Chatterbox

Chatterbox sat on my easel for almost 2 months.  I poked around with it, found a few successes, but found myself stuck, and put it aside.  Working on other paintings, chatterbox stayed in the back of my mind, trying to find the answer.  The pressure started to mount, as I had two shows on the horizon that I wanted this piece for.  Finally, three days before packing the van, it started to come together.  I needed the megaphone! 

Starting at the top, the first panel has a cardinal apparently calling out the name, which is stitched through the canvas.  The typewriter images are photo transfers of a fabulous old typewriter that sits, rusted solid on my front porch.  The bulls eye represents the epicenter of chatterbox's voice.  Text behind the dress is from a spam email I received, a long letter filled with typos.  The megaphones are linoleum block prints that I carved and printed on pattern paper.  Below is a bit more of the letter, and a long, transparent glove.  The last canvas has the bottom of the dress, with more megaphones, transparent this time, and a circular pattern in the background.

I think this piece pulls together the feeling I wanted of unending one way communication.

I finished this piece around midnight, the night before leaving for a show in Cleveland, OH.  Scott framed it around 6 the following morning.  Perhaps she should be renamed "Just in the nick of time!"

Studio Slice #5

This may be kinda fun?

Somewhere in the middle

I just thought I'd give you a quick peek at what is going on inside the studio this weekend. I have three separate pieces on the go right now. "Smarty Pants" just has a little bit of stitching left to do, "Little Bee" is drying, and this one is coming along nicely. This will be a new "Good Egg." But I am just so darned pleased with the chickens that I had to show it off. The chickens are linoleum block prints on rice paper, the paper is so transparent that I was able to flop the image to have them pair up beak to beak. There is still plenty more to do, but I hope to have this in the van with me heading to the Des Moines Art Festival next weekend. If you want to do a little artist surfing you can find their web site at www.desmoinesartsfestival.org If I have a moment, I'll post the finished piece before it goes in the van!

Little black dress

A quick word on artistic influences and my latest piece "Little Black Dress." 15-18 years ago I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery, to see the works of an icon. Andy Warhol. I could write for days about the things I find interesting about his work, but the one piece that wedged itself deep in my brain was his silkscreen of the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz. It was black, on a silvery black that sparkled. I bought the full color catalogue, and this piece was in it, sort of, a black block with teeth was about all you can see.

As a color junkie, I was enchanted by the sheer guts it took to do that piece, not to mention the many other black on black pieces I have seen since. Toss aside the color wheel, all you really have to work with is value. Then forget about all those lighter values, all you need is everything between black, and almost black. This is what I came up with...

Just for the record, the pattern in the background is a repeated linoleum block print, and is much darker in real life than it appears here. The dress is covered in paint, charcoal, and acrylic transfers. It is layered, and wiped, scratched, and scribbled on. Here is a close up...


Now, to finish packing the van. You'll find me (and this brand spanking new painting) at Coconut Grove this weekend Booth #352

Finished?

The question of when a painting is finished is more of an issue than you might think. Standing in front of the easel the little voices in my head get quite chatty. One is shouting "quit now, less is more" another says, "you didn't spend nearly enough time on that." "You could push that a little further" is met with "Whoa, quit before you screw it up!"

This was an interesting piece in that respect, because I was happy with the background and was working on the china, a little highlight, a little glazing in shadows, a few dabs of magenta in the roses. I turned around and looked at the piece and WOW! I loved it.

But was it finished?

I'll back up a bit and tell you what is going on in this piece. The background (as I call it, or the parts around the dress) is a collage of ads from the late 50's. On top of that is a block print of a repeat pattern of circles. The circles are woven together, and sometimes they shift and turn into flowers. I was happy with this red pattern, and how the greys in the background gently move your eye around the piece.

I didn't actually have a plan of what to put on the dress at this point. But on my "bulletin board full of crap," (others have beautiful names for this, memory boards, idea boards, dream stations...whatever) I saw a catalogue cover with a painting by Peter Plamondon. It is a huge painting, of a collection of white bowls, some upside down, one filled with white eggs, it's a beauty.

