(no title)

Valentine Buildings?

For the last two Fridays I have joined in a virtual group where the theme is writing letters. Now I am a person who actually does writes letters but the reason I joined in was more curiosity. Basically, there is a theme every week where the host plays music geared to that theme and perhaps you would write a letter to someone based on the theme. The first time I joined in it was mediation (perhaps you would write a thought provoking letter) and the second time it was valentines (write a love letter). About every 40 minutes the host stops the music and people engage in light conversation about whatever they were doing. As it turns out nobody really spends time writing letters, at least in the two sessions I attended. As for me, the first week I was working in my winter twig notebook and last week I was working in one of my sketchbooks. Other people were tending to a variety of works: embroidery, wood whittling, paperwork, bookbinding, you name it.

I had every intention of working on my tall skinny buildings that I have written recent posts on (also see here) Well, through listening to the music and I guess with the theme in the back of my brain, my buildings took a bit of a turn so here are the results. For me, my favorite is the last one, even though that is the least defined. I like the mysteriousness of it.

What I like about joining in this group is that it keeps me more focused. I would work on my sketchbook on my own but I would also have a tendency to multi task – go throw in laundry, go stir the soup, whatever. For some reason in this format, I tend to focus more. Possibly because I think I may miss something? The next piece of music selected (which is really terrific) or a break to chat and hear what others are up to? I think this type of activity is not for everybody and it takes a very good moderator to make sure it goes well which this group has. Though I may not join in every week, it is definitely an activity I will keep in mind if I am in the mood to be with people on a Friday afternoon yet be on my own. It is the best of both worlds.

Three Tall Buildings

If you have been poking around this blog, you will have seen a few recent posts from my sketch books featuring tall, tall buildings. After working on this theme on a small scale (the sketchbooks are 7 x 10 inches), I had the urge to draw these structures much larger. This piece was made on a full sheet of Rives BFK using acrylic paint, gesso, and Wolf’s carbon pencil. My friend Anders introduced me to these pencils. They produce a dense black line if you use them dry and if you use them wet, which is what I prefer, the line becomes even richer and more velvety. Below is the piece as it stands now and underneath that is a close up of the window and clouds. It is still sort of a work in progress because, as much as I love the dark lines, I am trying to decide if I want to tone a few down a bit more. One thing I do like is how the windows show through the clouds a bit. Also, I like that I was not too particular about cleaning up edges of windows or the buildings themselves. I welcome any comments or thoughts on this as I work it out.

Sketchbook: Tall, Tall Buildings #2

These are very different than the group of buildings from my last post, which tended to be done from a variety of wetter, heavier media. For these drawings I used mainly mechanical color pencils and fountain pen ink in brushes. I choose a different sketchbook made by Traveler’s Company, which has very smooth paper and is a good surface for the brush pens and mechanical pencils.

Click on any image below to enlarge it.

Sketchbook: The Tall, Tall Buildings

Here are a group of buildings I did over the past few days in my sketchbook. Buildings have long been part of my stable of imagery which makes sense to me since I am from Philadelphia. But the building images I am making now are very different; they are becoming much taller and thinner. More like apartment towers rather than small houses with triangular roofs or blocky rectangular office buildings. Anyway, these buildings are getting much skinnier it seems. For these sketches, I work in a variety of media since the paper takes both wet and dry media. In case anyone is wondering, it is a Canson Mixed Media 7″ x 10″ sketchbook. You can see some of my other building images here and here.

You can enlarge any of these images by clicking on them.

Another Sketchbook Drawing with a Longwinded Caption

Hello! Once in awhile I like to add a stream of conscious caption to a sketch book image. The caption with the image below reads:

This dwelling is Lockerby Towers, located just Southeast of Parsippany, New Jersey. Amenities include a small grove of trees providing shade and a fine place for an afternoon nap outdoors. In addition, laundry facilities include several community drying lines for tenants’ convenience and, fortunately, because they are used by all the residents of the building there is no annoying HOA yapping that you can’t put your clothes outside to dry. This particular view also includes a glimpse of the community garden, tended to by the residents and overseen by Mrs. Gladys P. Simmons, who prides herself with her knowledge of growing exotic petunias out of season.

