My podcast about our trip to New York

I had SUCH an incredible trip and saw SO much art that I decided it would make too long of a post, way to many photos and way way too much to read. So on a whim, I decided to try my hand at making a podcast.

Of course I've never done this before and had no idea what I was doing, which is why it has taken me a week to update about my trip. I had the best time figuring out how to make it though! What a blast! My husband really got into the project too, actually going out and getting me this fancy microphone! Isn't it cute!

The podcast is on my website which you can see here. There are over 70 images to see, plus all the galleries and their websites are on this page too. I hope you enjoy it!

Back from New York

I can't wait to share some of the highlights from my trip. It was amazing and inspiring on so many levels, even enduring the dreadful weather seemed to add new insight and meaning to the whole experience.

While I was away, a wonderful artist and teacher, Karen Lynn Ingalls, was kind enough to feature me on her blog. Karen asked me several questions about about my approach to composition and painting in general. You can see that post here, and please take a look at her beautiful paintings on her personal blog here. Thank you Karen for this honor.

I would also love to thank all the wonderful suggestions we received for our trip! I only wish we had had more time to do every single one!

Love and trip to New York

"I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." ~ Vincent Van Gogh

I am going with two of my friends, Kate Lewis and Joanne Aono, to New York for an all out art spree. We've made a map, plotted our course, and are attempting to check out as many galleries, museums, and vegetarian eateries as possible. We leave tomorrow and only have a couple of days to manage the 21 art spots on our map, an artist lecture Tuesday night, plus the 15 possible places we've picked out to eat.

I am just so excited I can barely stand it!! If you have any suggestions for must sees or eat, please leave a comment, which I can check while on the road!

Also take a look at Kate's website here and blog here, and Joanne's website here.

Hope this day and everyday your heart is full!

Joy to the World

This is actually a painting I finished before I moved but never posted, although it has been on my website. This is the second painting experimenting with the idea of the ribbons being held in a transparent container.

Most of my paintings deal with ideas about exteriors we can see versus interiors we can't. Thinking about ways to really dig deep and explore this core idea, a friend of mine suggested addressing directly my fears. For reasons unknown to me, the first idea that popped in my head was to make the container transparent, and without thinking more about it, I put a bow in a glass and painted Cordial. Then I revisited the idea with this painting. I didn't know what to say about it at the time, still unsure about this idea, so I packed it up and sort of forgot about it with the move.

Well I recently unpacked it, and Wow.... I could see that first layer of meaning! At least enough to know that I definitely want to pursue this idea a bit more. Pretty cool.

The painting is a bit larger (14x18) than most I post, so I thought I would show a couple of cropped shots. You can view a larger photo of the painting here on my website. I adore how all the colors melt together, and love this glowing interior space.

I particularly enjoyed using thick blobs of paint for the transparent surface, and love the distortions of the ribbons as they press against the inside. Seeing this spot below with fresh eyes actually caused me to go back and rework Cordial, which you can see here.

Slow progress and mixing grays

Progress has been very slow and difficult with my new painting, so I thought I would share some of my difficulties, and what I'm doing to get through them.

First COLOR!!! Usually the fun, joyful, thrilling part for me. I'm having the most difficult time seeing the color ... well I'm seeing it, but having a hard time translating it. My bows are white, but almost all in shadow, giving me a majority of grays, right? Well not as I see it. I see purples, and dark blues, and deep oranges, and yellows even. But when I try to paint purple-gray, and yellow-gray, the colors are NOT beautiful. I keep painting and scraping off whole sections. This has not been fun.

So I decided to adjusted my thinking. I love working with rich, saturated colors, so what I needed to work with wasn't gray, but super rich luscious saturated neutrals. Now that sounds fun to me!

I know this has to be clearly all in my head, that how I feel about a color effects the way I see and paint it - gray (sad) versus rich neutral (yummy), but it is working, and that's all I care about, so here we go:

Earlier I posted how I mix color based on opposites, and this is just another example, so I won't go into as much detail. The earlier post I used yellows and purples, this time I'm using oranges and blues. Opposites mixed together give us lots of beautiful rich neutrals, plus mixing this way gives me a lot of control. This makes it so simple to warm up a color or cool it down, plus it's very easy to remix a color. Here is a sampling of some of the colors I will be using:

Cad Orange + Radiant Blue in the left pile, which gives me a warm silver, the right side is the same mixture + Nickel Yellow, which just glows in person.

