WV 2015 Juried Exhibition begins November 8

"Fracking Paradox" was accepted into this Best of West Virginia show beginning November 8 and running through February 19 at Tamarack.  This juried exhibition is sponsored annually by the West Virginia Department of Culture and History and receives hundreds of entries from accomplished artists throughout the State.  Being accepted into this show was one of my long-term goals that I expected to take many tries to accomplish, so I was shocked and thrilled that I made it on my first try!

Although I didn't plan this painting to represent anything, as the textures and colors developed, I was reminded of the controversy over the growing practice of "fracking" to expedite removal of natural gas deposits in the Marcellus Shale region.  This development has been an economic boon to the State, while potentially creating environmental hazards.  Thus, the paradox.

The painting is 36x12 inches on a deep gallery wrapped canvas. Among the textures are cracking paste, foil, Japanese papers, and painted collage papers. Many layers of paint and glaze give more depth to the painting.

A photograph doesn't capture the true colors and all the texture of this painting. If you get a chance to stop at Tamarack as you travel through southern West Virginia, go into the gallery and see it in person!

Hidden Glories

Currently on exhibit in the gallery at Tamarack is one of my paintings in which I experimented with several acrylic texture mediums on a 30x10 inch piece of art board. As the painting developed, I began to see the geological strata that might be exposed by a huge cut through a West Virginia mountain.  I added some pieces of mica that I had found to add some shine and some collage to represent trees on the mountaintop.

"Hidden Glories" will be available for sale at Gallery Eleven in Charleston after November 1.

Urban Flow

One-Way Streets

The highlight of the year 2014 for me was being juried in to Tamarack, a showplace for the creative arts, near Beckley, West Virginia. Three of my paintings are on display now through April 6 in the fine art gallery there.  

On the left is a 30x15 inch canvas entitled One-Way Streets, which I started as a collage of papers that had been stamped with hand-carved stamps and arranged to represent a map of the city of Charleston.  A circular stamp in the top center represents the State Capitol building, a series of small squares in the lower center represents Town Center Mall, and other landmarks such as bridges are also represented. Numerous layers of glazes cover the collage, and painted lines represent the maze of one-way streets that often confound visitors to our city.

Also accepted into the "Urban Flow" exhibit were "Don't Look Back"(below) and "Rooftop Series No. 1" which was shown in my last post.

Winter Art

Being forced to stay indoors does have its benefits:  one has the time to take on-line classes and get the most out of them.  Last winter, I  participated in"Mixed Media Vacation" taught by Julie Prichard. Her video instruction on blending was so helpful that I feel it was worth the price of the class just to watch her paint.

For this class, I used Strathmore Acrylic Paper that was 18 by 24 inches in size.  Although our instructions were to loosely paint or stamp some graphics on our background and then cut up the sheets to make booklets, my first exercise turned into a composition which I couldn't bring myself to cut up.  I went on to do a series, shown below at Gallery Eleven in Charleston. The one above will be included in the "Urban Flow" exhibit in February at Tamarack.

Recent Paintings

It's been a slow summer, as far as art productivity, but I have completed three paintings since I posted the first of the 24x24 inch canvases that I had purchased.  The Southwest influence has become more obvious in two that I finished and named after my recent trip to New Mexico.

This one, I call "High Road to Taos".  If you have ever been on that road, you will understand why I was thinking of that trip when this appeared on my canvas.  I love that road because it reminds me of a West Virginia two-lane road, but with red rock formations instead of tree-covered mountains.

This year, I was lucky to be in Santa Fe during the Opera Season and splurged on a ticket to see "La Traviata".  What a treat that was!  This painting reflects the brilliant red dress worn by Violetta as well as the turquoise jewelry worn by the opera-goers.  

In my last painting, I deliberately began with a different palette of blues and greens, but ended up with mainly the three primary colors.  As with my other paintings, I started by putting down texture on the canvas, this time using wrinkled tissue paper.  The painting took the shapes of the wrinkles.  I named this one, "Into the Light."   

Going Large

The largest painting I had done until recently was a  16x20 inch canvas, and that seemed difficult after doing mostly small paintings on watercolor paper.  I worked and re-worked that canvas and was never satisfied with it.  I progressed from watercolor paper to small canvases, but was not ready to take the plunge to purchase a large (and relatively expensive) canvas that I might not be able to finish.

