January 8, 2013 January 8, 2013

Happy New Year to everyone! As you probably realize, I have been on hiatus. During November I was chairman for a 125 person, 17 vendor luncheon and bazaar for the Association of International Women and during November and December I was touring at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at about 5X our normal rate. Usually we do 1-2 tours per month and I was doing 8 or 9 tours each month. The museum is built on an estate that was owned by a member of the Eli Lilly family (as in Lilly pharmaceuticals). When the Art Association of Indianapolis needed a home for a new museum in the late 1960′s the estate was donated by the Lilly family. The original home is now a national historic landmark and the museum’s largest work of art. The family donated the home with most of the furniture and decorative arts on the first floor in place so we have a unique and special situation. The home is always decorated for the holidays with designs from 1920-1940. It is very popular and quite beautiful. We had huge crowds this year and I am always glad to see so much interest in something so historically important to the area. If you’re interested in learning more click here .

I wanted to share a photo of the Best in Show for the Watercolor Society of Indiana’s Juried Show. The painting is a watercolor collage done by Peggy Brown.

Peggy Brown – WSI Juried Show Winner

I took a workshop from Peggy several years ago and she is universally respected and admired. The link to her website is in my blogroll. Peggy has a very unusual process that she also uses to create marvelous art quilts.   I hope you will check it out.

Wishing everyone a great Tuesday, happy New Year and success in 2013.

 

May 31, 2011 June 4, 2011

Yikes! I recently realized that I did not have a single new drawing that I could enter in The Indiana State Fair fine art competition. The fair is near and dear to my heart because I was a long time 4-Her in my youth, because the people that run the fine arts area are incredibly nice and because I sold a drawing and a painting two years ago. Over 100,000 people tour the fine arts building. What an oppotunity to have your work seen!

While I was doing research for my American Modernism tour I became familiar with the B&W cloud photographs of Alfred Stieglitz (primarily titled Equivalents). During summers at his family home on Lake George, Stieglitz would go “a-skying” and that’s when he took most of these photos. They are beautiful and very special and after his death O’Keefe gave 19 of them to the Phillips Gallery in Washington DC. Duncan Phillips had been trying to buy them for years. I found the photos in the catalog for a show called In the American Grain: Marin, O’Keefe, Dove, Hartley & Steiglitz at the Phillips. I decided to see if I could draw clouds with graphite. My first drawing included a sunset – very hard to work with in graphite, dumb me – and was a mess but my second drawing came out better. It’s just a start and I may have to divert to get something ready for the fair but this is challenging and a great oppotunity for me to learn.

May 17, 2011 May 18, 2011

Ken had another round of stem cell harvesting on Monday and since then I have been thinking about blood, blood cells, machines and the prisms that are used to process the blood. All of this sturm and drang let to  my first Cells painting. This painting is 12″ X 16″ on Kilimanjaro paper. As you can see, I included a couple of new elements this time.

Cells 1

In the past I’ve always used only one diameter for the circles but, in this case, I was thinking about blood cells – white, red, platelets, stem cells – different sizes and colors. I also was focused on the light that I watch each time we go through this harvesting step. Deep down in the machine, the nurses monitor a line of light that is supposed to have a red line running through it. There are times when occurences coincide fortuitously (how’s that for a mouth full!). Last week a friend of mine gave me a stash of art supplies that included artist’s tape which I had never seen or used before. Last week watercoloredhands (may 13, 2011) had a post that described her use of artist’s tape to paint the edges of a building in a piece she is working on. Everything came together and I used the artist’s tape to develop the rays of light. At one point I thought I had “lost it” because the painting looked too dark. After it dried it resembled the colors you see when working with blood and plasma.

Wish us well – tomorrow morning we find out if we got a vaccine from this run!

March 24, 2011 March 25, 2011

Ken will start a new treatment program next week and, while he has been having lots of blood drawn over the last few months, that will increase significantly as he goes through the next several weeks. I have been thinking about blood, blood flowing out of his body and blood flowing back into his body. I painted this as I played with these thoughts.

Blood Flow Out, Blood Flow In

The painting has collaged strips from the product information sheet. Maybe it is my focus on geometry and maintaining an optimistic attitude but the painting doesn’t communicate emotion to me. I started in watercolor and finished in acrylic paint. I am not sure if I will keep this or try to recover the surface and do something else. Either way, I’m glad I did this painting. It is putting me more in touch with my feeling.

 

December 31, 2010 January 1, 2011

As the old year ends I want to thank all of you who have visited my blog. When I started my blog on January 1, 2010 I had no idea that the experience would add so much richness to my life. Thank you all for the fun, the ideas, the criticism and the friendship. This is my 158th post for the year. I am not an everyday “poster” like I had hoped but not bad either.

As part of my last post for the year I wanted to show my final version of the Hawaiian Headland collage painting . After my post of December 7th, I decided that it had too many problems and that I had to go back and make additional changes. The primary irritant was the lack of connectivity in the gullies running down the hillsides. How did they start? How could they start with horizontal flow? So I did additional painting, matted the piece and stuck it in a frame. Then I lived with it for a couple of weeks. If one of my paintings can make it through the “living with it” period without making me itchy to pick up a brush, I know it is complete. And as any artist knows…our paintings always look better “cleaned up” by matting and framing. Now I am truly satisfied…a good way to start the new year.

 

April 26, 2010 April 27, 2010

Lasy night I completed another ATC size painting using the watercolor crayons. Before I used them I took off the layer of wax the coated the tip of the crayon so they were a little easier to use. So far I think they are very convenient for using while I am sitting around watching TV in the evening. I just spread out my crayons, get a class of water and a small brush and go to town. I have only used them for ATC’s and I don’t know if they would work well for larger paintings but I will continue to experiment. I used a digital photo shot this week for my painting. It is of a white dogwood blossom. Right now I am still inspired by all the beautiful flowering trees in my neighborhood … but I am afraid that short season is about over.

Dogwood Blossom - ATC