Black Betty (without the shine!)

It's pretty amazing the difference a decent photo makes, compare this image of Black Betty with the one a couple of posts down and you'll see what I mean. That's all I've got for you right now though. I'm pretty excited about "Birdbrain" on the easel, and I should go out there and see where she's headed!

(Elle)ements

Holy smokes, here she goes again. Kathrine is half cocked and running around chasing rainbows, and mail delivery trucks, her tail, and well, you get the idea! If you've been reading this blog for any time at all you know that I've been working on a bunch of new pieces for my dress painting series. I have three biggies, just on-the-brink of being done. They are each 24" wide by 56" high.

But, (and this is a big one) along the way these little bitties came up...

Isn't interesting what happens when you aren't really paying attention? These little pieces are all 4" square. They are all little original mixed media pieces, each one is one of a kind, on small stretched canvases. And the best part of these is how versatile they are, here is some of the same group rearranged in a different setting...

So, as these are all little bits, or fragments of the big dresses I've been working on, I've decided to call this group (Elle)ements. I'm just warming up a new blog for them, and they are already on the Spring Gallery web site. You can see them all here!http://thespringgallery.com/section/281207_elle_ements.html

I have a mere 45 available to start, but boxes of new canvases on the way. They are all $25 each, shipping to anywhere in the US will be $6 whether you buy one or one hundred.

These will be coming with me on the road to shows, but I'd also like to start finding some wholesale opportunities. If you have any bright ideas, please pass them along. That's it for now, time to get busy!

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"

Good Show

Good Show! As children, putting on a show was one of the highlights of visiting my grandparent's house. My cousins, my sister, and I would arrange variety shows and fashion shows where we would parade through the living room dressed in Grandma's and even Great Grandma's stored away treasures. Singing, dancing, it was a hoot. And we certainly weren't alone. Many women come into my booth and tell me their similar stories when they see this piece. The photo transfers are of my mother and her cousins doing the same thing about 20 years earlier. The dress is from sometime in the 1950's, and the little lines of red stitching in the background represents the imaginary red velvet curtain. Although we all know that bed sheets on the clothes line work just as well!

Good show is 24" square, and will be showing with the rest of my work tomorrow and through the weekend at "Main St. Fort Worth" in Ft. Worth Texas. Hope to see you there!

"Good Show" has sold (yay!)

Goody Two Shoes

Goody Two Shoes was finished just in time for the show at Boca Raton! The interesting thing about this piece is all the layers. The blocks in the background alternate, there are photos of vintage shoes cut in with opaque paint, then finished with a pattern in pencil. And the 2's are stenciled over photo transfers of pages from an etiquette book from the 1920's. The sailor dress sits on top, and "goody goody goody" is stitched through the top with bright green embroidery floss.

I am interested in looking at what the ideal of being "good" is all about, especially in the context of being a "good girl." How can you be good, without being so good as to be a goody two shoes? Who decides what the rules are? And how do we know when they change?

Goody Two Shoes is 30" square on canvas, and is sold.