Fortuitously, I stumbled upon a set of three nice canvases at an auction house and got them for $5 each.  They are 24x24 inches in size, 1-1/2 inches deep, and very sturdy.  Photographs were printed on them, but they came off with a scrub of alcohol.  Some gesso, and I was ready to go.  I found that it wasn't scary at all to start painting when I had such a small investment in the canvases.

"Another World" is the first large canvas that I completed.  It is in my current display at Gallery Eleven.  Several people have noted the Southwest influence.  Not surprisingly, I have been inspired by my trips to New Mexico, where I immersed myself in art in the abundant museums and galleries.

Art Walk

Acrylic on watercolor paper, adhered to 8x8 wood panel.

Thursday was my second "Art Walk" since joining Gallery Eleven.  This is a monthly event in downtown Charleston WV where galleries, stores, and offices with art exhibits have "open house" all evening. It is a great social event with music, food and beverages that I have enjoyed in the past as a walker and gawker.  Now that I have work on display at our co-op gallery, I have stayed in that location and talked to visitors.

It is somewhat frightening to have my art on display, as I am still insecure about the quality of my work.  Since it is abstract, the most frequent question that I get is "what does this represent?"

The piece at right got the most second looks and positive comments, and I rather like it myself.  It was part of a class assignment in the Jane Davies "Extreme Composition" class, and was intended to be a color field painting.  I started enhancing the color of the lower section, using a palette knife, and got a texture that became more like a landscape design than was intended for that exercise.  When I hung it at the gallery, I named it "Abstract 4/2013" just to see what folks would say.  Yep!  They asked the same old question. I usually reply, "What does it mean to you?" but would love to have a good "stop 'em cold" answer, which I'm sure many abstract artists have up their sleeves to use on certain occasions.

Having too much fun to stop and write about it

Fellow bloggers, does this ever happen to you?  I would rather read your blogs than write mine.  How very selfish am I!!  For those who still are following me (or trying to), I will try to do better.  Really.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been enrolled in Jane Davies' Extreme Composition class (on-line).  We started with experimenting with basic shapes and are now working with colors and textures.  Here are some of my experiments:

Squares, Two shapes and a line - ink and tinted charcoal

Background of pan pastels in my sketchbook, with stamping and collage

Acrylic paint and stamping on watercolor paper.

Acrylic paint and gel pens on watercolor paper

Experiments with color and texture - I made a color wheel!!

In the Groove again!

In November, I saw an invitation to artists to submit work for an exhibit at Gallery Eleven, an art cooperative in my home town.  All pieces had to be in an 8 by 8 inch format, and I just happened to have the one that I did in a workshop last July with Toni Kelly.  I had been thinking of doing a companion piece, so this gave me the nudge I needed to start painting again.  On these first two pieces, I used scanned copies of drawings from my nature journal and quotations on the themes of Hope and Joy.

This was so much fun that I did two more pieces to enter in the show.  I didn't have any more birdie drawings that lent themselves to something similar, so the next two pieces were more abstract.  My favorite way to start a painting is to lay down some texture with tissue or molding paste and then see where that takes me.  These are the results:

 

The exhibit opened on January 12, and a few days later, I got a call saying that one of my pieces had sold!  It was the very bright abstract in my favorite colors of red, orange, pink and turquoise, which I had named "Alive!"  I was thrilled and feeling validated as an artist.

Now I have a couple more abstracts nearly finished and am just bubbling over with the urge to paint every day.  It feels so good to be back in the groove!!

New Mix in my Media

As I'm planning another trip to New Mexico this fall, I thought about the fun places to shop and remembered the wonderful fabrics that I brought back last time.  How can I buy more this time if I haven't touched those??? (Well, I sure could, but I shouldn't!!)  Anyway, I decided it was time to haul out the sewing machine, which also hadn't been touched since I bought it a couple of years ago, and do a project.   I was shocked to find out that the machine worked perfectly, and I didn't struggle to get the tension right or have any of the frustrations I expected from my past experience with sewing machines.  Why did I put this off so long??

Here's what I made:  a slipcover for my Moleskine sketchbook.  I sewed down some pieces of fabric on a backing of plain cotton duck, using machine decorative stitching.  Some of the fabrics have printed on stitching, so it's hard to tell from the photo which stitches are which.

After putting in a lining and closing the ends, I sewed on a button and looped on a ribbon for the closure.










This is what the outside looks like, including the back.

