Studio Slice #10

A hint of things to come.

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!

Good Egg

Good Egg was a greedy, greedy painting. One of those you have to wrestle into submission. It took days longer than I had anticipated, all the while Scott is shaking his head. Why do I make it so difficult?

This piece is 36" square, the dress sits to the left, so what to do with the right side? Well, I knew she was to be "Good Egg." So I began collecting anything egg related. The first thing was to find egg related literature in a 50's vintage farmers almanac. These pages were made into acrylic transfers, a multi step process that transfers the printing ink into layers of acrylic medium. These transfers are applied to the primed canvas. Over this, I used text from a cookbook and painted the words using a negative painting technique, essentially painting around the letters, letting the first layer come through. The outline of the word "good" is lightly drawn on the canvas with pencil, and the stitching begins...



Once the stitching was finished it needed more, it just wasn't visible enough, so I painted the insides of the letters a similar yellow, just for definition. Buttons were sewn through the canvas to make this retro oval shape which helped tie all the different elements together.

This is a detail of the stitched egg cup, you can see the layers showing through. I used transparent and semi transparent layers of paint to add definition.

This is the finished result, the eggcups are transparent, allowing the original pattern of the dress to show through. This is the first time I've done this, and in this case I like the result. The eggs themselves have a wash of white over top. The new pattern of yellow dots is painted over the dress. And the deviled egg was painted in the top right hand side.

So why "Good Egg?" I guess this is really a painting about my relationship with my Grandmother. "You're a good egg" is one of her higher compliments, and boiled eggs in egg cups were one of her breakfast specialties when we stayed at her house... Strawberry shortcake was another, but that's a whole new story! My Grandma is weeks away from her 90th birthday, she will celebrate with my Grandpa who passed that landmark a couple of years ago.

Good Egg is available at $3000