Window-Swap Workshop

Last weekend the Plastic Club, an historic arts organization in Philadelphia, hosted a drawing session using a website called Window-swap. The purpose of the Window-swap site is to give people glimpses of the views from other peoples’ windows from around the world. Though I am fond of the view from my own window, it was certainly nice to see what was outside of Elsa’s window in the countryside of France and Katarina’s window in Moscow as well as a window from a commuter train in Taipa and several other scenes.

There were seven of us present and we ran this session online. Though we did not keep the audio on for the images we were viewing, we had forgotten to adjust it once or twice and it was amusing to hear Leonard Cohen singing from one of the windows. Did Elsa have her radio on? Does she have a CD? We will never know! Another neat feature of the site is you can click on the label of where the window is and see a map of the area – a great way to learn your georgraphy!

Anyway, here are two of my pieces. We at first did 5 minutes sketches of about 8 different window views then we settled on a few to do 10 minute drawing. You can also view what my friend Claudia McGill did here. People really enjoyed this activity and we will be repeating it soon.

My Journey in the Visual Arts: Part 10 of 10

This is a series of short posts that will piece together how I ended up in the visual arts. I don’t recall an Ah-Ha situation where I knew from a particular moment that I wanted to be an artist. It just sort of crept up on me. It has now been over 35 years since I pursued art as, at first, a serious avocation then a profession. Along the way I have been very fortunate having experienced many facets of the visual art world. During that time I have also made attempts to leave that world only to be pulled back in somehow. You can read the first post in this series here.

*****

This is where I will end this series. After this point, I had made the decision to transfer from art as a past time to art as a way of life. My purpose for writing this was to see if there was any logic for me ending up in this field and I can see that my desire to produce art came early and persisted. My career has been quite varied in not only the type of art I have produced but the various positions I have held in the arts. There have also been many setbacks and sabbaticals but I always seem to return.

What I will leave off with is a reference back to the comment my friend said about wanting to see a bit of red in my early collages. Fairly quickly I got involved in the the broader category of Works on Paper which includes papermaking, printmaking, book arts, etc. So I will share a few images below of some other work from that early period of my art making. As an aside, but a good example of how your work catches up with you years later, please see this post regarding the last piece shown below (the link is also underneath that image).

Thank you for coming on this journey with me!

Community Spirit, Mixed media, circa early 1990s

Mama and Bebes, Mixed media, circa early 1990s

If We Lived in The Garden, Mixed media, circa early 1990s

Please see this post regarding the piece above

My Journey in the Visual Arts: Part 9 of 10

*****

I continued to take studio classes in college and my drawing instructor, Michelle, was very liberal with her definition of the word “drawing”, so I decided to start making drawings from cut paper. The first piece I did was a busy cityscape with odd shaped buildings and cars and the palette was limited to white, black, a gray and a blue/gray. I remember she liked the drawing and I also remember a friend of mine saying that she would find it more pleasing if there was a dot of red somewhere. That sort of stuck in my mind and was useful at a later point, but for now, I was limiting my palette.

*****

I had a goal to get into the Rittenhouse Square show. This was the show that I met the pen and ink artist at a few years before. One of the artists who had been in the show for many years told me to make sure the body of work I presented to the jury was consistent. I needed at least 10 pieces. I decided I would do a series of cut paper collages and the imagery would be things that were completely from my imagination. The paper I used was Canson Mi-Teintes paper. My daughter at this time was around three and I was still in school. I worked all hours of the night and whatever time I could steal during the day. Below is some of my work from that time as well as my display from my first year in the show, which was 1989.

*****

My Journey in the Visual Arts: Part 8 of 10

*****

Things get a bit fuzzy and start to overlap around this time in my mind. I know I was very involved with that cultural organization in the Northeast part of the city and was in charge of organizing an outdoor art show in the spring of, I believe, 1987. I took the opportunity of collecting artist’s business cards whenever I visited another outdoor show. The show was a success as far as events go – we had a lovely park setting on the grounds of a local hospital, a wind ensemble, and lots of people but not necessarily lots of buyers. I actually did sell my first piece at this show, a pen and ink drawing of a gazebo. Once again, I felt a bit guilty because the image was part my own and part inspiration from ads I saw for gazebos. I told this information to the woman who bought it and she said that did not bother her at all, she just liked the artwork.

