Making Marks

Red, White and View

This is a sketch for an upcoming exhibit at Lunaria, Red, White and View: Artist Visions of Freedom and Color. The design is inspired by a book I found last week by Nancy Crow (self titled). She is a quilter who works in free-form machine piecing. I am drawn to her use of graphic lines and bold color statements.

The sketch is acrylic on watercolor paper. Now I need to decide how to take this forward. I'm tempted to use fabric, but I may try to paint on canvas or use fabric, paper and metal on a substrate. In any case, I hope to capture some essence of the U.S. flag without hitting the viewer over the head with the traditional image.

This week in pictures

This has been a great week! I received TWO packages for the 5 senses swap hosted by Jen. The photo with the mug contains the items from my swap partner Jackie. She hit the target with the fabulous color combination and lovely, useful items. Thank you, Jackie!

Then Jen sent a thank you for participating. I love the little lavender in a matchbox. That's a clever idea. And I'm not showing my chocolate bar - it's all mine!

The iris are blooming in Oregon right now. This picture may inspire a painting. I love the color combination.

Finally, here's another picture of Scooter. Did I mention he's cute?

(I've tried to fix the formatting here. I give up. Maybe I need to upgrade.)

Part Terrier, All Cute

This is our new dog, Scooter. We got him from the Linn County Dog Control in Albany. He was picked up in Sweet Home as a stray, so we don't know much about him except that he's super cute, mellow and affectionate. The shelter guesses he's about 3 years old and a Schnauzer mix. (We kind of are thinking he's a Border Terrier mix.) He was in a run surrounded by 5 large, barking dogs and was very scared when we went to visit him. Also, he had a tick on his nose (ew!), but the gal at the shelter removed that before we left.

This picture shows him the most relaxed we've seen since he came home last night. He's endured an hour-long car ride, a bath from us, a trip to the groomer's today, and flea medication. On Monday he is scheduled for a trip to the vet, and if all goes well, he'll be altered. We're hoping the vet can give us a better idea of his breeds and age.

For now, it's just time for a walk.

Menagerie

I see these delightful shrubs on my way to the grocery store every week, and they make me smile every time. The dog is clear in the foreground, and there is a teddy bear on his back and a giraffe in the background. They are in the landscaping at a vet's office. What clever decorations! They also hired a mural artist to paint their colorful sign. I really appreciate business owners who value artists and hire them for work. Thank you, Silver Falls Eyecare!

Silverton is full of public art murals. The downtown is being "cuted up" to welcome all kinds of visitors. Recently we renewed Lunaria Gallery with a new coat of paint and cleaning inside. It looks great!

The spring cleaning trend continues in my studio as I seriously consider what supplies I need and what I can let go of as my style and media preferences change. Sometimes It's difficult to make the hard call, but hanging on to unused stuff makes life too cluttered.

New Work and Inspiration

I have been working on a series of paintings with the theme of circles for a two-person exhibit at Lunaria in September. The focus of the series has been on understanding how to work well with different acrylic medium and paint. Most of my successful experiments have been with using a palette knife, but I've also enjoyed sgraffito. Originally, I wanted to paint a painting a week and chose a 6" x 6" format because I thought it was a very reasonable goal. I also bought larger canvases, and The Red Circle painting shown here is 12" x 12". Now I realize the 6" x 6" size might be too small.

The light bulb went on this week as I started connecting various bits of information and the integration was powerful. One of the pieces of inspiration was from a trip I took more than twenty years ago . One of the  sources was a book I ordered on a whim, Beyond Realism. Ryder describes a process for transforming an image (primarily landscape) into a series of color fields. This clearly describes how I have thought of images for a long time, but I haven't been able to articulate it. Coupled with a trip to Robin Ann Walker's terrific website, the thought-provoking ideas have been powerful this week.