Interview

The director of the Peoria Art Guild and a board member interviewed me via Zoom over the weekend. I thought they had some good questions and enjoyed talking with them about my art making.

Possible Billboards

Peoria has a competition for artists to submit up to three images for Sky Art Peoria. Five artists' work will be chosen to enlarge to a 48' x 14' billboard to be on display along a street in the city for the year. I made these three on canvas at 13.5" x 3.5". It would be a real kick to have one chosen to be enlarged from 1/4" strips to 12" strips in scale!!!

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.

New work for a Wisconsin gallery

I've been asked to send work to a gallery in the touristy town of Egg Harbor, Wisconsin (look for my work at Plum Bottom Gallery starting in April). These are new pieces for that gallery.

Stay on the Path

For some reason, my mom collected cancelled postage stamps. About 15 years ago, she gave me a box of them. A couple of the 3¢ stamps found their way into this artwork, tucked into the trees and the leaves on the ground. This artwork originated with a photo I took while walking on a split-log path around a lake in Acadia National Park. Along with the stamps and the cut up digital prints, I added colored pencil and some handmade papers.

Sailing

As the snow falls here in the midwest, I had fun working on this piece from a photo I took last summer in Grand Haven,  Michigan. I like the vivid colors and the mood it sets.

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.