Giant beetles!

As promised yesterday, here is a recent piece with two seriously big beetles. "Elfreth's Alley" is a mixed media collage with stitching on a 36" x 48" stretched canvas.

This is the first in a series of at least 8 new works, all depicting large-scale insects. I've sketched out the next four already. The one I'll start next has a big-ass moth on it. This is a fun series to construct because I'm having to invent methods and techniques to make what's in my head work in real life. I'm enjoying the unexpected turns that this project is taking me. Check back for more progress and updates!

New Birds on Cradleboard

I created three new pieces recently for an exhibit at the gallery in the building where my studio is, NEST Arts Factory. One sold (and I didn't have a chance to take a photo), but I can show you photos of the other two.

These are collages of fabric, painted papers, and art paper, mounted on cradleboard. I really like the presentation of the cradleboard. It's sharp and clean, and easy to hang.

The pieces are 10" square and are named "raven" in various languages. The top piece is Corbeau, the bottom is Corvo. The piece that sold is Cuervo.

Cradleboard is a rigid surface with a wood frame (or cradle) on the back. The sides can be painted or left unfinished (you usually see solid wood or layers of plywood on the edges, either is pretty). It's available with different surfaces on the fronts, everything from canvas, gessoboard, board prepared for encaustics, clayboard, or unprimed, and in a wide variety of sizes and prices. Try it!

1 day + 100 artists + 100 patrons = $10,000 to fight cancer

I am delighted to be an invited artist for "The 100" to be held next Wednesday, February 4, 2015. The goal for this fiber fundraiser for the American Cancer Society is to raise $10,000 in one day. Just 100 people will have a chance to purchase a randomly selected artwork for only $100! 

See all the details on the Fiberart for a Cause website. See a selection of the artwork available on the FFAC Pinterest board.

I'm sure you will want to be one of the very exclusive 100 patrons who will be randomly assigned artwork from an extraordinary line-up of international fiber artists.

Fiberart For A Cause has already raised $240,000 through the generosity of fiber artists and patrons.

The artwork that I am contributing to this very worthy cause is one of my Bird:Houses - the Apostle Bird. As a patron, you have a chance of receiving this piece.

The FIberart for a Cause fundraiser is one that is near to my heart. I am asked to donate my work to a lot of causes over the course of a year and this is the only one that I say yes to instantly, without hesitation. Virginia Spiegel is a remarkable woman who has made a remarkable contribution to the fight against cancer with her imaginative and highly successful fundraisers.

In honor of my brother-in-law, Juan, who we lost way too early to leukemia.

Artist Trading Blocks

One of my mentorship groups, FiberArt Northeast (otherwise known as FANE) has been meeting monthly since 2006. Among many other things, I am constantly challenging the members with fun art projects, some for exhibition and some just to stretch creative muscles. Over the holiday break I offered them a quick little project that I had read about on the Gelli Arts blog, Artist Trading Blocks. A number of years ago Artist Trading Cards burst onto the scene. The size of baseball cards (2.5" x 3.5") the ATCs are a great way to collect and trade small pieces of art with others.

The artist trading block is a three-dimensional interpretation of this idea. The Gelli Arts blog suggests using 4" x 4" posts cut into 4" cubes for the blocks, but once I realized that I needed over 30 of these and I discovered how very much each one would weigh, I quickly dropped the size suggestion and tried to find a smaller, lighter weight alternative.

I wandered around the lumber department of Home Depot until I came upon what they call "square dowels", oddly, since aren't dowels by their very definition round? Lumber is weird, my friends, 2 x 4s are not 2" or 4", and dowels are apparently not always round. Anyway, the square dowels are 1.75" on a side and 36" long so I bought two. Using Carlos' chop saw I was able to cut each dowel up into 19 blocks, ending with 38 total. Some members took 1 and others took 2 so they would have one to trade. I took two so I could trade as well.

What a blast! Nifty little six-sided collages! Three dimensional accessible art! A great way to slide into the new year art wise.

One block is covered with different whites and off whites to start. I added pieces of an old book, an embossed paper Ganesha, colored art papers, a postage stamp, and then I stamped some letters, numbers, a word, and a chop over the papers.

The other block is a mixture of papers and fabrics, with other papers, a fortune cookie fortune, and more stamped letters, numbers, and words added. This block is in much brighter colors than the first.

I can't wait to see what everyone else has made and I'll be sure to report back. So what do you think? Will ATBs become a thing? Do you have a yen to make one (or three) now?

Printmaking and more at Create Mixed Media retreat in Chicago!

I had such a great time teaching at the Create Mixed Media retreat in New Jersey in July that I'm doing it again in Chicago this month. I'd love for you to join me!

