thoughts on art and creative living

This is the artwork I am entering into the “Dreams” show at the Launchpad Gallery, located at 534 SE Oak Street, in Portland. The opening is this Friday, October 3, from 6-10 pm. There’s expected to be over 60 artists showing work in the “dreams theme”.

It’s been a while since I’ve created an artwork that was strictly related to the interpretation of a dream, but since I almost always begin and end a painting without knowing my next step (preferring to start with one image and free associate til the painting completes itself), I think of the painting process as one which is very similar to a dreaming process, anyway. In this particular case, I began with the image of the bird, then added the plants. The semi-transparent woman and swirls decided to materialize at around 2 am the night before the deadline to get this painting into the gallery. Deadlines sometimes help to get the painting from dreaming into actualization… and off the easel.

I’ve started a few new paintings but am not at the point of sharing them yet.  In addition to my fine art, I’ve been working on a new series of necklaces to sell at the fairs (and wholesale to a few local stores). Here’s a sample of some new designs that use gold and silver leaf within the design. I’ve now updated my online store with the new pendants, which can be purchased through my secure paypal shopping cart.  I’m working on uploading these to my etsy shop.

Summer is a busy time for me. Between creating websites, creating art, and doing art shows, I manage to keep myself pretty busy. The summer weather is extending through September, for which I am especially thankful. I recall that last year around this time I was already lamenting summer’s end. Fall is gorgeous in Portland also, but I don’t pretend to absolutely love the amount of rain we get in the winters. I’m hoping to hold onto summer for as long as I can. The only really good thing I can say about foul weather is that it might make it a bit easier to get more painting done, with less distractions.

The painting above, “Summer Parade”, was completed about a month ago. It’s a rather small, sweet painting, which was inspired by a photo I took of a child some months back, snapped during a walk through my neighborhood (the original photo is this earlier post). In the original photo, the child bends down a large flower in order to smell it, so I exaggerated the size of flowers to give it more of a fantasy effect. I never figured out whether the child was a boy or a girl, but I like the ambiguity in the painting. It’s a rather smallish piece (8×10 image size), in a recycled frame that I painted.

I never know if anyone is following this blog or not since the only comments I get are from cheap pharmaceutical companies selling viagra. If anyone IS out there, you may have noticed that I’ve fallen off of my posting habit for a couple of weeks.

So what have I been up to? I’ve been so busy that it’s hard to remember. There’s the continual supply of website updates to be done (my own as well as those of my clients). On top of this, I’ve been crazy mad preparing for artisan markets. It’s hard to know whether such ventures will ever pay off since one has to invest money to even have a chance of re-cooping one’s expenses for the cost of materials and presentation stuff. And then there’s the countless hours of slaving away, reproducing myself in the format of affordable products. Fortunately, I had a really good weekend… sold an original painting and lots of smaller stuff (prints, magnets, and pendants), so now I’m encouraged to do more! The added benefit is that I’m getting out of the house and meeting people. One of the downfalls of doing web design is that I spend a lot of my time in front of a computer. I feel so much more energized by getting my work out of my space. I have a contact high from all of the great compliments on my work.

Here’s my most recent completed painting:

Now that I have a handful of new paintings, I’ve updated them to my gallery, but I think it’s interesting to see the unfolding of imagery. The background of this painting originally belonged to another that I started (a lotus image, in an earlier post), but I felt that the background was in competition with the main image, so I started something new with it. I carved the tree images into the background, then gilded the recessed carvings with gold leaf. The patterned “wind drifts” and foliage are on the same layer as the bird (a paint-altered collage), which floats above the background. I decided to call it “Wind Song”.

Bird imagery has been a recurrent theme for many years. The painting I just sold was the first of such images, based on an actual dream of birds walking around each other in water. My beloved “Aquabird Dream”:

I’ve always found it interesting that though it was one of my first “serious” (i.e. original) paintings, it is the one that probably gets the MOST attention, even when shown with my more recent (more dimensional) artworks. I always wonder if it isn’t because I had a certain quality of naiveite when I created that painting (before I was fully infected by my art education), and was creating out of a truly personal vision. The painting was a steal considering how well-loved it was, but I’ve had it in my possession for 16 years. It was time to let it go. I was also glad that it went to another creative person (an author named Michael Hoeye. He gave me a copy of one of his books, “Time Waits for No Mouse”).

Here’s another thing I’m excited about. Spurred by the desire to make affordable art that people are likely to purchase at the artisan markets, I’ve started my own line of art pendant necklaces. They are reproductions of my artwork, cut in a circle, with a glass gem mounted on top. They are encased in baked polymer clay, and hang on a silver memory wire choker.