably until it fitted. Schiele did it all the time and so did many Renaissance artists. They constantly looked for the patterns and ‘truth’ underlying the visual world and weren’t averse to altering what was in front of them to conform to what they considered to be ‘divine’ rules of nature. So I’m in good company, eh?

I did a lot of preparation on the ground underneath the drawing, stretching a large piece of Somerset and priming it with several layers of rabbit-skin glue, which gave it a lovely satin sheen. I washed over it with three layers of watered-down acrylic paint in yellow ochre, permanent rose and phthalo blue respectively. Finally I worked over the surface randomly with willow charcoal. And only then did I begin to draw, firstly by rubbing away the highlights from the charcoal background with a bit of rag, letting the drawing emerge. Then I worked it up with compressed charcoal and oil bars. This is based on a life drawing done with a young soldier model.

Monotype-Botanica

It’s always nice to receive recognition for the efforts of creating art pieces.    My monotype print, Botanica, will be included in the upcoming New Prints 2012/Summer exhibit.  The exhibit runs from May 24 – July 27, 2012 with an opening reception on May 31 from 6 to 8.  Gallery hours are Tuesday thru Saturday 11-6 and July hours are Monday thru Friday 11-6.  If you’re in the Chelsea area please drop by and check it out:

International Print Center New York | 508 West 26th Street Room 5A | New York | NY | 10001

Instead of perfectly spaced, expensive art hung precisely on gallery walls, a hodge-podge of recycled frames will display a variety of affordable original art pieces and fine art prints. All will be hung salon-style.

The featured artists include Jessica Jacobi, Justin Dunford, Lindsay Peyton, Anne-Joelle Galley, Lisa Chow, Gina Vasquez, Terry Klumpff and John Gardosik.

Peyton, director of Cadence Enterprise, an artist management company, explained that salon-style art walls have been around for hundreds of years. The style originated at the French Salon at a decisive moment in art history – when art became more democratic, as artists began to appeal to a publicaudience instead of a royal dictate.

“Just like the French Salon, we want to make art more accessible,” Peyton said. “The idea is to create a whimsical space, show some experimental, contemporary art as an homage to an exciting time period in art history.”

About Betz Art Gallery and Studio

Betz Art Gallery, located at 1208 West Gray, has been exhibiting fine art since it opened in 2000. The gallery also offers installation services, art consulting and commissions of original art. For more information, contact Lori Betz at 713-576-6954 or e-mail at info@betzgallery.com.

Then it began to rain.  Imagine, the land of little water, and it rained!  Thrilling, in a way, but somewhat discouraging at the start of a vacation.  I trudged up E. Palace Avenue with my brand new rollie bag — the smallest I could find that would fit not just under the middle seat, but also under the aisle seat — bumping along beside me.  A young woman came towards me, dressed in jeans and a parka with a fur-rimmed hood.  April in Santa Fe, I thought, and I am in a skort and a light weight, long-sleeved running shirt layered over a tank top.  On the whole, I may have been the one more inappropriately dressed, at least for the next half an hour or so.

At Deborah Gold Gallery I saw this:

. . . .  and I bought it.  I had been in Santa Fe less than three hours.

Six years ago we bought our very first painting, by any artist, from Deborah Gold — an impressionist oil of a vibrant Santa Fe sunset, all reds and purples.  Loved it then, love it now.  Since then, we visit her gallery whenever we’re in town, but have not had a gut “gotta have” moment since then . . . .  until last Thursday afternoon.  She has branched out into monotypes, and the spontaneity and energy required for her new process is obvious in these works.  The monotype I bought is not actually a monotype, in the sense that what I fell in love with was actually the second, “ghost” print.  If you buy one work, it’s one work; buy two works, it becomes a collection.  We are, officially, Deborah Gold collectors now.

I spent a few days soaking, stretching and preparing some sheets of paper, Fabriano and Somerset, coating them with several layers of rabbit skin glue [smelly] and then applying random washes of thinned acrylic paint in yellow ochre, permanent rose and pthalo blue respectively, making sure they were translucent enough to create randomised colour combinations. I’m working from life drawings to create large-scale fully worked up drawings in charcoal and oilbars which in turn will be the templates for three-colour reduction monotypes. Here’s a picture of me just getting under way first thing today; I’ve covered the paper [it's Somerset 250 gsm] with a lightly applied layer of willow charcoal and I’m about to transfer a recent drawing of the soldier who models regularly for our life drawing group at Swansea Print Workshop.

