Encaustic launch

After the workshop on encaustic, I decided to buy the things I needed to give it a try with my work. Next month's art group topic is "something leafy," so I decided to see how leaves would work embedded in the waxy medium. I'm pleased with how this looks, so I'll keep experimenting....

On the move

I've been moving work around here lately. I needed to get one of the pieces on display at Q's Cafe to send to Montana and had sold two more that had originally been in the grouping, so I decided to take down everything that had been hanging there for four months and put up new work.

I'm the featured artist in the One12 Gift Shop of the Galesburg Civic Art Center for May, so we hung ten new works on the wall there. I'll be in the gift shop during the gallery opening on May 7th.

And, drumroll please, we wrapped up 13 of my pieces and sent them off to an art gallery in Montana this week! They're to arrive at Visions West Galleries in Livingston on Wednesday. Once they get all of my work up on their website, I'll put the link on my blog. I'm so excited to have gallery representation!!

Some more April work

My friend Bob sent me a photo he took of snow showers somewhere between Butte and Bozeman when he was there on business a few weeks ago. I loved how dramatic and BIG the sky was in the shot with a small farm under the snow clouds, so I made a large (24x18) collage emphasizing that sky.

I made another bird piece to send with the other dozen collages to my new art gallery in Montana. In the grass I've placed pieces of a topo map of the terrain between Livingston and Yellowstone.

I'm going to submit a few pieces to a show called "Constructed Territory" that is soliciting work using maps, cartography or topographical explorations. I took this photo of the Hoodoos in Yellowstone and have covered many of the rocks with Yellowstone topo map fragments.

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."