Simple Prints

Every year I think I’ll introduce linocut and every year I opt for the styrofoam, when I imagine hands securing the linoleum on the far side of the linocut blade that might inadvertently slip and skip over the linoleum straight to the curve between the thumb and forefinger…Okay, that might have happened to me in grade school. I should get over it. Next year, we’re doing the real deal.

Styrofoam works fairly well though curves and circles are a little difficult to maneuver. But overall I love the finished look. We use real printing ink- not acrylic paints- on glass plates to load the brayer.

You have to remember that words and letters need to be imprinted backwards so they come out forwards on the print. !YADHTRIB YPPAH looks kind of cryptic until you print it.

Lined up to dry while they work on the next.

I love how the prior print color peeks through at the edges

This cat has so much personality!

This little artist just welcomed a baby sister into their family. The lion is her symbol for the fight she put up to get out of the hospital and go home to her family.

“HI”

“Hi,” to you too.

Older students can veer towards not being “cute” with their execution. (Pun intended.)

Always a dinosaur theme with this guy.

Collage Work

The idea for this project comes from my collage love/obsession. If you want to take a look at some amazing collage work look at Lance Letscher’s work. The detail is unbelievable.

Everyone had to draw a bird, fish or animal and do whimsical colors and designs on it; then put the being in an environment of their choosing.

Modge Podge is my favorite for this project.

These two worked solidly for two hours!

The little frogs are darling

Pumpkins for Fall

I love a good still life. And I’m drawn to the color orange so pumpkins are a delight.

I bought a few at a farm stand for reference. And we talked about light source and shadows.

Everyone was pretty thrilled to discover I’d replaced the ancient palletes with new ones.

I like the poetic license this artist took to add the vase of flowers

This artist turned my 3 pumpkin set up into a field of pumpkins.

I love the boldness

Great work on the lines following the shape of the pumpkin

Wrapped Rocks

I love smooth rocks so when I saw this art form of naturally dressing them up in leather and jute twine with twigs and reeds, I knew I wanted to try.

My grandchildren came for an evening and we finally did it. We had invited the kids for dinner but the dinner turned secondary and we sat at the dining room table eating lasagne while wrapping rocks. When we ran out of rocks Athan and Fox each took a run to the river to collect a few more.

The process is mesmerizing and finally hours later when it was too dark to see outside, they biked home with headlamps.

Jute twine and sticks.

Summer Flowers

I had the privilege of teaching three talented women- three generations of a family- to paint a floral piece using acrylics. I already had the head’s up that they were talented, so I did a general instruction intro and then they did these beautiful paintings.

Plein Air in a Windstorm

Maybe the worst wind in months and so I had scheduled a plein air painting day with my classes. Our final hurrah before summer break.

I had to go around with masking tape to secure their masterpieces and even then water cups were blown over and and paint brushes took flight.

I mentioned that some people go out in snowstorms and rainstorms to capture the clouds and atmosphere so it was all very genuine to the act.

“En plein air, or plein air painting, is the act of painting outdoors. This method contrasts with studio painting or academic rules that might create a predetermined look.”

Barn Raising

A barn in three mediums. First a sketch, make sure to get all the subtle details. Then in watercolor. You can be a little loose. Finally, in acrylic.

Watercolor

My love of watercolor makes me love to teach its secrets. It can flow freely wet in wet or be controlled wet on dry.
And because patience is essential when the paint layers are drying, we worked on two pieces at once, a little radish bunch and a landscape.

Gyotaku

Back when there were no cameras for fishermen to record their trophy catches, the Japanese came up with a unique printing method called Gyotaku. Gyo means fish, and Taku means impression, and the technique involved just that – using freshly caught fish to make inky impressions on paper.

Pop-Up Art Exhibit

w.e. McMillin was a professional ice skater before she switched to reverse glass painting. She was tired of the grueling hours on the ice and the travel; she wanted to set her own schedule, be home long enough to keep a plant alive.

Her work requires her to think in reverse; she has to begin with the last strokes on her piece. Besides paint, she uses whatever tape she has on hand, glue of every kind and woodstain to create her abstracts. Her inspiration comes from geometric shapes, especially lines.

Desiring to stand out from the usual canvas and paper paintings she chose glass for her surface.  But the real reason she chose glass is that it offered her the look she loves of a clear coat of varnish. Perhaps it’s a nod to the ice she skated on for so many years.

I first saw her work when I was curating art for a winery. I loved everything about it, the colors, the sharp abstraction, the glass. At the end of that show, I snagged the price tag from one and took it home. We later met up in a parking lot to exchange the piece of art for money. McMillin told me the safest way to transport the piece was standing up, you know, the way the glass companies do it.

Months later the winery called me to say a piece of her art had not been picked up from the previous show so Andrew and I went to retrieve it. I fell in love with it too.

And I hung it on my newly finished wall of my newly finished house. Even though the reverse side clearly state, “NFS.” Not. For. Sale. I reluctantly called McMillin to tell her the piece had been retrieved and was in my house. She couldn’t have it back, but I would pay her for it. Deal.

So now to help out a fellow artist, I’m having a pop-up show for her in my home. Okay, I’m stealthily planning to plant a few teensy little pieces of my own around the room as well.