And here's the inside lining and pockets that hold the book. 
Purrkins likes the ribbons.

Layers upon Layers

At the Toni Kelly workshop (see my last post) a couple weeks ago, I started a mixed media piece on an 8x10 wood panel. After layers upon layers upon layers, I am calling it finished.

The layers include:  background of fibrous Japanese paper, fluid acrylic paint, aluminum tape cut in shapes, stenciled paint, glazes of fluid acrylics and polymer medium (glossy), and a final topping of heavy gel.

The aluminum tape is something that Toni Kelly uses in her work.  It is found in hardware stores in the section that carries ductwork.  This is metal tape, not the common plastic duct tape.  I mixed Golden GAC 200 medium with the paint to help it adhere to the foil tape.

At the photography session to prepare the photo of my finished piece, I had a another layer -- Purrkins -- who thought I put the piece of mat board on the floor just for her to nap on.

And yes, I'm sure there are cat hairs in my many-layered piece.  No problem when I want lots of texture!

Catching up!

Life is never boring around here.  I'm sure you've heard about our big storm that knocked out power to almost everyone in West Virginia.  I was lucky - only losing power for one day, and I was able to share my air-conditioning for a few days with a less fortunate friend.  Many people were out for a week, and for some, it's been two weeks.  Those folks in rural areas don't even have water because they depend on electricity to pump well water.  How awful that must be!

Toni Kelly came to the Main Street Studio in Hurricane to offer a weekend workshop in June.  Toni is a mixed media artist who specializes in nature sketches.  Her workshop focused on techniques for incorporating images in art by using various transfer methods.  She also helped us with composition, color mixing and sketching techniques.  I finished one piece, an 8"x8" wood panel, on which I put down a background of handmade papers for texture.  The birdie is a sketch from my nature journal, which I printed on tissue paper and adhered with polymer medium.  I did the same with my favorite Emily Dickinson poem to complete the piece.

With all the extremely hot weather, it was best to stay indoors, and I have been trying to get my art supplies and collage materials reorganized.  Purrkins and Petey have been helping.  Petey thought I made this space in the bookcase just for her! Purrkins found a little space on my work table to squeeze into.











I'm still trying to get the collage materials sorted and stored in a way that I can find things. What I've learned from this process is that I should stop buying/collecting and just use what I've got, especially the art supplies. I found duplicates of paints and mediums that I didn't know I had!

Tissue Paper Magic

I recently discovered an alternative to transparencies that lets me use Photoshop work and copied or scanned materials in my mixed media work.  Transparencies have never worked well for me but this method is almost goof-proof!!  For this mixed media collage, I used a photograph of a statue that I had digitally enhanced and also copied sheet music and handwriting for use as background materials in the collage.









Here's the secret:  White craft tissue paper (Dick Blick has nice sheets) becomes nearly transparent when glued with matte or polymer medium to a substrate.  But material that is printed on the tissue shows up clearly and the color stays true. The only thing to be careful about is overworking the wet tissue to the point that it breaks up or the ink smears.

To print, I use masking tape to secure a piece of tissue paper to a carrier sheet (a sheet of acetate is perfect), and run it through the printer.

I like to use the copier function of my printer and try to fill up the page so that I don't waste the tissue.  Here's an example of old photos and sheet music that I copied with my printer to the tissue paper:

  And what else can you do with printed tissue paper?  Make Washi tape!!  Print a piece of tissue paper, or paint and stamp the paper.  On the back side of the tissue, lay down strips of double-sided tape, or a sheet of peel and stick adhesive.  Cut into strips.  Voila!  Washi tape.

More Ink Doodles

I'm enchanted by ink doodling.  It's so much fun to put down some ink and let it start an abstract painting.  Here are the latest pages in my art journal, which I started by gluing down pieces of miscellaneous patterned papers, including music, handwriting, security envelope innards, and old magazine pages.  Then I blended them with a thin coat of titanium white acrylic.  When it dried, I started the painting by dripping black ink on both pages at once and then tilting the book this way and that until a nice pattern emerged.  Then it was time to add some color with fluid acrylics and distress inks.   Fun!!

Back to Collage Art

After a rather dry spell (creatively speaking), I've started working in my art journal again.  Here are two pages recently completed.

For these pages, I started with a few collaged images and then did "ink doodles" that I saw demonstrated on Jane Davies' blog.  I love Jane's work.

