Wild West Tour was Fabulous!

We were out west for the first two weeks of June. After spending a few days in art museums and galleries in the Denver area, we drove to Grand Junction for the opening of their 14th National Juried Contemporary Exhibition. I was really pleased with where my three pieces were hung in the multi-room exhibit and the feedback I received during the reception.

From there we drove up to Park City, Utah, and checked out a few galleries and went to the opening of an encaustic exhibit (where we saw two new pieces by our friend Madeline de Joly and met Daniella Woolf, whose book and DVD on encaustics I have!). Then we spent a week with our friend Karen near Bozeman, Montana and unpacked and unwound. This was one of the dozens of photos I took of the ever-changing view out her living room window.

We took my boxes of art into Visions West and unpacked them; the gallery owner said she plans to put a grouping of my art in Livingston and in her Bozeman gallery. (www.visionswestgallery.com)

Our trip home took us through Yellowstone and the Tetons, with a stop at an alabaster quarry to load up 675 pounds of stones for my husband to carve. What a great trip!!! We took over 1,000 photos, so you'll be seeing some art made from them on my blog sometime soon....

Fishy

The Visions West Gallery in Livingston MT (http://www.visionswestgallery.com) is having an exhibit in July called "Save the Trout Eat Catfish" that will be a group show of art with fish as subject. When the gallery owner was picking out what art of mine she wants for her galleries, she mentioned the show and said if I had anything fishy to include that as well. I remembered having fun working with some photos I'd taken of the sea wall on Galveston Island that is painted with fish and sea creatures, so I looked through those photos and chose one to work with. I've only done landscapes with my shredded technique to date, so this was fun to try something flat. Its title is Sunday Morning Ichthyology... couldn't resist a little play on words...!

Seventeen

I sent an email to the owner of Visions West Galleries who represents my work (locations in Bozeman and Livingston, MT and Denver, CO) and asked her to pick from 25 JPGs the art she'd like me to bring out in June. I was pleasantly surprised after a few days to receive an email saying "These are all wonderful! Here's the list:..." and she listed 17 titles!!!  All of the above were "the chosen ones"... good that we're taking the truck when we go west.  :-)

Expanding my horizons

30" x 10"... the biggest collage I've made using shredded papers! It was a bit daunting to figure out a scheme to keep this amount of skinny pieces of paper somewhat organized. What I came up with was to first print out the scene in sections, so I had six 8.5" x 14" prints of the scene manipulated with a watercolor filter... six prints of a drybrush filtered scene... six prints of a poster edges filter. I laid the prints out in the proper orientation for the whole scene and proceeded to shred one area at a time, starting with the prints for the upper right.

In this photo you can see that I'm working on the center top section. I have a print at the top of my drawing board showing me the whole scene, divided into sections. Under it are three sets of shredded pieces sorted into the proper order for me to easily pick from as I build the scene. I also shredded some pale blue paper from an 1856 ledger to use in the sky (you can see those by enlarging the top photo) and some yellowed paper from an 1879 ledger and prints of a 1904 topo map of Yellowstone to use in the grassy area. Those give an additional interest to the piece when viewed close up.

The business of art

My old business cards don't reflect the work I've been doing the last two years with scenes from the west, so I decided to make some new ones using shredded imagery. We'll photograph this to make a digital image for the printer. When he trims them out after printing, I'll have ten cards each with different imagery out of each sheet of card stock.

Second Chapter

Ever since making the "book" two weeks ago, I've been wanting to make another one. In this one, I chose to use all pages from the same book (Natural Advanced Geography, 1901), so the overall tone is the same yellowed paper, but variation is achieved through the use of etchings, colored maps, and illustrations from the book. I put the page numbers at the top for these facing pages and had some fun in picking what images to use out of the geography book. I'm calling this piece "Earth Bound."

Lines

Last year my friend Bob shared a photo with me that he took of a country road that had such a sense of depth with the road and power lines receding in space. Using his photo last spring, I made a torn paper collage of altered versions of the photo (top) and thought it would be fun to print out those versions again, run them through my paper shredder and make a second collage with horizontal strips (bottom). I was interested to see what the horizontal strips did to the perspective of the road. My husband gave it "a big thumbs up". Let me know what you think.