My cousins took a trip along the Blue Ridge Mountains and shared a few photos with me to make art from. The active areas of autumnal foliage offered me a lot of places to embed handmade papers and sections of vintage postage stamps in red, yellow and green. Both pieces are 12" x 24" x 2"deep.
I've completed a number of commissions in the last couple of months. People gave me good photos of places that were meaningful to them and I gave them additional meaning and interest by embedding things into the art.
They include a sunflower watercolor artwork transformed by my art technique to make reproductions on metal for the woman's children and granddaughters... a field of sunflowers with names in the sky to memorialize three high school students killed in a car crash.... a dramatic cowboy and horse... a Colorado scene for a woman to give to her boyfriend... a NC beach scene at sunrise for a couple to think about their second home.
These were two pieces I made at the end of April. The cardinal piece is called "Checking out the Neighborhood" and is a 12" x 12" piece that includes additions of ledger paper and pieces of paperbark birch. The lake artwork is called "Early Morning Flight" and includes additions of blue ledger paper, vintage US postage stamps and a grassy handmade paper. (I heard geese that morning but they were too far away to photograph. In this artwork, I digitally moved a squadron of geese into the scene from another photo.)
I'll be taking 15-16 pieces of art up to the Plum Bottom Gallery in Door County in early spring. These three will be added to the group. Vintage postage stamps, newspaper text and handmade papers join the filtered photos to make the mixed media work.
Plum Bottom Gallery in Door County, Wisconsin is planning for a big year of tourist visits and art sales - yay! They sold 9 of my pieces last year, have 11 in their two galleries currently and want 15 new pieces to start out the spring season. NICE! I have enough appropriate imagery from my recent show to fill that request, but wanted to make a couple more from photos I took when in Wisconsin last spring. This sweet lighthouse is at the entry of the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal that gives ships a shortcut from Lake Michigan into Green Bay; there's a Coast Guard station next to it as well. After layering up my three versions of the photo in quarter-inch strips of paper, I embedded segments of some vintage 3-cent postage stamps depicting sailors and a Coast Guard ship.
The big art billboard project from this summer led to this fun installation of my art in a building owned by Caterpillar in downtown Peoria, IL. We scanned all 7 pieces of original art and then printed the files out on canvas. The largest is a 400% enlargement -- taking a 10"x20" collage and making an 80" wide canvas out of it.
The third photo down shows the original art on the counter and the enlargement on the wall. The 1/4" segments of vintage postage stamps are now 1" high in the canvas reproduction. :-)
We enjoyed hiking in the national parks in Utah a few years ago. Walking under the large arch formations in Arches National Park was stunning. In this piece, I've added in some handmade papers, vintage postage stamps and shredded U.S. currency. IT is 16"H x 12"W on a 1.5"-deep panel.
These three pieces all use photos by Ellen McDowell (my co-exhibitor in the upcoming show at the Galesburg Civic Art Center). All are created from three filtered versions of her original photo all cut into strips. There are additions in each of handmade papers, ledger paper or vintage stamps.
I've been working on art using photos of my friend Ellen McDowell's for our joint art show Nov-Jan at the Galesburg Civic Art Center. My gallery in Door County, WI, just asked me to send them 3 recent pieces that I was making for that show! They've sold 5 pieces of mine from their gallery and wanted more... so I'll be busy making new art with Ellen's photos for November!
The sunflower piece below is one of the pieces they chose and then I worked on the weekend to make the 10" x 20" mixed media piece of 4 chairs in front of a B&B in Door County that face the calm Green Bay.
Each of the pieces have a lot of vintage postage stamps embedded in them (including probably the only all yellow stamp the postal service ever printed!). I also added shredded US $1000 bills in the grass around the 4 chairs.
The third piece is a 20H x 10W collage also from one of Ellen's photos. After layering up strips cut from the 3 filtered versions of the photo, I added handmade papers, 1850s ledger paper and shredded money.