I spent ages trying to get it ‘right’ – it has to be drawn to fit the perspex matrix that I will use for the monotype, but in order to do that I had to do a certain amount of distorting, which I baulked at at first. By 10.30 I was pacing around the studio like Lady MacBeth declaiming ‘Why am I doing this? Why don’t I just stack shelves in Sainsburys?’ Then I dipped into Nigel Spivey’s most excellent book, How Art Made The World, as I remembered seeing something he wrote about how artists have always distored the human body, like Michaelangelo and Schiele, and that gave me a lot more confidence to loosen up and not worry about keeping to accurate proportions.

It’s quite revolting really to use rabbit skin glue, but I haven’t found an alternative that gives the effect I want. I know the rabbits were killed for food, but it still makes me feel like a bunny boiler.

This evening I went to a meeting at Swansea Print Workshop; we had a marketing consultant in to help us with future planning and marketing. It was very useful and we really need something like that because we’re run almost entirely by volunteers with just an occasional drip of project funding and we need to become better at making money if the Print Workshop is to flourish. So if anyone’s around the Swansea area on 12th and 13th of May there’s a terrific short course on creating artist books with Edinburgh-based Printfest Printmaker Of The Year, Kelly Stewart [click for more details]. You’ll end up with a terrific hard-bound artist book and help to support Swansea Print Workshop too.

7″ x 9″

My husband and I moved away from New Orleans the year before Katrina hit, so I closely followed the stories of survivors on the radio afterwards. One man in Pearlington, Mississippi said that he spent the night in a tree while the water rose around him. I was thinking about all the culture and traditions that risked being lost as people dispersed, and about the importance of oral tradition. Recordings might be destroyed, but the music still exists.

14″ x 14″

16″ x 22″

You would think upon receiving my new mail edition that there is no hand work involved in this image, since they were printed with an inkjet printer. Um, no. It was more than just click-click-click.

It’s true, I very occasionally use the Creative Suite to put some of my stuff together, but that’s not the complete story. My work space is half digital, half analog. The digital stuff (computers, scanners, printers) is on one side of the room while the analog stuff (drawing desk, art supplies) is on the other.

This is how this card came to be: I collected images on magazine paper, scanned them, digitally manipulated them, and then printed each one on a photocopier or color laser printer. Then I took those separate images or swatches and made one composite solvent transfer monotype image out of them. This means layering one distinct machine-printed image on top of another distinct machine-printed image, by hand and with a spoon and solvent, to make one unique and hand-made image. Sometimes I draw back into the monotypes with graphite or pen and ink. Then that monotype gets photographed or scanned. Sometimes it’s digitally manipulated again.

For this card, these are the elements composited together in InDesign:

• a Photoshop file of the scanned monotype background
• a transparent Photoshop file of the scanned micron pen drawing of a bird
• two scanned stock engraving letterpress proofs I’ve printed: the speech bubble and the castle with banner on the address side
• digital typesetting: the ellipses in the speech bubble

“TO”, “FROM”, my address, and the edition numbers are rubber stamped on the final prints.

It’s deceiving to see an end product like this. There’s a lot more to it than you might think.

New in the studio is a Paula Roland HotBox. Encaustic printmaking is a satisfying process and one that produces interesting results both planned and unplanned. I consider myself an “unplanner” most of the time.I like working directly on paper, so portable and absorbent. A relief I might add from the large paintings that are underway all the time in the studio. Relief in the sense of immedicate gratification. Everyone to whom I have introduced encaustic printmaking finds it a great way to experiment as well as produce finished work. Right now I’m continuing to experiment with printing papers and have not settled on one yet.

Looking to May I’ll be teaching a class at John Campbell Folk School. I have heard so much praise for this place and look forward to a large class…ten artists. We’ll be working with encaustic and mixed mediums. Then comes June and I’ve set aside four days for workshops, two consecutive two-day periods to accomodate those who find weekends unworkable. Thursday, June 21 & Friday June 22nd and Saturday June 23rd and June 24th. Options for participants to choose either two-day or all four days. 10:30am-4PM.