As a side note I was in a Gallery in Chatham on Cape Cod this summer and saw a few of his original works, simply stunning, google him!

But what truly struck me was how that composition would carry the repeated pattern of the circles from the background onto the dress. But I didn't want to copy the idea to the point that I made it look like the piece I just saw. So I pulled out what I have, china. Lots of china.

Without digging too deeply into my head, I have decided that my china collection is becoming a metaphor. It is in a cabinet and in boxes, I have collected it since I was about 12. It has moved with me at least 12 different times, and sometimes not made it out of the boxes before it was moved again. The china has become a reminder that the future I thought I would have as a child is nothing like what actually is. Not necessarily a bad thing by the way!

So I laid out the cups and saucers, and photographed them from above. I painted from the photo. So this is where I was when I had the "holy smokes, this is looking great" moment. I dug through my button collection and laid out the hula hoop shape of buttons (yet another circle) and stitched them through the canvas.

Then I let it hang on the wall for a few days. It wasn't finished.

The only thing the finished piece has, that the earlier version didn't, is the shadows under the saucers. I liked how they floated on the red background, but once I stitched on the black buttons it became more obvious that I needed a little more black in the composition to pull it all together.

One of those push pull moments of a painting, everything you do means you may have to do something else. To balance it out, to make it work.

So this is it, finished. She is titled "Enough." 40"x40"

New Birds

A couple of new birds...

I am having fun with these new birds, the backgrounds are loose and abstract and I love them!

I've spent many years painting pure abstract work, much more of a challenge than you would expect. Making something beautiful and balanced, without having anything representational to "anchor" to is tricky.

But these give me a foot in both worlds, the tightly controlled little birds contrast nicely in both color and style to the backgrounds they sit in. And the dots of color as well as the changes in the top layer of color lead the eye around the composition.

Chatterbox is stitched in cross stitch through the top one, and although the thread looks black in the photo, it's actually a deep greenish brown, mirroring some of the deeper colors in the bird. This bird is a real chatterbox by the way, he or one like him sits on the peak of my studio in the morning and sings a good morning song that can be heard all through the yard!

A female cardinal is the next "bird in the hand" she is currently on the easel, if I get her finished before packing the van for the next show I'll try to put her up. Have a great day!

Wallflower

Wallflower is fresh off the easel. It has quite a different look from most if it's "sisters," partly because the dress is more from the 70's era rather than the 40's and 50's. The pattern is a loose interpretation of what was actually on the dress, enlarged to bigger than wallpaper size. What I love about this piece is the contrast or "push-pull" between the transparent color and the opaque ground. I added a bit of a shadow behind the dress just to make it pop a bit, but I already know there will be many, many people who will breeze by this piece and never even know there is a dress under the paint. Most of my paintings hold some sort of surprise for those who are really looking! You will have to look closely though to see her name, "wallflower" is stitched along the bottom hem of the dress in black floss. This piece will show for the first time in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the "Original" show, here is a link to their site http://www.artfair.org/

Wallflower is 24" square.

Atta Boy

The question I get asked most often at art shows is definitely "do you do commissions?" But I am also often asked "why don't you do boy's clothes?" Well I do, but pretty much only as commissions. "Atta Boy" was requested to be a companion piece for a little dress painting I did called "Smarty Pants."

"Atta Boy" has a background of transferred Farmers Almanac pages, it is glazed over with quinacridone gold. A row of buttons from a Navy jacket runs along the top. The name is stitched through the canvas, and the oval shape is surrounded by a line of little brass beads. And yes, the little overalls were blue, but I still repaint them entirely to give them lots of depth. This was a fun piece to do, especially because I was given lots of freedom in the process, simply a companion. Something that would feel good in Iowa. Both hang in an oral surgery office, I hope they bring smiles.