I love the periwinkle in this one. SOLD

I snagged the price tag for this one and bought it. SOLD

NFS (But I still managed to buy it- SOLD)

SOLD

SOLD

SOLD

SOLD

SOLD

Aoife's Little Book

I absolutely love, love, love when my grandchildren gift me their tiny creations. (See Atlas’s origami box, Anwyn’s miniscule origami birds, Rhys’s pottery bird all in dark green and black.)

So when Aoife slipped this onto the dinner table for me, I was overjoyed! A tiny book of her rhyming words.

I did not want to lose it so I put it in my coat and zipped the pocket closed. My phone was in there too. On the way home I pulled out my phone, then slipped it back in the pocket and zipped it up.

Sitting in bed, I remembered the tiny book and went to check the pocket; the tiny book was gone! I asked Andrew to please go out in the foot deep snow and look in the car to see if the tiny book had fallen onto my seat when I pulled out my phone.

He came back in, set the book down on his bedside table and I was thrilled. It was lost but now it was found!

Illuminated Letter

A little history about illuminated letters and then on to the project.

For this project the students were asked to pick a letter and then pick out things that begin with that letter to embellish it. For example, “F” for fox and forest. “O” for ocean. I stressed that the pieces are generally chock full of detail.

We used colored pencil and marker for the color and then used a gold acrylic paint for the illuminated part.

I sampled a bunch of gold paints and in the end I wasn’t thrilled with any of them. They tend to go on thin and need extra coats. But the up side of that is that we discovered the paint can be applied over the colored pencil or marker for a colorful shimmery finish.

One little girl did an homage to the recently deceased Eddie Van Halen.

Virginia McCracken

I’ve followed/stalked/loved these little creations by Virginia McCracken for years. This Christmas my ship came in when Erin gifted me a bespoke box. I had loved McCracken’s “The Artist in His Study.” She created for me, “Terri in Her Study.” The books are superb, the trinkets are a perfect touch and the critters expression is wonderful.

Origami Box

Atlas was taught to make these origami boxes at Christmas time for an advent calendar. He whipped up one for me out of paper of my choosing.

Women in the Arts

National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. Sometimes I wonder why we have to reduce artists to certain categories; can’t an artist be amazing without the reduction? I mean, can’t some of these pieces hold up to anyone else’s art? Or do we have to reduce the comparison to other women in art? We hit the last day before a Covid shutdown. The city was in eerie lockdown. Andrew and I with our grandson, were able to see the whole museum in under 2 hours. Some art is uninspired but there were some clever pieces and some well executed pieces.

There was also an extremely vigilant guard who felt it his bounden duty to make sure Andrew’s bandana never slipped beneath his nose. Very tiresome.

This happy art patron accompanied me through the gallery.

I was intrigued by the detail of the paper sculpture

A kid with a little patience could do this to great effect.

the close up of applied paint is fascinating in the way it conveys reality when you step back.

Remember those little paper lanterns from grade school? Up a notch.

Baby feet would make this a poignant piece to reflect on the Right to Life.

Origami en masse

I thought the pink wall was clever for a gallery

Good old Frida Kahlo and her iconic unibrow.

Ceramic Tupperware

Kinda makes me want to give a large canvas a go

Has his bandana slipped? the art guard could tell you.

Umm, my 3 year old granddaughter could kick butt on this.

My kids used to do clever magazine collages like this. Maybe better.

Jerome, AZ

We went to see what we could see and stumbled upon Jerome, AZ. It looks like an old town created for a movie. The windy road up the hill has houses whose front doors hug the road; the back door sits high above the cliff it’s settled on, precariously perched on stilts.

We pulled into the Jerome HighSchool parking lot to discover that long ago, over 40 years ago, it became art studios. Robin John Anderson was having a one man show in this town with a population of 474.

“Proclaimed the “Wickedest Town in the West” in 1905, Jerome earned its notorious reputation because of bordellos, saloons, gambling and gunfights.“ It is a ghost town now with tons of character.

Robin Anderson and his wife have owned the high school for 41 years. Just six weeks prior to our visit, his wife had died. He was 21; she was 34 when they married. When she died, he’d discovered she was older than she’d ever let on. The age difference was more than the 13 years he’d been told.

As we walked through his exhibit, he explained his mathematical way of dividing the canvas. Once upon a time he painted en plain air, but now with his formula, all his paintings come from his imagination.

I liked the ease of them and the brightness.

Nana/Granddaughter Class

This was the sweetest painting class. The grandma arranged for her and her granddaughter to share a painting lesson.

I also had an art class paint the lemons.

Here is the church, here is the steeple...

I was honored to be able to teach a few fundamentals of acrylic painting to this group of women. We are in a “pandemic” and sometimes it’s just a relief to do something normal, something creative. Everyone chose their own sky color; did they want evergreen swags in the window or no?, snow on the peak of the steeple or no?

I was focused on teaching, refilling paint requests, offering perspective, when suddenly I discovered that the hostess of the evening had provided artichoke dip with bagel chips. I am such a sucker for a creamy dip with chips. Excuse me just a minute while I stuff my face.

Anyway, yes, the painting. Acrylic on an 11” X 14” canvas. The only “cheat” I offered was a template of the church.

Sort of in the middle of the project here with lots of detail to go.

Okay, sometimes you are just so intent on it turning out like the picture you have in your head.

The student surpasses the teacher…

Let it Snowman

The last hurrah before we break for Christmas. Snowman in acrylic on canvas. Oh my gosh, I always love seeing the personality of each artist.

Pears

I am in love with the rendition of each pear.

I did a step-by-step demo and the unique personality of each artist shines.