I'll be teaching four workshops. First up is the 4-color block printing class. You'll learn about design, registration for perfect prints, marketing and selling prints, and even cut your own mat. You can add some stitching by hand and/or machine. Everyone works on their own design and New Jersey's students came up with some stellar ones!

On Saturday I'll be teaching a class called Art Websites for Beginners. All you need is a laptop with wifi capability and some images of your work. There's no software to buy or download, no special knowledge needed. By the end of class you'll be well on your way to a beautiful website you can maintain and update yourself. We work on the websites in real time, one step at a time, until everyone is confident and ready to move onto the next step. In New Jersey we joked about having a hacker party with pizza and beer in the hotel lobby after class to keep working on our sites together. Fun!

Saturday night we jump into the Live Tweets class. This is a great introduction to soft sculpture and the results are delightful. Make a bird with fabric and paper that you've painted or printed yourself. What a fabulous way to show off your handiwork!

And on Sunday morning join me for a great inspirational exercise that ends up as a house with a bird on it in the Bird:House workshop. Randomly choose a "bird word" and create a collaged and stitched house to illustrate it. We talk about inspiration, the principles of design, and many construction techniques. The houses can either hang on the wall or sit in a wooden stand when complete.

The Create retreats are great fun, inspirational, educational, and a wonderful way to connect with our "tribe" while trying new things and meeting new people. I hope to see you there!

The store is now open!

At long last, and after some much appreciated nagging from my daughter Sam, my etsy store is once again fully stocked and ready for shopping. I added some gyotaku fish prints (which come matted and ready to frame) and some collage jewelry. I have a few more items to add this week and then I can cross something big off my ToDo list.

Please head over to Etsy and check me out!

ONE hundred collages

I am so honored to be taking part in Virginia Spiegel's latest fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. The plan is to sell ONE hundred collages on ONE Wednesday for ONE great cause. I made three collages and I'm excited to show you one below. You can see a preview of the fundraiser and read about how it works on this site.

The all-star team of contributing artists:
Natalya Aikens, Pamela Allen, Laura Ann Beehler, Liz Berg, Pokey Bolton, Laura Cater-Woods, Jette Clover, Jane Davila, Jane Dunnewold, Jamie Fingal, Gloria Hansen, Leslie Tucker Jenison, Lyric Kinard, Jeanelle McCall, Linda Teddlie Minton, Karen Stiehl Osborn, BJ Parady, Judy Coates Perez, Wen Redmond, Cynthia St Charles and Virginia A Spiegel



The big day is next Wednesday, February 16th. Please check out the work, it's all extraordinary and 100% of the proceeds go to ACS.

Rubber Fish Chronicles

Have a hankering to paint some rubber fish?  Holy mackerel! You'll have your chance in Chicago this August with me at the Cloth Paper Scissors Create conference. I'll be bringing all of my fishy friends for a day of gyotaku painting fun!

One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish - big fish, small fish and a seahorse and starfish too. Don't let this one get away. :)

I'll also be teaching a 3D fiber house plus a workshop on Jump Starting Your Art Career - now's the time to get serious about your art and I can help you. This is an evening workshop with lots of hands-on activities to help you develop your personal marketing plan for your career. Tons of useful, practical information about branding, dreaming big, approaching galleries, selling more art and much more.

AED - reboot

So now that I'm getting over the over-thinking and subsequent self-sabotage from a week ago, I'm back to posting again. And no longer worried about the relative importance of the output, just the doing.

A fun little collage with a fun little Indonesian stamp I picked up on a jaunt today that also included a Wolf Kahn exhibit and excellent chocolate gelato (not all at the same time).

AED - collages

Okay, here on the 15th day of this project it's time for a little self-evaluation. Notwithstanding the fact that I've missed a couple of days (argh), I'm now struggling with an internal debate of "trivial" vs "important". Although I have created art since the beginning of the month, I do feel like nearly everything I've made is fairly trivial. I may be overthinking things (quel surprise), but it's bugging me and I'm going to try something different.

Soooooo, saying that, here is the first step of a series of collages. I'm working on 8" x 10" bristol board with a mixture of Liquitex fluid medium and acrylic paint.



I'm not sure whether I'll work on one at a time until it's done or on one layer on all of them at once - I guess I'll have to see what tomorrow brings!

If you're doing the AEDM project, how do you feel about your progress so far?

AED - Day Two

Day two of Art Every Day Month - and no, I won't be putting a number on each of these pieces *big grin*. There just happened to be a postage stamp, the perfect color and size, in my collection that had a 2 on it. Or my subconscious is really pushy...