*****

It was also around this time that I started to enter small juried shows. The first one on the grounds of Cliveden, a historic site in Germantown, Philadelphia. This was an in person jury so I had to bring several pieces for the jurors to look at. I remember one juror that sort of intimidated me but then I over heard him saying he liked my work, which was at this time, mainly charcoal and hard pastel drawings, and a few pen and inks most likely. The funniest thing about this “intimidating juror” was that many years later, we served on a board together and I was always having to wake him up because he would nod off at the meetings!

Drawing from a photograph of my sister when she was a child of about 8

The other juried exhibition was an indoor show through an arts group in Lansdown, PA which was right outside the city. I entered a charcoal drawing of one of my husbands dress shirts that was hanging on a closet door. It really was a striking drawing and I remember him saying he didn’t know how I would ever do anything better than that drawing (which was meant as a compliment). I agreed it was the best thing I did at that point but I also said that if I never do anything better I am in big trouble!!

*****

There was also a community arts group forming in the neighborhood of Frankford, which is where I was originally from. I attended a few meetings and eventually got very involved with them with some public art projects as well as teaching.

A woman from the Frankford based group worked in color pencils and I wanted to learn more about them. I saw that a workshop was being taught in New York over a weekend by a very accomplished artist in this medium by the name of Bet Borgeson. We decided to go up so I could attend the workshop. It seemed, for me at the time, a great adventure. While I was in the class, my husband rode around the city on subways and such with our daughter and the diaper bag visiting stores and other sites. Everyone seemed to have a good time.

*****

My Journey in the Visual Arts: Part 7 of 10

*****

Our daughter was born very early in 1986 and we had bought a home back in the city in the summer of 1985. Life for me was very quiet and lonely at this time. I drew when my daughter napped and since I was still more interested in realism at this time I stuck to very simple objects such as one piece of fruit. I was particularly fond of apples and peaches and drew them using hard pastels or color pencil.

The one piece I remember very well actually was a non-representational collage and it completely absorbed me. I remember going to the art supply store and selecting very specific tempera paint colors. At night, I sat at our dining room table making this piece and my husband sat across from me painting miniature historic figurines. I painted several sheets of small, fairly thick watercolor paper a variety of pastel colors: pink, blue, and yellow. After I painted the paper, I painstakingly tore them into long strips and then spent a great amount of time collaging them, looking carefully at the tear pattern of each strip of paper and deciding if it was the best choice to go with the previous strip’s tear pattern. It took me a long time to complete this piece and it was very small. After it was finished, I bought a precut blue mat (overall size 10″ x 8″) that had a white liner mat, which I signed. I called the piece Post Partum. Over the years I framed it different ways but I think my favorite presentation was the original one in the inexpensive humble precut mat and ready made silver chrome frame. I still have the piece (see below)

*****

As our baby was getting to be closer to a year old, I felt I needed more outside stimulation. A group was forming through the Department of Recreation to attempt to bring more cultural programming to Northeast Philadelphia. Most events took place downtown. This group was heavily interested in the performing arts but there was room for all art related interests. My involvement was trying to book speakers on various topics at the local regional library branch as well as try to figure out a way to have small art exhibitions. It was a welcome activity for me and I enjoyed the people I met. There was a small outdoor art exhibition held in our part of the city that was somehow related to the Recreation Department that I participated in but it was not something directly related to this group. I was continuing to work with charcoal and hard pastel and that is probably what I exhibited.

*****

The other big change I made was I went back to finish college. Finally my stars and the stars of the academic world aligned and I was able to major in Humanities at a small local college. The only requirement was that I had to decide a main area of focus but could take courses in many other subjects. My main focus was, of course, art. Below is a photo of my daughter and I that was published in the college’s newsletter. I remember what I was pointing at, it was a watercolor of a pile of sneakers made by one of the nuns who was a professor in the Humanities department.