Talking...

I'm finding that the collages I'm making with my Montana photos -- ones that I've been planning to send to a gallery owner in Montana for consideration -- are speaking to folks in the middle of the country. My friend Marvin in Texas just HAD to have the piece with the three ravens, so I put it in the mail last week. When a group of friends was over for drinks Saturday night, Brett was really taken with the piece below with the spirals and concrete compass and asked if it was for sale and Bob really liked this mountain and valley collage and asked if it was for sale. Pretty exciting that my recent work is talking to people -- it makes the fun I'm having all the more delicious!

Spiraling Again

Spirals seem to be everywhere in nature, so I'm continuing to explore rice paper spirals interacting with the environment. I've used a couple photos from our trip west - rocks and vegetation along a hiking trail and a segment of a compass in the patio next to Yellowstone Lake - and have tried to make the scenes have a bit of intrigue by adding the spirals. Send me an e-mail (lori@reedstudios.net) or post on the blog what you think of the spiral series (others are in earlier posts). 

Western Ravens

For over a decade, I've been fascinated by the entire corvid family of birds and the high intelligence they display. Ravens have an extra appeal because of their size, and I've enjoyed Native American tales about the crafty bird. We saw ravens throughout our travels out west, and I sketched out the idea for this piece on our trip back from Montana. I used a cradle board frame that has a surface prepared for sketching. I applied sections of primed canvas to that surface so I'd start out with a layered look to the piece and get the canvas texture coming through my laser prints; I painted the canvas sky blue. I ran the "ink outlines" filter on the raven photos in Photoshop, then tore them out and applied to the canvas with matte medium. I tore sections of a topo map of Yellowstone to make a unified "rocky" surface for them to perch on and layered up pieces of sky color and filmy cloud areas. I used two colors of tissue paper to make the raven shadows on the ground. I'm pretty excited about this 8" x 24" piece! (If you click on the photo, you'll enlarge the piece and can see the details better.)

Recharged

Rob and I drove to Montana last week and stayed with our friend Karen in Paradise Valley. We had a fabulous time and took hundreds of photos -- some for fun and some for future collage work. I can't wait to get into my studio and start working with some of the images!

I feel like I'm really on a roll now . . .

- Sales at Art in the Park were encouraging, and people have seen work on this blog and asked to purchase. 

- I took examples of my work to Montana and met with a gallery owner (who'd expressed interest after seeing some pieces that Karen had). She sorted my work as I took it out of the box and told me the ones she liked and why. She'll be picking new artists to represent in Jan/Feb, so I'll be sending her a CD with images of the ones she liked and others I plan to make soon!  

- In going through my e-mail upon our return, I had a message that a collage of mine had been accepted into a national juried show in Denver!!

Life is good.

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".