Lots of new work in the studio.

monoprint

Was watching a cooking show segment-game show premise.  Two TV chefs as contestants answering questions. Pretty silly.  The Question?: How many eggs does an average chicken produce in a year?  300?  600? 900?  ( I figured 300 would be more than enough). The “experts” guessed 600 and 900.

Started talking to my husband, Richard. He said, “300, if you’re lucky.”

I began to imagine the process through the eyes of the hen… What a huge imposition!  An egg is BIG compared to the size of your average chicken. Whose idea was this? Does it upset the hen?   My husband opined that chickens aren’t deep thinkers.

Anyway, this has changed my thoughts about eggs forever… and chickens.

Above is one of my monoprints-suitably chicken related for the purpose of today’s entry.  Comes from an article I read some years back, when the Dalai Lama was a tad bit anemic?  Made me feel a less inadequate person at the time. I mean!  We all have frailties-hope he’s feeling better.  I know I am.

Monotype montage: 3 male nudes.

These are large monotypes I did from original drawings from the life drawing group at Swansea Print Workshop. It takes me a full day at the print studio to do each, plus about half a day to work up a scale drawing from my original sketch, which is usually done into a sketchbook. The middle one will be in an exhibition at Art Matters in Tenby in May and the one on the right will be showing in Walcot Chapel Gallery in Bath, July 9 – 15. Other monotypes will also be included in both exhibitions.

I’ve been nominated for a WordPress Versatile Blogger Award by Drew Kail and and Jackie McSween at Pointsthruprose. This is lovely – thanks so much Drew and Jackie.  Drew is an exceptional printmaker working mostly in block printing – amazing work. Jackie coordinates a collective arts blog.

The rules for the award indicate that I must nominate 15 blogs I think are deserving of the Versatile Blogger Award.  All of the blogs I have listed are tremendous and I recommend checking them out.

My nominated blogs are:

1. Rayya the Vet  Moving diary of the life of an Australian vet and her varied patients

2. Doodlemum – Daily drawing blog about a Welsh Mam and her husb, three children, cat and dog. Funny and whimsical.

3. Charcutier - fascinating blog about starting a high class charcuterie business in a remote part of rural West Wales

4. Dave Cropley – lovely life drawings from this talented printmaker

5. Lemon’s Tree – fun and quirky drawings and cartoons about life and stuff

6. Sticks, Stones and Paper Stew Blog - warm, human, humane, arty

7. Ziggy Shortcrust - a bit bonkers

8. Karasartisticaladventures - gorgeous whimsical arty blog

9. Hellopalz  – such a lovely, warm and varied blog

10. Artyboy68 – wonderful daily portraits

11. Hansishallucinations - bonkers!

12. Rubicorno – phantastic phone photography

13. Blumbago – gorgeous paintings and drawings

14. Grubbygrrrl’s 365 cats - as it says

15. J Hladik Voss - absolutely bonkers Barbie tableaux and other stuff

It was very hard choosing just 15 out of the 90 blogs I follow but I tried to pick those that publish regularly and have the most varied content. Please forgive me if I didn’t include yours.

Here are the rules:

If you are nominated, you’ve been awarded the Versatile Blogger award.

•  Thank the person who gave you this award. That’s common courtesy.
•  Include a link to their blog. That’s also common courtesy — if you can figure out how to do it.
•  Next, select 15 blogs/bloggers that you’ve recently discovered or follow regularly. ( I would add, pick blogs or bloggers that are excellent!)
•  Nominate those 15 bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award.
•  Finally, tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself.

versatile blogger award

Nominated bloggers don’t have to participate.  I nominated each of these because I feel their blogs deserve to be recognized, read and followed.

Seven things about me:

1. I’m a mad cat lady

2. I love living by the sea – I love it’s smell

3. I’m a rock chick – old school, prog, metal, grunge – love it all [except 1980's poodle rock]

4. I love making cakes but I don’t like eating them

5. I like watching world-class rugby

6. I’m a tea addict

7. I find weather fascinating [just realised how very British the last three are lol]