87. That is how many paintings we are up to so far. We are done with most of the ones in the house, aside from the ones framed under glass. Those ones are a bit troublesome for me at the moment, due to the reflection of the glass. I have some ideas on how to deal with it, I just need to do it. But we still have a few in our own house to photograph as well. Then there is all the sketches. That will be a different setup. Next week we start in on the sculptures of her husband, Leonard. He is the mastermind of the Sparty sculpture up at MSU.
I also brought home a box of her stuff to try and sort through and figure out how to organize. She saved every newspaper clipping that ever mentioned her, and there were a lot over her lifetime. Then there is a little box of wondrous delight. It holds handmade artist Christmas cards that Irene and Leonard made to send out to friends and family at the holidays. Some are photos, some are prints, some hand colored, some not, some even have the original sketches. It’s a little treasure trove of vintage art.
Here’s some photos of my organizing and the Christmas card box.
And here are just a couple more of Irene’s paintings. You can see them all on the Flickr site. This is Marionettes in Rehearsal and The Prophet.
Life continues to get in the way of doing somethings like blogging. I’ve been pretty busy with kids, family, holidays and business details. It’s all good, just kind of crazy some days. Allergies have run amuck in our household and everyone has been stuffed up. A chaos of toys, clothes, papers, and pet hair has taken over the house and I really don’t want to deal with it. I am dealing with it, but I don’t want to. I went to an art retreat with my art group a few weeks ago and I have yet to unpack. All the above mentioned things have left me with little motivation to clean and settle my art supplies back into their homes, hence no art has progressed. But I have managed to shop for some really cool items. One of them was a board like this one. Nope, not from QVC though. I knew Costco had them a few months ago and I really wanted one but we didn’t have funds for anything extra at the time. So this last week I managed to get over to the store and went straight to the shelves that housed the boards and found one, the floor model. I didn’t care. I grabbed it and pulled the tag off the shelf that had the price on it, for the cashier. Then I got over to our local bead shop on Saturday and fed the bead monster inside me. It was needed.
But with all that I have been visiting my in-laws once a week to photograph paintings. Irene’s story continues to unfold for me and I am loving it. Her story would make a great novel. Maybe someday it will. Her self portrait was pulled out of a second ‘Paintings Closet’ and I could stare at this for hours and still not see all the symbolism. Silent Shrine was in memory of the bombing of Hiroshima and it is an amazing piece of work. The Mystic creeped me out, but so far that is the only one.
I head back this week again with both the boys in tow. The older one is off for the week. So they get to have some quality fun time with Grandpa which will probably involve some water balloons and/or water guns. I’ll be sure to pack a change of clothes for them.
At some point this week, I hope to reassemble my work area and get back to work on something creative.
I got through the first batch of photos of Irene’s paintings this past Saturday. We hooked up a flat screen monitor to the laptop so I could actually see what I was working on, and thank you Lord for RAW data and Photoshop! These came out so darn good. Right now we are displaying them on my Flickr page (click on the West Winds Studio set) but eventually they will have their own website and flickr page. Eventually, we’ll get them in some sort of order as well. Right now, these are the ones from the middle and bottom shelves of the ‘paintings closet’.
Here’s “Luna Moths” and “Devil’s Paintbrush”,
We looked briefly through a few boxes of her things on Thursday and there is such a treasure trove of amazing stuff. I had to put it away or I wouldn’t have gotten any actual photos taken.
I’ll have more of my own stuff in the days to come. Deadlines are next week, so my goal is to get stuff done on time.
Yesterday we began the task of photographing Nana’s (Victor’s Grandmother) paintings. I knew there were a lot of paintings. I heard stories of ‘the closet of paintings’ yet in the ten plus years I’ve been around the family, I had never seen this closet. Then there are more paintings on the office shelves and in almost every room of the house, the walls are filled her paintings. They have never been cataloged. But when I finally got going on this and started to see the amount of paintings we had to go through I realized that whatever I got done this first day was just a drop in a very big bucket. With that being said I love this project. I love seeing all these paintings that span most of her life and all the different subjects she explored. I find it all fascinating. The goal is to eventually have some shows displaying her work, but we have a ways to go before we can talk about that.
So I worked all afternoon and got nine done. Yup, 9. I knew there would be some trial and error, learning curves and all that, so I kept my expectations low. The last one, I took it totally crooked and didn’t even notice until I had on the computer. Next session I’ll bring a pot of coffee.
The other thing on my mind of late has been setting up an Etsy shop. The graphic design business did well last year but not so much this year. I know this year is still getting going but getting clients to pay has become a giant issue. These are good clients that I have worked with for several years and have just hit hard times. So I can’t really be mad, just very frustrated. It has made it impossible for me to keep up with some of my stuff. I can’t continue to supplement my fiber art (and other hobbies) needs from our regular income. Usually the graphic design would keep that afloat. So I need to at least try to sell some of my stuff. I don’t know if it will work, but I have to try. So I’ve been reading lots on the Etsy community, learning all I can. With my experience in marketing, I want to have some things thought out -packaging, labels, cards, logos and so on. But I have to careful not to get hung up on it all, because that is something I would do. Sometimes I’m just a little too cautious. I’m working on that.
I pulled out some items this weekend to add to my box. These were pieces of craft metal that I embossed with use of a stamp and clay tools. I then painted them with some glass paint, added the embossing powder and got the heat gun out.
Now I need to go finish my journal page. The due date is quickly approaching and I keep getting distracted with things like laundry and dinner for the family. Details, details.