I've also started a new on-line class - Layers of Memory and Imagination, with Serena Barton at Creative Workshops.  This has gotten my mojo going again, and I'm enjoying experimenting with some new techniques that she showed us in the first two lessons.

Erosion Bundles - One year later!

Last September, I started an Erosion Bundle" project.  I gathered various ephemera, such as pages from old books, art papers, cardboard, and book covers, and wired them together in bundles.  I wrapped one of the bundles in a piece of muslin.  Then I hung them outside on my deck to be deteriorated by the elements.  Here's what they looked like last year:





I could hardly wait for things to happen, and actually, I don't believe anything happened for months.  But winter came and we got rain and snow.  And finally, one year had past and I could open the packages and see what nature had done.  Here is what one packet looked like before I took it apart:

And here is what the two bundles look like now that they have been taken apart.  There is a lot of mold/mildew on the papers and also some tiny insects, so I haven't brought them into the house yet.  I'm trying to figure out what is the best way to store them.  If anyone has ideas, I'd appreciate suggestions.

And today, I did my first art project with one piece of eroded ephemera.  Because the paper was still a little damp, I used a hot iron to press it between two sheets of paper before I started to work with it.  When I was finished, I sprayed it with a fixative to keep the mold from dispersing any more into my environment.

The drawing is after Picasso, and the idea of drawing with ink on old book pages/music came from an exhibition of Robert Kushner's work that I saw last week at the Huntington Gallery of Art.

Tsunami

A few weeks ago, I started an acrylic painting by wiping leftover paint on a piece of canvas paper as I was working on other projects.  Some strokes were made with a credit card, and an abstract began to take an interesting shape, so I filled in and blended some of the areas to come up with this painting.  While working on this and listening to public radio, I was thinking of the terrible disaster in Japan.  I call this painting "Tsunami.".

Remembrance of New Mexico Adventure

A mixed media canvas that I started in October is finally finished!!  One of the great things about using acrylics is that you can paint over them if you don't like how it looks.  One of the bad things about acrylics is that you can do it many times :) 

I started this painting by laying down some tissue papers and some garnet paste on this 12x12 canvas.  The resulting lines and forms reminded me of the mesas and left-over volcanic formations that we saw as we trekked around northern New Mexico on our Art Adventure last fall.  I tried to make this painting more abstract, but my Virgoian traits just don't seem to let me leave things alone.  The final step was putting in the travelers and "Big Blue".

Recycling Security Envelopes as Collage Materials

A couple of months ago, I read in another blog (forgive me for not linking if it's yours, because I don't remember whose it was) about using opened security envelopes as collage material.  I began looking at the business envelopes I receive almost daily in the mail and noticing the cool patterns inside.  Not only are they really cool, but there are lots of designs and colors.  In just a few weeks, I have collected 14 different ones.   Today, I laid them out on the floor to choose some for a project and my little helper, Purrkins, came to hold them down for me.

Escape!

The Creativity Prompt for the month of January was "White".  I sure didn't need this prompt to make me think about the unusual amount of snow we have been having.  But I did need to have more positive thoughts about the white stuff.  What struck me about all this snow was the fact that it's not just white.  The morning sun tints the snow with a warm orange. The shade of trees and houses makes blue patterns in the snow.  The late afternoon sun causes a magenta glow.  With a camera, you can sometimes capture those colors of snow.  With a paintbrush..... well... it turned out to be a little harder than I expected.

My idea for a mixed media painting was to put down a lot of texture, covered by snow, in all its shades of white.  I started a 12-inch square canvas with collaged pieces of newspaper and other papers, some  corrugated cardboard, a photograph, and tissue paper.  Then I covered it all with diluted gesso to blend out all the words and other dark items.  Then for the hard part - turning that into a painting that was shades of white.

Even after I worked through tinting different sections of the canvas, the painting didn't have any feeling  or meaning in it for me.  So I started straying from my original intent and began adding elements with my newest art supplies, oil pastels.  Still the painting didn't please me.  With the little circles I had added, this was beginning to look like an underwater scene.  A Fish!  I had just drawn a fish as a watercolor practice piece, so I photocopied that drawing in three different sizes and added them to the canvas.  One of the fish was situated on part of the background that sort of resembled a net, so what if I added some cheesecloth over and around the fish to make the netting more visible?  A few more elements, and more coats of polymer medium, and I'm happy with it.

So, I know it's not White, but I've decided to forget about snow.  Escape is all I can think of right now.