part of our new flock

 I’ve been busy this past week painting, getting photos taken of the new work, planning my framing strategy, writing my artist’s statement, and generally worrying whether my paintings are looking their best. It’s kind of like the frenzy of getting ready to give birth!

Amidst all this activity, spring has arrived here on the farm. We’ve been planning our garden spaces, adding new babies to the flock, enjoying the new blossoms, building fences, and generally nesting in our new home. Here are some images to share:

An orchid shows her beautiful face in the window

Artist buddy Laura Mack's new baby at the Salem Art Association Auction

Jamee Linton and her cute husband at the auction

I’ve really been enjoying the support of my fellow artists lately. It is difficult to imagine what it’s like to put yourself out there, at an auction, exhibition or gallery unless you’ve been there yourself. It’s nice to compare notes, and realize you’re not the only one!

One of the ways I connect with fellow artists is by blogging. It was nice to meet artist and professor Jessica Burke at the Salem Art Association auction on Saturday night. We had exchanged messages via blog, but it was so much fun to meet her in person! Blogging is not just for networking, but also inspiration. Leslie Avon Miller shared a thought-provoking question on her coaching blog this weekend:

What is one of the top energy boosters in your creative practice (or life) that nourishes your creativity, your body and soul, and how can you honor that even more?

For me, it’s not just nature and life, but also music and poetry. I almost always have music on in my studio… all types. I love the random setting on my ipod, and it’s always interesting the way the songs that come up serendipitously dovetail into what I’m painting. I keep my poetry books close by, and sometimes type out parts of poems to keep on my inspiration board. These are some of the things that provide my daily inspiration, what about you?

Winter Morning View

I’d be interested in your response to this question… leave me a comment!

New work, influenced by my new surroundings!

"Private Tune" watercolor on paper 9x12"

I’ve been really focusing on my studio habit this month in preparation for my show at Riversea Gallery next month. This means I have to say no to more social things, be really focused on routines and habits, and be really efficient in my household tasks. A lot of support from my husband helps too!

I’ve noticed that the search for new inspirations has really opened me up to trying to pick up other habits too. Spring is a great time to do this! We seem to have increased energy, the light lasts longer, and I can feel new things shooting up everywhere.

One of the new things happening for me is the advent of more landscape influence in my work. I wrote that I had felt this coming on in this post…way back in August. I had such a positive response to the landscape painting I did for The Whistling Season show for Lake Oswego Reads, and it was so much fun to do too…. The painting even sold at the show! Maybe the recent press in The Oregonian was an influence there… In the actual newspaper my image was featured. I always wonder who the purchaser is. If you are an artist, does this make you curious too?

Meeting Ivan Doig was a huge inspiration. He was a brilliant speaker, easy to talk to at our exhibit and had wonderful things to say about the creative process. When someone asked me how I got such color into my landscape, he quipped: “Just tell them the same thing I do: you used your imagination!” Another thing Doig said that has stuck with me was a quote from Vladimir Nabokov about writing: “The writer must use the PASSION of a scientist and the PRECISION of an artist.”  By this he meant that to be creative, you must be a passionate explorer… one who is always asking ‘what if’? But you must also be able to find the perfect balance of imagination and reality… be the artist who can fool us into believing that the illusion before us is real.

I had a nice compliment this week from someone who bought a print on ETSY… she said my painting made her think she WAS the girl in the yellow dress at the flower market. That is always my clue to when a painting is finished… I can forget about the details and feel myself in the painting. Here is a new one… I am walking the dog It has undergone a few minor changes since I photographed it, but it is near completion at this stage. Look for the differences when/if you see it in person. After I get the show together, I will be rephotographing things and updating my website (finally!) I also plan to list a new class here in my home studio. It will be Thursday mornings, starting in mid-May. More details to follow

Winter Evening Walk, Watercolor on Yupo

 I will leave you with part of an inspiring, motivating poem by Mary Anne Radmacher  (used with permission) that I have hanging in my studio to remind me to work hard:

Be avid,

Create apart from perfection. Risk failure. Cover your words with sweat. Run a little.

My favorite part is “cover your words with sweat.” That’s what I’ve been trying to do lately….

Thank you to Lisa Swifka for having the idea at Whimsical Bohemian and getting so many great participants. I wish I’d had a chance to visit more of the great blogs that signed up. I had no idea how many artistic bloggers were out there! And thank you everyone who visited my blog and left a comment. I hope you’ll come back soon to see what’s new!

I did my draw this morning with a random number generator. It seemed too paltry to offer just one prize for the 184 great comments, that I decided to surprise you and add another! The runner up will receive a set of my art print cards, which I am just getting ready to list on etsy.

OK, the winners are: Comment # 76 (Debby at The Gathering Nest )for the Original Acrylic Painting on Block “Bird in the Head” and Comment #27  (Lauren) for the art print cards! Congratulations… I’ll be emailing you directly next!

Hear the Author
Tickets Available Saturday, January 30 at 11 A.M.

Ivan Doig, author of The Whistling Season, will be speaking at Lake Oswego High School about “Passion, Precision, and Whistling a Work Song.”  This event is for high school age and older.  Admission is free but a ticket is required for this event.  Tickets will be available at the Lake Oswego Public Library starting at 11 A.M. on Saturday, January 30. There will be a two ticket per person limit and a Lake Oswego Library Card is required. Note: the tickets will be valid until 15 minutes before the event begins on February 17.  Seating is first come, first served.  Wednesday, February 17, Lake Oswego High School Auditorium, 2501 Country Club Rd., 7 P.M. Free but tickets are required.

Art Show 

Opening Art Show Reception:  February 4 at 6:00 P.M.

