Fun with Fun Foam

Has a new love knocked your heart sideways?

Looks like a mighty wind blew through my studio and knocked my new cards sideways.

I am ready for the in like a lion out like a lamb winds of spring, hence the tulips. Note the printmaking block I made out of corrugated cardboard and fun foam.

Just in case the weather gods didn't get the hint....knock it off, already, and send the tulips.

Hand Made Cloth

No doubt these photos would be much better with adorable children painting their amazing hand made cloth. In fact I know they would because I know the adorable children, and they're, well, adorable!

But here's the way it was. Imagine four 9 to 11 year olds sitting in these chairs and painting, with big globs of paint.

Now, imagine that there is another table just like the one above only about four feet to the left of the picture with three other children with scissors, cutting out their pattern of a stuffed critter and then using sharp pins to hold the figure together and then threading a needle to sew on eyes and actually sewing the critter!

Lions and tigers and bears, O MY!

Thank goodness I had the help of a wonderful grandma of one of the students.

But you understand why I didn't think of the camera until AFTER they had all gone home.....


Thanks to Alisa Burke for the great idea. Here is her blog.

Makeover or Take 2

Common Loon, 8 x 10, acrylic and collage

I'm refurbishing canvases again, painting over the uninspired efforts of earlier days , trying for something new and more interesting. Before I began this painting, I had covered the old canvas with a mixture of collage papers, but left the spirals in the lower right corner from the previous work.

Aline brought in a cool book she got for her recent birthday. It is a book of many birds of North America with a picture and something written about each, and then you can press a button on the side to hear their calls. We had a particularly good time listening to the common loon who makes a haunting, almost howling-wolf kind of sound. Good for this time of year. It brought people from all over the front of the building wondering what kind of creature was loose at LibertyTown!

I'm heading up to Alexandria tomorrow to bring home LibertyTown's contributions to From There to Here show which closes tomorrow in the Target Gallery at the Torpedo Factory. I'm pleased that one of my works sold. It was not the one I thought would sell, either, so that's nice.

He Takes After Your Side of the Family, 10 x 10, mixed media with collage, aluminum cans, acrylic

Today's Work

Today, I started from the above working in acrylic. And how got you there, you ask?? I began by toning an 11 x 14 canvas board with quinacridone red, then printed over with small hand cut block prints. I painted negatively with a mixture of phthalo turquoise, permanent green light and white to create the tree. Then I went back in to paint on the branches with more red.

Today, I added fruit and leaves cut from catalogue pages from around the turn of the last century, fixing them to the board with matte medium. I printed a funny little bird--one of my own blocks--and began to add color to the fruit and bird--hansa medium, phthalo blue and black were added to the rest of the palette. I went in with a black micron pen to create dark edges around elements in the painting.

There's a lot going on, but I'm pretty pleased with it. Oh, and I forgot--along the way the sky turned from turquoise to blue--sometimes, life is like that!

More Birdies

I think I'm ready for spring migration, or something. Birds keep popping up in my paintings. Here's another one!

Today's high temperature--64! Pure bliss for this Texas girl, who lived for years in a major flyway (for the birds, that is...)

"Spring Cleaning"

Yeah, I know it's not spring, and I'm, for sure, not cleaning, so let me explain. Every year, about this time, when other people are making resolutions to change their lives, I want to paint over all of my canvases. For the most part, I try to restrain myself and only pick a couple that need refurbishing. The one I picked this year had some nice colors and some interesting shapes, but really was only part of a painting. I have been watching it for some time, trying to decide what its next life will be. I think I have found it.

I have been doing a series of mixed media pieces (printmaking, collage, painting, anything else that doesn't run faster than I do!) with birds as the subject. I showed the first piece I did on the last posting. On Saturday, I rifled through our recycling bins at LibertyTown and found some aluminum cans. I removed the tops and bottoms and cut out fun bird shapes. My friend Sharon has brought me several kinds of adorable buttons with brads on them, so I punched a hole where a birdie eye would be and used the brads. Here are a few of the googly-eyed birds.


Back to the painting getting a makeover...I plan to pair these birds with that painting. I prepared a tree for them to roost in today. The tape sections with sharpie writing tell me which birdies will sit where. I'm still working out how they will attach to the canvas. (By the way, there is more canvas and tree than shows in this photo. I took the photo at an odd angle, so had to crop it in a funky way!)

Shot in the Dark, or A Creative Process?

OK. So I've been working on this piece whose creation has been very organic. I have hesitated to put it up here because it is not finished, and it could turn out to be crap. But if I am going to take one of the creative avenues I like to take in painting, I have to assume the risk that it will turn out to be time ill spent. (So may reading this journal of the experience--a warning to the reader!) Today's entry is the back story.

I began last fall working on the idea of using my small, hand-carved soft blocks as the actual builders of form in my paintings. I knew I didn't want to work on paper; I wanted the finished works to be on canvas. It is very hard to make a good print on a piece of stretched canvas, so I decided to gesso my own cloth (bought as scraps for cheap at fabric stores.) I gessoed three layers on the cloth at least, leaving the fabric to dry between coats. It made a great surface on which to work flat, because I might press with as much firmness as I needed to transfer a print. (Of course, it meant I had to stretch it when I was done, but one must suffer for one's art.)

Below is one of the several paintings using this process that I completed last fall. It sold in November to one of my local collectors.

Under Cover, acrylic

Then I began playing with creating gessoed "cloth" for the making of other items. My friend and longtime printmaking student, Inge, took several pieces of this "cloth" and has been using it to create purses and covers for notebooks. This is an example of our collaboration.

She is an interior designer and has many samples of cloth, buttons, etc. The square in the center is a piece of the gessoed cloth I printed. She made all the other design and constuction choices. I have several of these for sale in my studio.

This is all preface to say that I had been pondering what to do with a sheet of this "cloth" that I had left over from Inge's efforts. I taped it up on the wall of my studio and left it hanging there some weeks while I "watched" it. I will often do this when I don't have a clear idea of the direction a painting should go. I leave it where I may look at it out of the corner of my eye, without pressure, until the solution emerges in my head.

This is the trimmed end of the watched swatch...


More later, for those who dare!

...and more cards

And the first round of printing is done. I wanted to get a good selection to show the owner of the stationer's shop so that she'd have something to pick from. I think my next set will be printed from soft blocks, which have yet to be designed or cut. Busy, busy!

New Card Designs

Ahh. Time just to sit and let the ideas flow! Just before Christmas, I got the opportunity to put my hand made cards in a downtown stationery store, so I am designing as many as I can while there is some quiet. It is my plan to put unique designs there from my cards at LibertyTown.

It has also been great to get back into my oil paints. I'll have more about my latest work in oil in future posts.

Below are some test prints for the blocks in the top picture. I will be printing in multiple colors and doing some hand painting of the blocks so that the images are colorful and fun.