Russian Tea Time

Kelsey and I had a splendid visit the Russian Tea Time recently. We felt cocooned and pampered, as all dressed up ladies out for the afternoon should!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Sneak Preview

22" x 30" small crop of original drawing

Oil, graphite, iron oxide, colored pencils,gesso

The end of the semester is near and I'm immersed in several projects. I've begun my residency at the police department but I'm not posting finished work at this point. I had an attack of the jitters and decided that I needed a safety net. I'm giving myself complete freedom to work on the art representing the department but I'm not posting anything till I show the chief my direction. I feel a large dose of responsibility in representing the department visually and I'm still fumbling around right now with how I want to approach the work. So this is a small crop of the starting point. I'm beginning with law enforcement tools. Every time I visit the department the subject of pens comes up. Law enforcement officials are just as pen obsessed as artist's are. So here is a tiny peek at a corner of drawing one.

Police Station Glallery: The Chicago Landscapes

10" x 10"
canvas and mixed media


I'm incredibly lucky that Janice Elkins agreed to loan seven of her beautiful Chicago Landscape series. Her work is rich, layered, mysterious and gloriously confident. This show will be up through January and while I was hanging the show, several people were excited to see her work there. Meeting artist and getting to see people's studio is one of the most fun parts of my job. Thanks you, Janice!

Flying Pictures Flying Home

This beautiful suite of paintings is from my friend Ronell who closed my book with these beautiful landscapes of her home town in the River Valley of Loire, France. I love how she has cleverly framed each painting with film borders. A very creative and fitting end to my beautiful book. Stop by and see what all my fellow flyers have done in my book (and others books as well) as we wrap up our project. We have only a couple more books waiting to fly home and then we sadly end this wonderful project.

Spanners and Lace

22" x 30"
Oil stick and graphite
Micasious Iron Oxide
"Art and Design"

Today I met with the Chief of Police and he agreed I can set up an Artist-In-Residence program at the station. He and I discussed a body of work I'm thinking of creating around the police department. I'm actually going to be working in the station!!!!I can't tell you how excited I am about this new body of work and how great it feels to be launching my painting career in this particular way. We are going to use the work to raise money for the AIR program and perhaps a favorite charity for the department!! Lucky me!!!

My recent drawings are much larger than I've been working on so they take longer. This one is a reprise of my spanner and lace of earlier last month. I'm about ready to move on to a new tool now but this particular tool held lots of interest for me.

One day in class we had a discussion about the difference between art and design. From the fine artists there almost seems to be an attitude of disdain about design. And yet, if it were not for good design, we would not be sitting as comfortably, using tools that fit so well in our hands nor have buildings that were both beautiful and functional. Design is one of art's more ubiquitous manifestations and the underpinning of our culture. Perhaps its more valuable to say that art and design are both part of visual culture and deserve equal attention and respect.

Moleskine Exchange

Oil pastel and graphite

This is my work in Steph's book for our Moleskine project. We are having a blast in the rotation and I loved following Steph's take on Blake's creation drawing. I thought spanners would be a nice complement to the creative act of, well...creating.

Remember this? Well today I recieved 2 free hugs from kids on the street in my town!!!

Palimpsest

collage, oil, graphite, gesso on
300lb hot press wc paper
22" x 30"

Palimpsest is an old concept of recycling. It was used when parchment was too expensive to throw away and writers would sand the skins down and re use them. Some of the old writing appeared as ghost images. This was our assignment a few weeks back in my Creative Drawing class and I love it. I intend to do it again and am considering doing a tutorial on it. Any interest?

I'm using copies of all my drawings up to this point in my class and layered them and hid them and layered, scrubbed and scrapped at the surface. It was wonderful to have an excuse to use paper that cost 10US. The paper feels like a slab rather than a sheet!

Thatcher Woods on a Sunday

November Shetchbook
9" x 12"
oil stick
graphite

October was such a warm month, the weather could have been confused with August. November has now settled in with a few snow flakes and I've been walking in the woods often. The colors have all now shifted to gray blues and vivid golds. There are lots of beautiful dried grasses and plants. Everything is so gestural and I'm loving using graphite on Oil stick. Makes me feel like I'm a drawing painter.

I'm working on several large drawings for class projects but the nice thing is that I'm really shifting my work and feel much freer to work any way I want. I'll be posting a few drawings this week so stay tuned.

Obama: America's New President

Today, I feel proud to be an American. Now it's time for all of us to roll up our sleeves and keep the momentum going. President Obama, like President Kennedy, asks us what we can contribute.

Yesterday while running errands around town with my "I voted" sticker on, people smiled at each other and congratulated one another. This election has drawn our community together. Could this really be the end of the Civil War that began 164 years ago?

Drawing Now- A book review

The book Drawing Now: Eight Propositions,published in tandem with an exhibit if the same name at the Museum of Modern Art, covers alot of ground and many artists. Here are the propositions, set up by curator Laura Hoptman

1-Science and art, nature and artifice
2-Ornament and crime: toward decoration
3-drafting an architecture
4-drawing happiness
5-Mental maps and metaphysics
6-Popular culture and national culture
7-Comics and other sub cultures
8-fashion, likeness and allegory

If you are looking for ways to enrich your drawing practice by moving away from reality based art into idea driven art, you may find this book helpful. Since taking my Creative Drawing class, I've been appreciating conceptual art much more.


One artist featured in the book is Matthew Ritchie. He used ink and graphite on plastic sheets 22" x 56" (55.9 x 165cm) for his series of seven drawings entitled
Everyone Belongs To Everyone Else.
(To make this site work, scroll over the name of the drawing to see the image.)These beautiful drawings remind me of maps of human relationships; between people, the landscape and ideas. They are elegant and original. I can only imagine how full of light they are in person.

Under the Fashion portion of the exhibition are Elizabeth Payton's colored pencil portraits. They are haunting and very textural. She's built up rich layers of color and texture on these works and used her colors, subjects and mark making to create images of pop icons. Although beautiful, the sitters look haunted.
Images of her work can be seen here but I'm having a hard time finding the colored pencil ones that are in the book.

Chris Ofili's Prince among Prince among Thieves with Flowers uses pencil on paper to communicate a bitter irony of power. What does not show up on the web are the tiny, faces that make up the outline of the Prince. They are cartoon representations and very effective in conveying his point.

Altogether a rich book and worth a look.