Ocean and Birch

More fun with the "job lot" paints, today using the colors Ocean and Birch.

In addition to painting straight on the water color paper, I painted sheets of newspaper to use as collage elements, blending and overlapping the colors at times to create new shades.  I also started digging through baskets of fabric and specialty paper looking for things in a similar palette.

(added bonus of finding all kinds of cool things I forgot I had...)

One more series tomorrow - this time featuring "twig."

Ocean and mushroom

I have these funny tubes of paint that I found for a ridiculously low price at the local job lot.  They are named like sweaters in the J. Crew catalog.

Nevertheless, I am drawn to the colors and have done a series of work using Ocean, Mushroom, Birch and Twig.

For today's viewing pleasure, I bring you Ocean and Mushroom.

(all on 4"x6" watercolor paper)

This is one of those pieces that went from bad to worse, to "I'm throwing this away", to "okay I can live with it but it's kind of a mess."

This was intended to be the start of a background, but the more I look at it, the more I like it just the way it is and the way it evokes the shore.  Just don't call that a mushrooom cloud in the sky.

Tune in tomorrow for Ocean and Birch....

Creativity begets creativity

As January rolled in, I promised myself to try and do one creative thing a day, no matter how small.  One day all I managed to do was glue a funny caption onto a photograph, but it still counted as progress in the collaborative art journal I was dragging my feet on.

With this goal in mind, I enrolled in Randel Plowman's 30-Day Creativity Workshop.  I knew I might need a little extrinsic motivation to gain some traction.  And of course it's working.  This first week of class involved a simple paper quilt exercise:

I'd pulled out several dozen magazine pages and cut the quilt shapes from the whole stack, not really knowing which pieces would catch my attention.  With the project completed, I had a huge pile of magazine scraps leftover.

I found myself feverishly gluing them into pleasing formations in a sketch book.

 

 They are quick and loose and don't mean anything, but I am flexing a neglected muscle and it feels good.

Life is busy and full right now, and coupled with the dark cold weather I am mostly inclined to lay on the couch under a fuzzy blanket.  Pushing myself to do that one small thing a day has re-ignited my interest, and motivated me to spend longer weekend hours in my art room.

And so collages are being made, postcards are being painted, new and old things are being mailed, and there is a growing body of evidence that momentum is building.

What's next?

Some of you may remember that waaaayyy back in April of 2012, Seth Apter put out a call for 5"x5" works of art that answered one of three questions, and I submitted this piece, answering the question "If your artwork could talk what would it say?"

(here's my original blog post about it)

It was a non-juried, no-risk submission.  All entries were posted on Seth's blog in the following months, and it was a fun community building project.

End of story.

Except, later that year, I learned that my piece was selected for publication in Somerset Studio magazine's November/December issue, as part of an article about Seth's project.  It was exciting to be sure.  More than I ever expected from my original participation.

Happy surprise ending.

But....fast forward two years, and I get an email from Seth, to all the 5x5 participants, announcing that an art gallery in Connecticut would be exhibiting all the 5x5 pieces in December.  How cool is that?  

I had fully intended to go to the opening of the exhibit on December 5th, since the gallery is only an hour away, but I was sick as a dog that whole weekend.

Still, it was cool knowing it was hanging there.

(you can read Seth's blog post about the opening here.)

 

All the pieces in the exhibit were for sale, (you can see them all here) and right before Christmas I got another email from Seth, saying my piece had sold. 

and to think I almost didn't submit anything for this project...

I don't know who bought my piece, but I'm sending out a heartfelt thank you, and hope it brings you happiness.  Another heartfelt thanks to Seth for organizing this project, and then carrying it forward in so many wonderful ways.

Moral of the story: Show up, make stuff, share stuff, take chances.  You never know where it will take you.

 

Now, what will I do next.....?

 

Contentment

It's snowing in that perfect way - just enough to transform the landscape, but not enough to inconvenience us.

The Christmas tree will need to finally come down tomorrow, but tonight I will bask in its glow one more time.

Soup is simmering on the stove.

I'm sipping a delicious chocolate porter.

I've spent all day thoroughly engrossed in David Mitchell's "The Bone Clocks" and I probably won't move from the couch until it's done.

It really doesn't take much to make me happy.

What are you doing on this first Saturday night of 2015?

I hope yours is as lovely as mine.

A good day's work

My mother-in-law has commissioned me to create a piece using black, white and red as my palette.  My job transition has kept me from creating much of anything, but over the past few weeks I've been going through my paper files and pulling out any and all black/white/red scraps. 
 

#1

I ended up with a huge pile, and a nice mix of hand-painted papers, commercial papers, security envelopes, and bits of advertising.  One brain-dead evening last week I coated all of these papers in polymer medium while watching some mindless TV.

#2

 Yesterday was a paid holiday for me, and I found myself with a surprisingly unscheduled stretch of time.  With all of my collage fodder prepped and ready to go, I was able to sit down and start.

#3

I wasn't sure where I was going, but as with most things, once I started I couldn't stop.  (and I'm continuing my love affair with the polymer medium/tack iron collage technique.  Not a single glue-fail or buckled paper in sight!) I have six finished pieces, a few more in progress, and a couple of silly postcards for good measure.

#4

Each of these pieces is created on heavy 8"x10" watercolor paper.  I used drafting tape to create a 1.5" border, so the collage itself is 5"x7".

#5

I keep changing my mind about which is my favorite.  There's only one I don't like, but I include it here (without telling which one) because I'm often surprised by what people respond to.  

#6

What do you think?  Which one is your favorite?

Found poetry challenge

Phillip sent me a self-addressed, stamped postcard that looked like this:

It's a simple 4"x6" card with a lot of text on it.  

On the back of the card he offered a challenge - Obscure as much text as I want, in any way I want, creating a"found poem" from the text I leave visible.   He sent this same card to lots of people on his mailing list, and I instantly loved the idea of this project.  I sat down with the text and a notebook and started finding possible "poems" in the text.  

For the phrase "telepathic music guides the people" I knew I wanted to use this picture of WACs in gas masks, but the picture was much too big for the 4"x6" format.  After some thinking, I decided I would cover the chosen words with clear contact paper, paint the entire card white, scan the picture, crop it to the right size, run my postcard through my printer, then peel off the contact paper to reveal the "poem."

Here's the result:

But I was nervous the technique wouldn't work.  So I scanned Phillip's text and re-printed it on white card stock so I could have a practice run.  I needn't have feared, my idea worked perfectly.  But now I still had Phillip's original pre-stamped postcard on my desk.  I didn't want it to go to waste, so I set out to find another poem.  This time instead of using my printer, I made a monoprint for the background and added some collage elements: 

 This was fun.  Back in my notebook, I had all kinds of possible phrases, and now I had the scanned text on my hard drive.  Nothing was stopping me from making another card....

 And another....

I was on a roll, so I kept making more.

I used the same technique as the starting point for each of them - covering selected words with contact paper, painting the background white, and creating some type of accompanying art on that white surface.  The tiny contact paper rectangles get encrusted with paint and ink, but peel off pretty easily to cleanly reveal the hidden words.

 

I've made eleven different cards (so far) with each phrase extracted from that same original piece of text Phillip sent.  It's probably more accurate to call my cards "found captions" than found poetry, but that's the way my mind works.  I can't wait to see how other people interpreted this challenge.