Great day in the park!

Art in the Park was a beautiful day with temps around 80 degrees, nice breeze, vintage Stearman airplanes flying overhead from the annual National Stearman Fly-In, great live jazz music and a steady stream of people. I had fun visiting with people about my art; I sold 14 pieces (and was asked to do 3 commission pieces) and was awarded the Best in 2-D Art prize!! Some of my favorite "sales stories" are: Sara – a new mother – bought a 4"x4" collage for her baby daughter and said "this is Maya's first artwork"... seeing Annette – a cafe owner who had a food stand in the park – standing in front of me, out of breath, holding a collage in one hand, money in the other saying "I walked as fast as I could back to our booth to get my money and as I speed-walked back, I kept thinking 'I hope nobody bought it yet, I hope nobody bought it yet'"... a young woman looking intently at the piece entitled "Marsh Gas" that had a page out of a science book listing formulas for marsh gas, meconic acid, meconidine, melamine, etc. exclaiming, "Mom, this is what I do!" and then buying the piece to hang in her office in Nebraska where she works testing things like marsh gas!! 

I'm posting a photo of my booth in the park and a photo of the small pieces still for sale. I plan to take some of them to the Galesburg Civic Art Center gift shop and to Dove Tail Arts in the Seminary Street shopping district. I think I'll wait until October to do that, so if you see any you'd like to know the price on, send me an e-mail lori@reedstudios.net.

Preparing for Art in the Park

I had my one and only art fair experience two years ago at our local Art in the Park. People really seemed to like my work - and I was awarded the $100 2-D prize - but I only made a couple sales. Most of the work I had was priced at $100 or more, so I'm trying something different this year (as I really like to support our local Civic Art Center and this is one of their events). I have over 35 small works to display and will hang a few framed larger pieces just for fun. The smaller pieces are in the $25 - $45 range, so I'm hoping they will wing their way to new homes. I've had a lot of fun making "concise statements" with the small canvases, but I am ready to take on some larger canvases in the near future. If you're in Galesburg this weekend, stop by the Standish Park Arboretum from 9am - 4pm on Sept 12th. My booth will be on the northeast side of the park, near the courthouse.

More Explorations

I wanted to try the spirals with a recognizable background so I used one of my favorite photos I took in Montana. Every time we'd drive the road to Karen's cabin, we'd pass this lone tree on the hillside with the clouds coming up behind the hill as if by magic. I decided to try using spirals in the scene to create kind of a magical feel – soap bubbles going up? ... but wouldn't that be going from large bubbles in the foreground to small in the sky?... something coming down from the clouds? ... something ethereal interacting with the tree? I hope it conveys a sense of mystery and magic. I'm calling it "Clouds Touching the Ground".

More Spirals

I'm enjoying working in a series while also keeping it interesting and evolving. I came up with a way to tear spirals more easily out of the nicer ricer paper that becomes more transparent when coated with matte medium. I altered some photos to add more colors for my backgrounds - can you tell what the original subject matter was?

Aerial View

This is the third abstract I've done working with the idea of an aerial view of the landscape. I used art papers, a copper-colored envelope, an aged book page and some WWII ration stamps of my grandparents. It is 12 x 12 x 2.

Exploring Spirals

These were really like movement therapy to do! Tearing the shapes out and remembering what direction I was moving as I tore from outer to inner and back out... deciding roughly where I wanted to place them on the background image and then going with the moment as the spiral stuck down and changed directions on me... trying to create a sense of flow of the whole group of them as I layered up the varying sized spirals. The first two I made with rice paper shapes on top of very active photos of an old store's wall that had been painted numerous times in its 100-year history. In the third of the series (top most one of the post), I decided to tear spirals from a print of the old painted wall and place them on a field of text from an even older newspaper from 1890; I used some of the edges of the photo at the top so as to create a feel of the shapes spinning down out of it. These are all 12" x 9" canvas on board; hubby has an idea of how to frame them with a narrow metal channel....

Spirals

Last spring my women's art group had "an assignment" of working with "spiral." I revisited that idea with one of last week's collages and enjoyed working with the variations in torn spirals – how they relate to each other and their surroundings. I made a small 4x6 piece on Friday with rice paper spirals on top of a photo of colorful leaves on slate. Pleased with how it looked, I decided to pursue that idea on 9x12 panels on Saturday - wow, did I have a lot of fun with that! I'll post those once Rob has the photos processed, but here's Friday's spiral piece entitled "Becomes what it hears."