I would prefer to post my projects when they are done but that won’t be for probably another two weeks and that would not help my goal of posting more on the blog. So in the spirit of all that I’m working on three projects, two of which I actually have photos of.
First is the art journal exchange I’m doing with my art group. Each person picks their own theme for their journal and each person will make page spread for that theme. This particular journal is about books. I had to think about this for a little while. Came up with retro cover art. Being a graphic artist and having designed a few covers, I love a good design. So with a little Adobe help I put together this and did an image transfer:
It has already been cut down to page size since I took this as well as had some interfacing stuck to the back. I’ve started markering the pages and we’ll see what else soon enough.
Then there is the fabric box challenge also with my art group. First time around with a fabric box project. I tried to keep it simple and use what I have in the stash. I knew I was going to do a lot of hand stitching so I had to get the foundation built. Here’s the beginning assembly.
All hand dyed fabrics from last summer. Stamp pad and Shiva stenciling. I’m getting to know my sewing machine a little better. Thank you Mary.
And here’s the box looking like a box. I know I should have waited sew the sides together but I was quickly getting board with it’s flat shape and needed to see it in box form. It needs more work and a lid (challenge requirement). But it looks like a box and that helps.
This weekend is the first photo shoot of the cataloging project. I got the photo umbrellas yesterday. Little nervous about getting it all done correctly but I’ve been reading up on my camera operation. The darn thing even tells me when my manual settings are going to take a bad photo and how to fix it. Yup, love my camera.
My favorite early sign of spring is in full bloom in back of my house. They pop early. They pop really early next to the dryer vent. I don’t care, I’ll take it. The little weather bug icon on my laptop screen says it’s 54 degrees. That is so wonderfully close to 60 that I am almost giddy. Then add in that the three year old decided to fully get on the potty train today, well darn it, it’s a good day!
Been working on several things in the midst of all the excitement. I don’t have photos of everything yet but here’s what I do have. The new theme for the online quilt challenge group is passage. I knew right away what I wanted to do. I dyed an old map last summer with the MSU project. It was cool enough to be a project all on it’s own. Here’s a sneak peak close up:
I want to incorporate an image of a compass onto it. I haven’t figured out how I am going to do that yet.
Also preparing to help my in-laws photograph and catalog the many, many paintings that Victor’s grandmother created a long time ago. So this means some new lighting equipment and really learning how to use all the advanced features of my camera. I had to do some research on the best ways to photograph oil paintings in order to not have giant glares on everything. She didn’t paint them with oils but egg tempera, which makes the paintings very reflective. I think I got some good ideas but it will take some trial and error for the most part. But afterward I will have all the makings for taking some awesome pics of my own pieces!
Yup, the fourth completed project this year. This is a record for me! Stop laughing. This one has been hanging on the wall for the past year for two reasons: it needed something and I didn’t know what that was and the dear lady kept bubbling up. It gave her a bad complexion and a bumpy kimono, so not flattering. But with a little sashiko stitch inspiration for the finishing and matte medium for the bubbling lady, I got past my creative blocks with this piece in a day. I also realized this idea would work great for the art journal exchange I’m involved with.
This is called Lost in Another World.
So I finished up the 3 Creative Studios Quilt Challenge today. It’s about 12″ x16″, deconstructed rubbing on black fabric, lots of hand stitching with hand-dyed threads. I found that the stitching worked well with the print texture of the puzzle pieces. The whole process was largely about experimentation. With the theme of puzzle I decided to just go literal and pull out some actual puzzle pieces. I just figured out what to do as I went along. It is a departure from other work I’ve done and for that I like this.
My art group is doing a round robin art journal exchange. I’ve done round robins before but never built an art journal. So I did lots of reading and surfing around online, looking how other people construct these things. I absorbed the gist of how it all works and went about doing it my own way. It was a lot of work, but fun. Aside from a little Peltex, some eyelits, eyelit tool and cording I used materials I already had. All hand-dyed fabrics and paper. The paper was packing paper I dyed last summer during the MSU project. I really had no idea how it would look but figured it couldn’t hurt. It turned out pretty cool. I used this book as a reference. I read through various sections several times to figure out my best course of action. I went with the ‘Coptic binding’ for my journal because it seemed to be the best way to deal with all the thick page spreads. I’ll admit that I got myself a little worried at first because this binding sat under the heading of ‘advanced bindings’. Well, my worry was really for nothing. The binding was the easiest part of the project.
The theme of the book is modeled after the ‘books of hours’ from the middle ages. The idea is to have each person create a page around one routine in their lives. Seeing the beautiful in the mundane. So I worked to make the book look like something old, used, somewhat worn and imperfect. Everything is machine stitched, then painted, glued and so on.
I really like the results. Definitely something I will explore again, but maybe a few less page signatures. Now onto my other deadlines!
I finished one piece I was working on. Not crazy about it. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either. And fitting it into the theme of ‘puzzle’ was weak. Here it is:
So I decided to tackle this challenge again with an idea I had been thinking about for a few weeks. How well would black fabric work with the deconstructed rubbings technique? So I borrowed some puzzle pieces from my kids and built this:
and what I got was this:
Pretty cool! Kind of reminds me of art from the 80′s. I then used some Shiva sticks to the edges with some more puzzle pieces. Fused it to some felt and then turned on the sewing machine. After some calm negotiations, the machine agreed to work. I’m not the most skilled at using sewing machines and it sometimes it takes me a little bit of time to get it working smoothly. So last night, on commercial breaks of Dr. Who on BBC, I got some free motion stitches in place.
Part of this challenge for myself is to see how quickly can I pull this piece together, without ditching the quality. I have some other things I’m going to attempt to do to this today. Stay tuned.
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