Door County plans

Plum Bottom Gallery in Door County, Wisconsin is planning for a big year of tourist visits and art sales - yay! They sold 9 of my pieces last year, have 11 in their two galleries currently and want 15 new pieces to start out the spring season. NICE! I have enough appropriate imagery from my recent show to fill that request, but wanted to make a couple more from photos I took when in Wisconsin last spring. This sweet lighthouse is at the entry of the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal that gives ships a shortcut from Lake Michigan into Green Bay; there's a Coast Guard station next to it as well. After layering up my three versions of the photo in quarter-inch strips of paper, I embedded segments of some vintage 3-cent postage stamps depicting sailors and a Coast Guard ship.

Working Bigger

I don't normally work this big, but felt the landscape needed to be BIG. This 18"H x 24"W x 2"D mixed media piece took 27 sheets of legal paper cut into quarter-inch strips to build up the imagery! I added in lots of different types of green papers, some gold, and bits of text from a hundred-year-old agricultural newspaper. The original photo was taken by me during a hike north of Boulder, Colorado and show the South Saint Vrain Creek.

Lobby Makeover

The big art billboard project from this summer led to this fun installation of my art in a building owned by Caterpillar in downtown Peoria, IL. We scanned all 7 pieces of original art and then printed the files out on canvas. The largest is a 400% enlargement -- taking a 10"x20" collage and making an 80" wide canvas out of it.

The third photo down shows the original art on the counter and the enlargement on the wall. The 1/4" segments of vintage postage stamps are now 1" high in the canvas reproduction. :-)

New Year's First Artwork

During this pandemic winter of hibernation, I was looking through my photos and decided to make art from a photo my husband took of our resident barred owl in our backyard this summer. I added some text from a yellowed 1921 agricultural newspaper and decided to include some individual letters from headlines as well as small text. Hmmmm, I think I'll need to experiment some more with that!

The day after finishing this piece, the owl appeared at twilight in our snowy backyard. Nice.

Revisiting my trip to Utah during this time of no travel

We enjoyed hiking in the national parks in Utah a few years ago. Walking under the large arch formations in Arches National Park was stunning. In this piece, I've added in some handmade papers, vintage postage stamps and shredded U.S. currency. IT is 16"H x 12"W on a 1.5"-deep panel.

Turning toward the desert

A gallery in Scottsdale, AZ, plans to bring my work in once the pandemic calms down. I made this 16" x 20" piece with that gallery in mind. It uses a photo of an old car in a ghost town in Arizona, a photo of saguaro cactus and an old license plate. Filters were run on the composition of the three images, prints cut into strips and pieced together, and old postage stamp segments were added to the band of cactus at the bottoms.

Moments of Joy

Photographer, Ellen McDowell, and I have a show up through Dec 23rd at the Galesburg Civic Art Center. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the show is now by appointment only, but I'm so pleased friends and relatives are making time to go immerse themselves in a room full of beauty.