well, I have been remiss in keeping up with my blog.  blogs are strange things, to be sure.  i'm not sure what I expected from it, but it's not been all that interesting or fulfilling to be sure.  however, I will continue with it and get better at keeping more regular posts.  I have also, obviously since I haven't been posting pics, been remiss in keeping up with my art.  I think that some of that is due to some melancholy of late.  I do not really have my own space here, and even though I converted my mother's old office into my art space, it's still my mother's old office that i'm using as an art space.  it's still not really "mine".  it's hard living here after my mother's passing. it's so much her home, even still.  and it's really time to find a really good living situation for my father.  he needs to be more active, and I need more of my own life.  I feel "tethered" to the house, and he just sits on his "perch", lol, on his little sofa in the kitchen.  so, my creative juices have not really been flowing.  this is not an excuse as much as a reason.  but, mood follows action!  and I will attempt to get back to my commitment.  I have no pic for today.  but, hopefully I will have one to post in the next few days.

ciao 

same pic of some of my glasswork items. I'm going to use these as garden décor, planted randomly throughout.

just for kicks I thought I'd upload a video of my teacher, Paul Swartwood, doing some of his pieces, making it look just too easy. ;)

here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIbOXJWd5wM

hola my dear readers.  today I am attempting to teach myself to roll cigarettes.  I have heretofore been wildly unsuccessful and only manage to shred the paper and fling loose tobacco all over myself and the floor.  I will attempt to upload a video of this for entertainment.  I will also include an instructional video that I will research on youtube.  Here goes.....

okay, found a great one!  this guy's too fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXOzaMUueOY

please check him out. 

photos:

so for anyone checking this blog, I would be so appreciative of comments.  thank youuuu ;)

 work in progress:

this is done with colored hot glue, a definite new treasured find

 

 

4/9/13 so finally, with the help of my brilliant daughter, figured out the glitch with uploading the pictures.  I'm expanding my repertoire of work that I'm showing, and will start including my glass work, photography and paintings as well as collage.  The glass work above was done at Glen Echo in the Glassworks studio with my teacher Paul Swartwood.

4/4/13

for anyone checking, there is some kind of problem uploading pictures.  I've tried multiple times with no success.  Hopefully, I'll get this resolved soon.  Thanks for stopping by, and have a look at what has been posted so far if you'd like.

4/3/13

oh my.  I have been absent, and not sticking to my schedule.  As you can see I changed the format, making it a collage a week.  This has to do mainly with not having enough room to do a piece a day, but also I felt like a piece a week would be more manageable. 

I've started a new therapy, too, which took some getting used to.  But, I'm back on track, and here's the piece for this week.

The style of it comes from the childhood style of drawing squiggly lines and filling in the shapes with color.  The outlines were made with clear glue sticks in the glue gun, and the colored filler is colored glue sticks.  The colored glue sticks for the glue gun is my latest treasured find.  LOVE love love!

and here it is, (so far. work in progress):

okay, glitch.  cannot seem to upload photo. will try again tomorrow.  :(

3/22/13 Day 6
since no one is actually reading this:  blah blah blah blah blah blah and blah

and here's today's piece:

3/21/13 Day 5

okay, oops, missed several days, but this is still day 5 of the piece a day, cuz this is the 5th piece.  I know what happened.  I misplaced the photo of my daughter, and was really in the mode of working on that.  I had a really hard time shifting gears, since I couldn't work on the photo.  I started on this piece:

But it was half-hearted because I was distracted.  I kept stopping to look for the photo, which I finally found the next day.  So, I lost some momentum.  Also, another detour from the format, my next piece isn't technically a collage.  It is another style that I've been having a lot of fun with, using regular house paint to do dribble painting.  I wouldn't say I'm a die-hard Jackson Pollock fan, though I don't dislike him either, but I'm a fan of that style of painting.  It's just really fun.  I feel like a little kid.  And the paint is way cheaper than acrylic from the art store.  I go to Home Depot and get samples for $2.97 a piece, and have at it.  There's a lot of paint in those samples, too.  

Okay, here it is:
Untitled

3/16/13 Day4

interestingly enough, the blog is proving to be the most challenging aspect of this project.  I thought making something everyday would be the hardest part, but I want to make the blog interesting and am feeling a bit inept.  Everything I've read about doing blogs says to write about something you feel passion for, and I am definitely passionate about art.  Especially the mixed media/collage medium that I've fallen in love with.  I don't know if it was so much me finding collage as it finding and calling to me.  It's hard to explain, it's a visceral thing that just calls to you and you're simply at its mercy.  But, it's an exquisite surrender.  I love it.  I say one of the reasons I like collage is because my drawing skills are not superb, but I'm really just being cheeky.  I don't have tons of experience with drawing, but I CAN do it.  I just prefer the textural nature of collage, the layering, the way xeroxed images look against an interesting background, on and on.  There's an inexplicable magic to it.

So, on to today's piece.  "Child At Play"
I found a black and white photo of my daughter, Alexine, that her best friend in 8th grade took of her for a photography class.  The assignment was photographing movement.  I used a lesson from one of my books on mixed media techniques to do a "weathered" photograph.  I swiped the whole picture with an ink pad called Distress Ink in the shade Tattered Rose.  I bent the picture in several places and added more ink to the creases.  I used a sandpaper block to sand away parts of the photo around the edges, then applied ripped, white paper to less important areas and rubbed some of it off with water.  I then covered that paper with the Distress Ink.  The canvas was painted with acrylic and the photo was applied with hot glue, which I also used around the edges.  I used Glidden house paint to dribble paint around the photo.

And here it is, "Child At Play"

3/14/13

I picked a photograph of my mother, who passed away October 27, 2011, which was taken when she was in her 20s.  She looks like a movie star.  The vintage letters spell out "she comes to me in butterflies".  I had a session with a medium last year that said my mom appears to me in butterflies.  I mean, what the heck, why not.  I like the idea.  The vintage letters I used are sticky, but not enough to stay put once I put on the epoxy, which I found out the hard way.  No matter how I positioned the piece, the letters kept slowly migrating across the piece.  I took a picture of it while the letters were still in line, and another of it the next day.  The letters fairly scattered, but this is how it dried, so that's what the finished product looks like.  I like it.  Which is good, because there's no changing it once the epoxy sets.

materials:  acrylic paint, glue stick, butterfly images found online, xeroxed photo, epoxy

here are the before and after:

A Piece a Day For a Year and a Day

I decided to do a piece a day because it is giving me structure and discipline, and most importantly, it is getting me out of my rut.  I've been stuck on several pieces for months on end, and have been having a hard time getting out of my head.  It is freeing me, oddly enough, even though it's strict, because I don't have time to think too much, (deadly to any creative endeavor).  I just go into my art space and start painting, gluing and cutting.  It's wonderful. 

So, I started this on 3/13/13.  Seemed like a good magical number for a starting date.  3 is the magic number, after all, at least according to Schoolhouse Rock.  I chose a year and a day, as opposed to just a year, just simply because I liked the idea.  I'm cutting and pasting something I found when I googled the origin of a year and a day:  The year-and-a-day rule is found in a number of cases of common law, both in the US and in Europe. In the United States, notice of intention to file a medical malpractice lawsuit must be made within a year and a day of the alleged incident 

 That's one example of this tradition.  This time period is also based on some early European traditions.

  So, this is my project.  I'm going to journal about the process and upload pictures of each piece.  I hope you enjoy.

 

3/13/13

My first piece is called Meadow, and I used a 5x5 square block canvas, acrylic paint, art papers, a glue stick, a funky, curly twig and covered the whole thing with epoxy.