Imagine! How do you capture the essence of 345 pages in a single piece of art?  That’s what faced the 18 artists listed below from the Splash! group.  In their 4th year of meeting this challenge, their visions will be unveiled for the first time at Graham’s at the reception.  From Lakeridge High School, art teacher, Shannon McBride and 14 art students read The Whistling Season and have prepared 15 pieces of art interpreting what they read.  From Lake Oswego High School, art teacher Katie Brink and Artist -in-Residence Michael Orwick had 14 art students work in oil to re-create the scenery from the book.

Throughout February, the adult art will be displayed at Graham’s Book and Stationery and the high school art will be displayed at Chrisman Picture Frame & Gallery.  Opening Art Show Reception, Thurs., February 4, 6:00 P.M. – 7:30 P.M., Graham’s Book and Stationery, 460 Second St. and Chrisman Picture Frame & Gallery, 480 2nd St.

Thirteen artists from the talented Splash! group and five invited artists have created images that came to them as they read The Whistling Season.  Their interpretations are imaginative and amazing.  Artists include:

1.  Ruth Armitage
2.  Kara Pilcher
3.  Susie Cowan
4.  Dave Haslett
5.  Mary Ellen Otten
6.  Anna Mastellos
7.  Dyanne Locati
8.  Janet Otten
9.  Lee Baughman
10. Patricia Schmidt
11. Jan Rimerman
12. Kathy Bethurum
13. Lois Larsen 
Guests

1.  Bill Baily
2.  Barbara Vance
3   Barbara Wagner
4.  Linda Terhark
5.  Deborah Marble

I also received a beautiful photograph from my cousin of my Great-Aunt Lois & Uncle Harry’s farm in Redstone, Montana which should get you excited to read this book! Thank you Carol!

Lonely Montana Farm - Carol Skiles

http://www.harcourtbooks.com/WhistlingSeason/interview.asp

 It was a challenge for me to decide whether to focus my painting on the characters or the setting of rural Montana. There were so many wonderful characters in this book that I had a hard time choosing, and finally decided that the landscape was the one common factor to their experience.  Doig has a great gift and I must borrow words to help me explain how this book made me feel:

Before me lies the edge of the world. I am on my way there running. – from a Papago song

I rarely do landscape, so this was both a challenge and a joy. Montana is a place that I love to visit. I have family there, and my impressions of its vastness are filled with nostalgia as well as the simple, natural beauty that emptiness and space can inspire. I hope my interpretation holds some of that emotion, through my exaggeration of color and my choice to leave any trace of human touch on the landscape out of the painting. Let me know what you think!

Smooth Buttered Plain 12x12"

While I was working in the studio for the first time in a long while, I got a call from the RiverSea Gallery in Astoria. They want to do a solo show of my work in March! (Of this year!) Oh My! That is coming right up, and I will have to work my tail off to get enough quality work completed. Yikes. I guess I needed a deadline.

Finally, I wanted to share some more links of artwork for the 100 Artists show at Mary Lou Zeek. Mary Lou has posted some more on her blog, and here are some other blogs of artists! Check them out! 

http://www.thesteelfork.com/wordpress/100-artists-show-the-honeybee/

http://www.jenworden.com/2010/01/06/january-means/

http://idolatrieartist.xanga.com/719573915/beans/

Jessica  included a link in one post that is so funny…. the instant art critique. Put in any five numbers and it generates a phrase that will make you sound pithy, smart or at least over-educated when talking about an art piece.  My numbers generated this lucious bit of art-speak:

“It should be added that the optical suggestions of the sexual signifier makes resonant the essentially transitional quality.” 

It would be fun to look at a random painting and a random critique together and try to make sense of the two!

OK… enough procrastinating! Off to the studio

I’ve been cooking, cleaning, unpacking to beat the band and it finally feels like things are getting back to ‘normal’. Even though my studio is still a wreck, I’ve started back working, which feels great! I’m going to love having all the new space to roll around in… Still need to install better lighting and get rid of boxes & clutter. But one of the greatest pleasures of moving has been finding new display areas for some of my favorite art pieces. I felt so lucky when I saw all the things piled in one room during the move. And just putting them in different places helps me to notice them more and others to see them often for the first time!

Vicki Hammond's Beautiful Assemblage

This piece by Vicki Hammond, which used to give me great inspiration in my studio, now provides a great mood on my bathroom vanity. If you haven’t moved your artwork around lately, try it! A fresh look for the New Year!

I wish I had photos to post of my newest artwork, but I was working on it until the last minute before I delivered it! Deadlines are a powerful motivator!!!! My most recent piece was for the 100 Artists show at Mary Lou Zeek Gallery in Salem. This year’s show is called “Nourish & Sustain” and will benefit the Marion-Polk Food Share. If you’ve seen these shows in the past, you’ll know what an honor it is to be invited to participate. Artists from all over the country (and places even farther) work together to accomplish good things in our community. It is always amazing how different the art pieces are, each artist beginning with the same challenge: an item sent through the mail.

This year the item was a tin can, pictured below.

The show runs February 2-27 at Mary Lou Zeek Gallery, 335 State Street, Salem, Oregon. If you are out of state, you can usually view the work online. Bids on the artwork begin at $50 and go up in $5 increments. The competition can be fierce!  The artist’s reception on February 3 promises to be thrilling! Hope to see you there!

Mary Lou has posted one great example of William Skripps’ piece on her blog: http://marylouzeekgallery.blogspot.com/2010/01/100-artists-show.html Check it out!

I’ll also include here a sweet picture of the newest member of our flock: Bobbie

Ready to pounce out at the dogs!