Landscape-ish Monoprints
I have been fooling around with a gelli plate making mono prints lately. These were done on copy paper.
Acrylic Wash Sketches
I recently sat at my dining room table and just knocked out a bunch of these little paintings, just for the sake of practice. Sometimes I get into a kind of groove and out of maybe 16 sketches, came up with a few that I like. The are a manifestation of wanderlust, which I more or less constantly have.
In Verdant Sight selected for “In Good Company” exhibition
I am thrilled to report that In Verdant Sight (number 2 of from my series of mountain collages), was selected for a juried art exhibit called “In Good Company” to celebrate SWAN (Support Women Artists Now) Day 2016, held at the Livermore Valley Performing Arts Center.
The works are all on display from March 2 through May 1, 2016 at the Bankhead Theater Visitors Center and Gallery.
A couple of postcards
Here are two postcards that I made for The Postcard Project last year that go together well. Sometimes in the free associating that I do when I’m making postcards, I end up coming up with some that could be a little mini-series. That was how the whole Mountain Collage series got started.
Getting back to my Mountain collage series
Last year I started a project to create 40 collages on a theme. I chose 40 because that was the number of pieces that came in a pack of chipboard that I was using as backers to glue everything to. I made it through about 23, before I lost momentum. First it started to feel repetitive, then I ended up taking classes over the summer, going on vacation, and taking up painting in August which possessed me until the beginning of the year. I was thinking that I was done with the mountain collages. Aiming for 40 and doing 23 was a pretty good run!
But this month I’ve been floundering around trying to figure out what to do next. I have a few ideas, but nothing that has really gelled yet, so I decided to retrench a little bit and finish the Mountain collage series, while I figure out what my next project is.
I spent a whole day reassembling all the stuff that it took me to make these things: painting the sky backgrounds, gluing them to a backer, making paper to use for the mountains, and finding all of the supplies I’d used last year, which had been scattered to several boxes. Then finally, I made a collage!
My first set of 23 were about 9″ x 11″, and I decided that in order to portray more majestic mountains, I should work a little bit larger, so this next set is going to be around 11″ x 14″. I almost picked up where I left off, but I learned a lot even in this one collage, about how to make the paper and draw mountains, which I hope to improve upon in the next one.
The rest of the chipboard shall be used for something else.
Making images out of boredom
One day last summer I had to kill a lot of time in a windowless waiting room, and I was restless and bored out of my mind. I can read on a plane for 6 hours without looking up, but this was a long stressful day spent in a really dull and uninspiring space. Then I remembered reading somewhere about boredom being good for creativity. Maybe it was here. So I decided to try and channel my boredom into something creative using the tools at hand, which naturally, was my iPhone
I took a bunch of abstract photos of cropped sections of magazine pages, and then ran the photos through the Waterlogue app. Waterlogue makes your image look like a pretty great watercolor. Here were the results:
Cape St. Mary’s, Newfoundland
In September 2014, my family and I traveled to Newfoundland, the homeland of my father’s side of the family. It was a fantastic trip. We went out to a gannet reserve at Cape St. Mary’s, on a particularly windy day. My brother is a birder, so he was on a quest to see the gannet rookery, and it was quite a marvelous place.
This is from a photo that I took on the walk out. The actual painting is 18″ x 24″ and the photo is not really doing it justice. I gave the painting to my brother for Christmas, though there’s not a bird in sight. (They are all down at the rookery.)
Out of the Clipping File
I was going through an old file today and discovered this gem, courtesy of House & Garden, June 1997. It’s just quite possibly the greatest room in the world (minus the animal hides).
I searched for more photos of the Walter Seligman residence, but could only find this one, from the Library of Congress:
More research is required to determine if this house still exists.
Another random collage
While I was taking a collage class over the summer and was struggling with a really overcomplicated collage that was just not ever going to come together, one of the other women in the class passed my table and pointed to the scraps left over from whatever I’d been working on. “That’s cool,” she said. So I glued them down.
It could be cropped a couple of different ways. But it just goes to show you that less is often more.
Watercolor Sketches
I worked out in my back yard a few weeks ago, and just whipped out a ton of stuff, following one idea after another. I always end up doing patterns, as a former textile design student. Out of that pile of stuff, these were the two pieces that I liked the best (below).
