Desert Path

After hiking up this path to see some Native American ruins in central Arizona, we made our way back down, frequently stopping to enjoy the up-close view of desert plants and the long view of saguaro, lake and mountains. I made three digital alterations of a photo from the path, shredded those alterations and combined them to form a new landscape.

Gallery Visit

My husband and I flew out to Scottsdale, Arizona last week and the first thing on the agenda was to deliver four collages to Xanadu Gallery. After unwrapping the art and checking out the new work in the gallery, we walked across the street to dine at a nice sidewalk cafe with the director of the gallery. While we were eating, the gallery owner sold one of my artworks that had been on display in the window! Nice start to a vacation!!! We went to the Celebration of Fine Art where 100 artists set up their art and create new work under big tents and are there from 10 to 6 every day for ten weeks. We also took several trips out into the desert and took a lot of new photos for my work. It was a really great trip. Tomorrow I'll start on a new piece - after I narrow down my subject choices!

And Two Makes Four

I'm going to be replenishing my art at Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale and am making a compact package of two 11"x14" panels with two 6"x12" panels nested inside them. "Desert Bloom" and "SMoCA Loca" (shown in earlier posts) will be going to Arizona along with these two new pieces. I went back to my previous method of cutting rectangles for the piece called "Gathered Here" with all the small cacti around the tall saguaro. Doing that made me realize how much more I prefer my year-old method of cutting strips of imagery! (I think I'm going to devote myself to that method for the foreseeable future and push that idea using wider strips for larger pieces.) This newest 6"x12" is called "Almost Ready" and my friend Bob pronounced it my best piece ever!! He said he can see it as a work 6-feet tall... hmmmmmmm.

Abstraction of reality

My friend Linda and I went to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) in December. They have a sculpture courtyard that is a restful area with walls painted in solid browns, white and bright yellow that the sun and shadows really play with. I took a photo of the plantings against the round and flat walls and then decided to kneel down and take a shot of an exaggerated view of the cactus and the light hitting the wall above it. This weekend I digitally altered the photo, then shredded three prints of those alterations and pieced them together to take the image even further from reality. I'm calling this 6" x 12" piece SMoCa Loca.  :-)

Abstraction from "leftovers"

Since I generally work from three altered files for my landscapes, I end up with a lot of leftover pieces of paper. Making abstract collages out of them allows me to work strictly with color and composition. I really love quilts, so this feels a bit like making an art quilt without having to fight with the sewing machine! After I'd finished the first one, I was showing a friend how it looked sitting on one side of the cradled panel, then rotated the square to see the next side, then -- he stopped me and said he liked it at the "half turn" so that it was a diamond shape. Oh YES - much more dynamic!!

Both of these are made with strips leftover from collages of landscapes of Montana, Wyoming, Illinois and Arizona...so the top one is "States of Mind" and the bottom one is "Altered States."

In Print

Interesting week ...

- Art Buzz 2012 arrived in our mailbox. Rob and I submitted art to this juried competition in the fall because we liked the founder's mission. Instead of the usual juried show where you pay $30 to enter and send images, then ship the art to the gallery if it is juried into the show, Art Buzz publishes a hardcover book of the art chosen. They then distribute the book to gain recognition of emerging and mid-career artists. They send books to art dealers in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Naples, Miami, Santa Fe, New Orleans, Washington DC, as well as ones in The Netherlands, Russia, UK and France. We found out in December that we'd been juried in; I have one image depicted for Honorable Mention in "altered photography" and my husband won First Prize in sculpture so he has 3 images shown.

- One of my collages is featured on a full page in the current 96-page gallery catalog for Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ. The catalog arrived this week as well.

- We were interviewed Saturday (along with another Galesburg artist with an image in Art Buzz) for an article that will run in the Galesburg Register-Mail next Sunday.

- I emailed the Peoria Journal Star about possibly doing a story on my husband and another Bradley University graduate who are having an art show together in February. The reporter looked at our website and decided she wanted to do a story on Rob and me instead! So she'll come to our studio on Thursday to interview us for the Sunday arts and entertainment section.

Fun stuff!

Sedona image

When visiting Sedona, Arizona, in December, I took a photo featuring this crazy blooming cactus in the foreground with a stunning red rock formation beyond it. My husband chose this image to try out a new stylus and a free paint program on his iPad. I liked how his painting looked, so I made a print of it – as well as prints of two digitally filtered version of the photo – and combined pieces of all three to make this scene. I love how abstracted it is up close, but then the eye tricks the viewer into seeing the scene pretty clearly from several feet away! (This piece is 11x14 on cradled panel; click the image to enlarge it to better view the abstraction.)