This one is ATC-sized (2.5" x 3.5") and the base is Strathmore paper with a canvas texture. You won't believe the HUGE mess I made making this tiny thing! My studio is such a disaster right now that I've been reduced to putting a cutting mat on the floor and slicing and dicing on my hands and knees. And my camera got lost less than five minutes after I set it down and took me fifteen to find again. Ugh. I need a couple of days to devote to sorting and cleaning and organizing. Maybe next week...

Art Every Day Kick-off

I've been struggling lately trying to chisel out enough time for art. Almost everything I've made for the last yearish has been for a Purpose - for a book, magazine, class or some other obligation. I heard about the Art Every Day Month project on Twitter from Fi Bowman and immediately signed up. The "rules" are very loose and, in keeping with that, I'm not adding anything to it. As long as I've created something every day in November, I'm good. Some days it could be an interesting photograph, some days it might be a small collage, who knows? I'm open to anything and happy to be creating.



Today's entry is a 1.5" square collage on illustration board with fabric, paper, watch gears, stamping, and painting. Whee! Art for no reason at all. Fun!

PS: I used a scrap of newspaper from India in the collage. If anyone knows what it says, please let me know!

Bricolages - part deux

The bricolage assemblages are done! I'm not certain what they "mean" or what they're "saying" yet. I tend to work very subconsciously and all of that needs to filter up before I can figure it out.

I made small shelves with balsa wood, painted them and then distressed them before attaching them to the illustration board. I used both glue and small screws to attach the shelves.



I auditioned a number of found objects for the shelves. In the end I used found chess pieces that I bought from Judy Gula in Houston last year.




The empty morphine vials came from a Facebook friend's etsy store.



The cardboard letters and vintage Japanese card came from another Facebook friend's etsy store. Etsy is the best. So is Facebook.







It's very tricky to photograph framed art because of the reflections on the glass and harder still to photograph shadow boxes because of the depth of the frames and the shadows they throw. These difficulties were compounded by having to use just one photoflood, since the other blew during a marathon photo shoot recently. B&H will be delivering new bulbs on Tuesday, so I'll set up and shoot again next week.

Bricolages

One of the online collage groups that I belong to had been discussing the various terms that describe what we do and the word bricolage came up. I love this word!

Bricolage: [bree-kuh‑lahzh] a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things.

I just happened to have three small IKEA shadowbox frames lying around the studio. I buy frames "on spec" when they're pretty and interesing (and inexpensive!) The frame opening is only 5 1/2" square and is about 1 1/4" deep. I've been wanting to work on three-dimensional assemblages (Joseph Cornell's work has inspired me) and layering colors and textures. So, cool new word in hand, I jumped in.



I had scraps of illustration board leftover from making collagraph plates, so I cut those down to fit the frames. I painted layers of washes of paint on the illustration board (and forgot to take a picture) and then tore and glued down pieces from an Italian newspaper.



After the glue was dry, I painted a wash of cream acrylic paint over each board and then stamped designs over everything with more of the same diluted paint.



The cream wash toned everything down and the stamps added visual texture and interest. Next I glued on a few paper mesh squares and strips, and found object papers and letters.



Right now I'm waiting for the paint to dry on the little shelf supports that I cut to fit in each frame. I'll take more pictures when the shelves are attached to the boards and I start auditioning found objects to place on them.

Oh, and a person who makes bricolages is a bricoleur - wouldn't that look great on a business card?

Almost...

The new office area in the barn studio is nearly complete. Sometimes I think I should have been an interior designer, the decorating part of any project really floats my boat (bad metaphor, I get seasick really easily, but you know what I mean). Or, putting my reno and carpentry skills together with the decorating, a contestant on one of those reality shows where you get two days, $100, half a sheet of plywood, six old planks of knotty pine, two rubber bands and one copy of the Sunday New York Times to make over a room. I would totally rock that.



This project did involve trips to Ikea, Home Depot, Lowe's and an office supply store, and didn't involve any rubber bands, but it still looks hot. The shelves on the other side of the room are getting containers and labels. I need another trip to Ikea to finish it up.



And yeah, it's snowing again. Even with the snow, the view is better with the window.

More art, another collage made in December:



pescados musicales

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Lots of stuff going on, lots of changes happening and lots of time being eaten by said stuff and changes, which leaves little time for art. So, I'm going to distract you from the fact that I haven't posted a new Loteria collage in a while with some art I haven't shown yet.


las peras verdes

This is a mixed-media collage mounted on bristol board, using more of the mini-pear prints from last summer.

And this is a quick peek at one of the distractions in my life right now - another reno project, this time in Carlos' studio.

We decided that the shed attached to his studio would benefit from the addition of a window, among other things. Of course, there's always more to a project than that.



First I needed to clean everything out of the room and paint. I like to visualize things in advance (and I'm impatient), hence the blue tape to see where the window will go.