The top dark pile is Ultramarine Deep + Cad Orange. From that dark I can get a variety of grays just by mixing more orange (left pile) or blue (right pile) + white.

Below that dark group is King's Blue + Cad Orange, these are super rich in person, and the palest group of purply pinky pearly neutrals is Radiant Blue + Shell Pink (= purple) adding Ivory White (yellowish white - purples opposite.)

Now I can put these saturated colors to use. I'm focusing on the bottom bow first because it has some of the strongest contrasts, which I can use to judge all the other values.

More soon!

Getting settled in to a new Studio

Guess what? I moved again. Four moves in four years. I'm a needy organized nester, and moving seems to keep me out of sorts longer than would seem necessary. At least this will be my excuse for the long periods of absence on my blog, and lack of finished paintings for 2009. I do want to apologize too, for the delayed responses to comments and emails I've received over the last two months, I have let myself get so far behind being distracted with the move and getting my studio set up. The good news is, this time my husband and I bought a house, so HOPEFULLY we are staying put for a while! Yea!

I've been busy painting the walls/ceiling/trim all white, so it seems only fitting that my first painting in my new space would be inspired by all white as well. Of course, all the snow might be responsible for the white set up too, but I think the real source of inspiration started back in June by a comment by Alia El-Bermani on my post for Fireworks. She stated that "cloud nine" would have been a good title for that painting or a new one, because of my own joyful reaction to my recent paintings. Of course, my crazy brain immediately jumps to... cloud nine...yessss...nine big canvas of all white!

Well, that might be a bit ambitious. I have a very bad habit of starting a huge painting (that I never seem to complete) every move and new studio. But, seeing that I have so much white for inspiration around me, with clouds, snow, and a bright new studio, I just might get this done! I'm hopeful.

The canvas is 20 x 20, and this is the charcoal sketch so far.

Till Death do us Part

Sold 12x12 oil on canvas

What self-respecting realist hasn't painted a skull? :) How Killer!

South Shore Arts Salon Show Award

I'm excited and honored to be the recipient of the "Ernestine 'Dolly' M. Wisnewski Memorial Award" which I received at the opening reception of the South Shore Arts Salon Show. The reception was wonderful, and the show itself is a diverse and fantastic group of artwork. About 70 pieces in all - paintings, photography, sculpture, video, and one installation piece.

I am so pleased to be a part of the show, and extremely honored to be chosen for this award!

Sharing some good news

I am so grateful and excited today, and I thought I would pass along the news. I have been featured on a wonderful blog I just discovered called, A Gift Wrapped Life.

As anyone might guess, Sande Chase, author of this inspiring blog, and I share an obsession with presents. Sande Chase's blog is a companion for her website which specializes in gorgeous gifts wrapped so beautifully I could cry! Her blog is a wonderful new source of inspiration and I am very honored to be featured there. Thanks so much to Sande, for her generosity and for her incredibly kind words. Also many thanks to Lara Harris, a fellow artist and blogger who saw the similar passions, and was kind enough to make the connection.

One more bit of good news, two of my paintings, "Fireworks" and "Melt" have been selected for the 66th Annual South Shore Salon Show in Indiana. I am very excited about this opportunity, it is a great honor for me to participate and I am thrilled these two paintings where chosen.

Fireworks

Sold

Wow, am I pleased! I know I keep talking about how excited I am with my own paintings lately, and I must apologize. But I am absolutely in love with the results of allowing the paint itself to play a much larger role in my paintings. The challenge and joy for me, is finding the balance between using paint to create the illusion of form, versus using paint to become the form.

Paint becoming the form is a goal I've been striving for, for several years now. finding my own unique voice to do that with is key. Each painting I do lately feels closer and closer to realizing this goal, so I'm just on cloud 9!