Exhibition Talk Video

This is a talk I gave during a show of my artist books at the Hickory Museum of Art in 2022. The video was recorded spur of the moment on my phone by my husband. I was very fortunate to receive a grant to have some professional editing done with an emphasis on being able to show more details of the books as each one was discussed. This project was supported by the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, the Arts & Science Council, and the Cabarrus Arts Council. Special thanks to Robert Y. Lee for editing the video.

Gull Print Drawings

Last week, walking under a pier along a beach in Virginia by the Chesapeake I looked down and noticed a blanket of Gull footprints in the sand.

Being a fan of textures and patterns, I thought this might be fun to try to print or draw. Drawing first! I used my black sketchbook and some white and metallic pens and came up with this.

After drawing the footprints, I started to fill in the white areas working from the lower left to the upper right corner. In the process, when I was about 3/4 way finished, I liked how it looked with only part of the image filled in and the top left black. However, I decided to finish this as originally planned and do another one with only a partial fill in of the white.

Thanks for looking at my sketches!

New Paintings

To call these ‘new’ is sort of misleading. One of them (City, Spring) is actually new. But the other painting (Winter) is something I worked off and on at for about 2 years. I thought it was done but something still didn’t seem right so I had it sitting on a small easel so I could look at it off and on to decide if it was really done or not. Then one day, I took the easel down to dust. When I put the painting back, I placed it upside down not realizing it. Then when I looked at it, it all of the sudden seemed like a whole new painting. I made one or two small marks on it and declared it finished, finally! See, it does pay to clean every once in awhile!

City, Spring, Acrylic on Panel, 12″ x 12″

Winter, Acrylic on Panel, 16″ x 16″

Drawings – Seed Houses (part 1 of 2)

A few posts ago I showed some drawings I was doing on what I called “Seed People”. Well, seed people need a place to live so here are some Seed Houses. On some of these you can see a ghost of the image from the other side of the paper, but I don’t think it detracts that much. And that is what sketch books are for – to have fun and not worry about such things. Next week – Seed houses on black paper and some seed neighborhoods.

Drawings – Seed People

Not long ago I mentioned that I like to sit and doodle. Many of my doodles recently have been these characters that I decided to call seed people. The thought of seeds kept coming into my mind – first from the word ‘Seed’ that I made during my lettering class then through a guided meditation I did that used the imagery of sowing seeds as a metaphor. Sometimes I give them bits of clothing accessories like ties or suspenders or hats but this group seems to be without such adornments. I am also thinking I need to make some seed houses for them. I made a pile of these but here are a few of the seed people below.

Note that the first and third images, shown below, are pretty similar. This is because I created the one with a sharpie and it bled through the page. Rather than wasting a page (being frugal as I am), I decided to use it as a challenge to see what I could make using the marks that bled through as a guide.

Drawings – Eras of Creation

There was scholar by the name of Marcus Borg whose focus for his many books was historical interpretations of sacred texts. An overall theme in a chapter of a recent book I read was how ancient communities explained where the world came from. Many of us are familiar with the Creation story from the first chapter of the Hebrew Bible: On the first day God created, etc. Borg posed the word Day may have actually been another way to say Era. To think of plants or animals being formed over several hundred or thousand years rather than a single day sort of, in my mind, marries the idea of the Creation story with Evolution.

So began my illustration of the Eras of Creation. This is a topic that is sort of easy to get carried away with so to keep some parameters, I opted for a minimalistic approach. Though there is nothing simple about the drawings, I imposed some limits on my choices: very limited colors, very limited shapes, the minimal amount of drawing to get an idea across. Below are the results of my exploration into this theme.

Below: The Beginning – A Formless Mass

Below: Era of Light & Dark

Below: Era of Separate Domes for Water & Sky

Below: Era of Land Mass, Sea, & Vegetation

Below: Era of Sun, Moon, Stars, Time

Below: Era of Avian & Sea Life

Below: Era of Creepy Crawly Things

Below: Era of People/Human Type Beings

So though some pages are a bit more involved than others, I still tried to restrain myself as much as possible and get the ideas across with economy of shape, color, etc. My two favorites are the Creepy Crawly pages and the People pages. If you look closely, you can see fossil type shapes emphasized on the Creepy Crawly page. On the human page, I chose to depict the continents of Africa and South America. The reason for this is because people/humans (or whatever the term is for what we were millions of years ago) originated in Africa and I was always intrigued by how, even now, you can see how Africa and South America were joined. They fit together like a puzzle!

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For this project I used a Stillman and Birn Softcover Epsilon Sketchbook, 5.5″ x 8.5″. For making the images, I used whatever suited the task best for that Era but, in general, I used Kuratake watercolors which are more gouache like in the way they behave. I particularly like a set of graphite colors they make. Additionally I used traditional transparent watercolor, gel and pigma micron pens, and some fountain pen ink. If you have a question on one particular image please feel free to contact me or ask in the comment section of the blog.

Drawings – Ancient Figurines

I was searching for images in the public domain to show during a talk I was going to give on the element of shape in art. It dawned on me that the ‘go to’ is always paintings and I got to thinking that sculpture would be so much more fun for exploring shape. Many of the sculptural images in the public domain are from ancient times and when looking at them, I was reminded of the many times I visited the African Art galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my friend and former history professor, Father Ed Biggane. Ed lived in Africa for many years and collected African sculpture. Upon his death, I heard many of his pieces were donated to a museum collection. As I looked at these images, which were from all over the ancient world, I was struck by the unusual shapes, their beauty, their simplicity….I could go on and on. So I decided to start drawing them. Below are a group of drawings I completed recently. The links to the artifacts are included so you can see the actual works if you desire. And I must add that walking around those galleries with Ed must have made an impression on me and I am grateful to him for opening my eyes to such unique art.

Standing Female Figurine; Greek, Rhodian (?); Early 5th century BCE; Terracotta. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click here to see actual artwork

Marble Female Figurine; Attrib. Bastis master; 2600-2400 BCE; Metropolitan Museum of Art Click here to see actual artwork.

Marble Female Figurine; Cycladic; 4500 – 4000 BCE; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Click here to see actual artwork.

Female Figurine, Dogon, Early 17th Century, Diospyros wood, Brooklyn Museum; Click here to see actual artwork.

Female Figurine; Egyptian; 3500-3400 BCE; Terracotta; Brooklyn Museum; Click here to see actual artwork.

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These images were drawn using a combination of conte crayon and a variety of pencils in a brown paper (craft paper) Traveler’s Spiral Bound Sketchbook, approx. 8″ x 5″