A quick trip to Ikea with a very focused list netted us some extra-tall shelves to create an impressive amount of storage along one wall of the room. I love Ikea.



Today we put in the new window and tomorrow, after the foamy, squirty insulation is dry and shaved down and the moulding is added, I'll take photos from inside. This is a picture from outside and in looking at it closely, I'd better add "paint the barn" to my To Do list for the Spring. Ignore the air conditioner lounging on the shed roof. It's a long story involving two ladders, a long rope, colorful words in several languages, rodent offspring and a slight miscommunication...



Have you noticed that when life-changing events are taking place that you have difficulty producing art? I certainly do. It isn't even a matter of having the time or desire, but rather the mental, emotional and creative energy necessary. So, a fallow and frustrating time.

Art Quilts at Play

Here's the big, exciting news! I've been living this project for the last 18 months and I can finally share. Elin Waterston and I have written a new book, Art Quilts at Play, for C&T Publishing, to be released in January 2009.

This new book is a perfect complement to our first book, Art Quilt Workbook, and covers a plethora of surface design techniques and special effects on fabric. The book is full of illustrated how-tos, many, many samples from the different processes and oodles of finished art. Once we've shown you how to create and alter some beautiful fabric, we give you scads of ideas of what to do with it, from challenges and trades to collaborations and more. Our first book was based on an in-depth, comprehensive class that we'd been teaching. This new one also draws on workshops plus the techniques we each use in our own art.

Over a year ago we asked a small number of very talented women in the art quilt and mixed-media world to contribute some pieces to our book and they very generously agreed. Their work enriches the material and shows you how different artists with different voices and different techniques approach the same themes or materials with exciting, original and unique results. We're so grateful to each of them for their contributions.

Natalya Aikens
Woodie Anderson
Liz Berg
Gail Ellspermann
Janet Ghio
Rayna Gillman
Terry Grant
Kathryn Hunter
Andrea Jenkins
Jane LaFazio
Mati McDonough
Tricia McKellar
Kim Rae Nugent
Karen Stiehl Osborn
Virginia Spiegel
Beryl Taylor

A few of our students were also asked and graciously agreed to share their work with us. We are so thankful to them for their generosity (and in a couple of cases, their bravery as well!)

There will be a big release party, book signing and art quilt exhibition at the Country Quilter in Somers NY on Saturday, February 21st and we hope you can join us!

You can pre-order an autographed copy of the book now by contacting me. We're so pleased with the response to our first book and hope that you'll like this one just as much.

Now open - come on in!

I've been talking about an Etsy store for just about three years now. I've finished some cool new jewelry and posted it here.



I'll be adding more items to the store as I finish them. I have plans for a variety of categories, including more jewelry, small mixed-media art and collages on paper. Stay tuned!



Another goal on my list for the year ticked off, woohoo.

Text as design and inspiration

Artist Trading Card with a background of newspaper from India and a Chinese fortune cookie fortune

I love the use of text as a design element. I know that a lot of other artists are also inspired by and incorporate text into their work. I adore the way Karen Stiehl Osborn uses text, Rayna Gillman does beautiful things with letters, and Virginia Spiegel has a way with words, just to name a few. I don't know whether my affinity for the use of all things alphabetical is linked to my colored-grapheme synesthesia or not but I do know that I find it a very satisfying inspiration.

Sometimes the forms of the letters are pure design elements for their shapes, used as background noise, as in this piece from my Climate series.

Sometimes the letters or numbers are large and central to the piece but don't "say" anything.

Sometimes the letters spell something relevant.

I can't get enough letters and numbers. I have over 600 fonts installed on my computer and subscribe to a bunch of font newsletters. You might say that I'm a font junkie. I'm such a letter nerd in fact that I print out and collect the Type Trading Cards from ITC (International Typeface Corporation) each month. They're like ATCs, but with font history and fun facts.

I also collect lots of things that have text on them to use in my work. I have scores of fortune cookie fortunes -

Maps -



Old music scores -



Pages from falling-apart books -



Reproductions of old money or letters -



Postage stamps -



And of course, paper and stamps with other languages.

Handmade paper with Korean characters -



A newspaper from India -



And more alphabet stamp sets than you can shake a stick at - in every size from 1/4" to 3" high, and several character sets.



I've been playing with layering text of different scales, different languages, different colors, to say something and just for the forms. I can think of so many more directions to explore.





I found some really neat letters made of recycled tin cans in a catalog recently. The letters are about 8" high and 1.5" deep. Because they were on sale, the company was out of a lot of letters and only had two vowels left (u and o). It made spelling something out a little challenging, but I did think of a great word for my studio, as you can see!



My husband walked in right after I hung them up (probably attracted by the hammering) and wanted to know why the wall said "spout". Silly boy...