Encaustic

I took two evening workshops on Encaustic this month as I've always been drawn to this medium (melted beeswax and Damar resin applied to the surface). While I enjoyed making an abstract piece with the pigment-tinted encaustic medium and oil paints in the first workshop, I wanted see if it was something I could combine with the collage work I've been doing. I made two little 4x4 collages and took to the second workshop and found that I COULD combine it with the acrylic matte medium! I think I'm going to get the necessary supplies and start experimenting with adding this luscious depth that beeswax can bring....

Gifts from the Sea

I made a collage two weeks ago (see post below) for my upcoming Women's Art Workshop's "gifts from the sea" assignment. The fat sand dollars are just so irresistible, I decided to do a grouted collage using ceramic tiles, shell fragments from South Padre Island, and three of the sand dollars from the Florida Keys. I made it the same width as the earlier collage but not as high (for a lighter-weight wall piece!) so it is 20" x 8".

Road to Dailey Lake

This piece is 20" x 16" on cradled panel. I made three filtered variations of the same photo, tore and pieced those together and then added art papers and pieces of grass to the foreground. There's a deadline coming up for a national juried show at a local art center, so I think I'll submit this one....

Sea

My Women's Art Workshop group has the topic this month of "Gifts from the Sea." I decided to continue with the pieced-together landscape for the back layer of this collage, but made a darker border/edge this time (whereas last week's had a lighter border). I've used a photo of a boat anchored in the water, then layered on top of it a 1787 ship navigation map (the dark arch shows the gulf stream) and photos we took of some very large and thick sand dollars a woman from the Florida Keys gave us years ago. (I gave one of the potters in my group a couple of the sand dollars last month; she pressed one into the bottom of a clay bowl to take on that star shape, so our pieces will relate to one another!) This canvas is 20" x 10" and is titled "Riding the Gulf Stream."

Good Week

I finished a commission piece and it was picked up this week by a very happy customer ... I received a check in the mail for three of my collages (all dealing with navigation as subject matter from 2008, 2009 and 2010) and will ship those off to Houston TX tomorrow... and sold another piece that traveled onto Naperville IL on Saturday! My Women's Art Workshop group met on Friday and had a great discussion on our new work made in response to the assignment of "birds" and the processes everyone had used. This weekend I worked on another bird piece and the above 14" x 11" landscape. Life is good.

Pieces and Layers

After winning the GALEX Purchase Prize, I was musing about the raven work and remembering how fun it was to build the "ground" out of pieces of topo map. So... I decided to make some work where I pieced together entire landscapes using three different prints of the same image with several Photoshop filters applied to it – altering the look and brightness/darkness. First I made one wrapped around canvas of a hillside in Montana – "Blank Space in History." The second one I made by adhering canvas to wood panel and adding squares and rectangles of canvas on top of that in the foreground before adding the torn images of the hay bales – "After the Storm." The third one has a layer of canvas on panel, another layer of the Pikes Peak mountain shape, and more canvas pieces where the trees are – "Obscured by Clouds." The "lumpy layers" of canvas on the two panel ones show up when viewed at an angle or the light hits them – the mountain shape really shows up then! Click on the images to see them bigger; comments appreciated!

Purchase Award Recipient

Gulp. My piece with three ravens was announced as the Purchase Award at the GALEX last night! That means it will reside in the permanent collection of the Galesburg Civic Art Center AND I was given a check for $1000 – wow! What a nice feeling, to have one's work validated  by the juror out of 74 works that had been selected for the show. I'm stunned... and VERY happy!!