What happened to this year?!

I realized I've been remiss on posting art I've made this year. I guess I've been busy! Here are a few pieces I've made in 2024...

Off-site studio results

My husband and I drove to Florida at the end of February and returned 5 weeks later (very surreal road trip home with restaurants closed and hotels strangely quiet due to the pandemic). We were in Florida to help our daughter and son-in-law before and after the birth of their baby. I took my drawing board, 7 panels with the wood edges already stained, 7 sets of filtered prints I'd made and all my art making tools. These are the results of my labors. All but the one with the pink/magenta field of flowers are made from photos taken in Door County, Wisconsin.

2020

As the new year begins, I'm focusing on making new work for a spring show in Peoria, IL and a winter show in Galesburg, IL. I also need to make new work for a Scottsdale, AZ gallery to choose from for their winter season. I closed my graphic design business at the end of the year and will now focus full time on my art making. YAY!

My first piece of the new year is pictured below. The Rancho de Taos Church of San Francisco de Asis is over 200 years old. It was painted by Georgia O’Keeffe and photographed by Ansel Adams. They each focused on the heavy buttressed end of the building. I was taken by this view of the side of the church; I liked the contrast between the solid geometry of the building with its shadows and the organic shapes of the flowers in the side garden. I ran 8 or 10 filters in Prisma, picked several I liked (overlaying a few on the original photo to further work with the look of the filters), printed those out and cut them into quarter-inch strips. Combining three sets of strips, I created this 14"H x 11"W x 1.5"Deep piece.

Summer Time, Beach Time

I wanted to make another composition with an inviting walk down to the beach. I took the original photo for this on the upper shore of Lake Michigan. At first I thought I'd do a horizontal landscape, but then felt the big wood tops of the walkway were a bit distracting. I cropped the image into a square and made this 12"x12"x1" collage (middle photo) using three filtered versions of the scene with some Michigan road maps added into the clouds and handmade green paper in the grassy areas.

Large close up

This 16" x 20" is comprised of 4 filtered photos of tulips with some fragments of tulip poems added into the background.