I dropped off my piece at the Collective Visions Gallery in Bremerton, WA over the weekend. I was very worried given our recent spate of really terrible weather that had prevented our leaving our house for the entire week! I was finally forced out of the house when we lost power. It worked out very well in the end, as I stayed in Seattle where I could take the bus to the ferry that would take me to Bremerton. No driving, no worries!
As promised, here’s a link to the recently published piece where my upcoming event is mentioned. If you are a subscriber to the Walla Walla Union Bulletin, the article was published in the Etc. section. Enjoy!
Last week I sent a spate of press releases gratefully written by the coordinator of the juried art show at the Collective Visions Gallery. I was surprised at the number of outlets I came up with. Thank goodness for my training at the corporate media office of Nordstrom. I wish I didn’t feel so dirty shamelessly promoting myself though!
I did get two nibbles and will post links to those results soon.
I am so excited to have my recent work, “Flemish Convention,” selected for the 
upcoming fifth annual juried art show at the Collective Visions Gallery in Bremerton, Washington. There were over 800 pieces submitted; 137 were selected. The show opens January 28, 2012!
Rio Wrenn and I will be displaying new works at a spring 2012 show in a spring 2012 show at the LaunchPad Gallery in Portland, OR. Thank you to Jennifer Porter of Chroma for making it happen. I am so very excited to have my first show in Portland! More details to come.
I had the extraordinary opportunity to participate in a TOMS event recently held at the Renton location of C’est la Vie. I met and worked alongside two other artists, decorating shoes purchased during the event. Between the 3 of us, I believe we did more than 45 pairs of shoes. We worked non-stop between 11 am and 6 pm that day, enjoying every minute of it. Thank you to Colleen, Jannie, and the entire crew. I had a great time!
I’ve just returned from Shape PDX in Portland with a renewed desire to get a show of my own on the books somewhere there in town. Maybe this will be one of the featured works?
Life has a funny way of making its demands come due all at the same time. It’s been several weeks since I was last in the studio.
How apt then is the title I just came up with for this painting. It has felt as though I’ve been stuck in a cave for the recent weeks. Well now it’s time to come back into the light of the studio and get to it!
The day the earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit northeast Japan, we were on our way to Whistler. The next morning, the BC paper was full of amazing photographs of the destruction. There were a couple of the shipping containers at the port in Sendai. The composition was striking: rectangular shapes pushed against one another, in shades of red, with punches of bluish green. A crane in three large yellow pieces sat atop the piles. The images stuck with me.
An interpretation of shipping containers after the tsunami March 2011
This is my artistic response to those images that embedded themselves in my brain. It is the underpainting, but its a start. Just like the recovery efforts in Japan.
I have these great tools, dubbed “paint pushers” by my peers. They have a silcone tip, and come in various sizes, my favorite being about 3″ wide. I use them as I would a brush, but the effect is more schmear than brushstroke.
This is an example of one of those images that is a direct result of just covering the ground in a color, any color. In this case, a tint of blue, still present in the final image as the petals of the flower. I worked with what was suggested, and this is the result.
The painting took about12 hours total to complete, not counting drying time in between layers.
This is inspired by the imprint left from a waking nightmare I experienced a couple of weeks ago. The idea was family groups being annihilated in clouds of gunfire leaving the souls to burst forth out of the flesh evaporating in the hail of bullets. The sense was of butterflies carrying those souls outward before collapsing to the ground as heaps of flesh.
Wouldn’t that startle you out of a deep slumber?
