Illustration Friday Juggle

For some reason she never seemed to master the art of juggling...She was never sure why...

Land of Lost Luggage Mission Accomplished!

Okay, finished, back on track, done, fini. Whew. I hate getting behind, but having Jenny home sick last week threw me a curve.

I'm so excited! Tomorrow night, my college room-mate is arriving for a TEN DAY VISIT! Yay! She's easy going and fun--the perfect guest! The kids love her, Richard loves her, and (do I even need to say it?) I love her. We lived together all four years at Michigan State except for the four months at the beginning of freshman year--She was the first person I met at MSU, and we've been friends now for twenty-six years (wow. does that make us old?).

She's a wonderful artist and graphic designer, so we'll play in the studio while the kids are at school and then hang out with them once they're home. I've got some good meals planned, and I just can't wait to see her!

Land of Lost Luggage Mission Part 4

Land of Lost Luggage Mission Part 2

Ack! I'm behind!

Illustration Friday Wedding

She was a runaway bride, disappearing almost into thin air. He never saw her again. He always knew she was flighty.

Oh, this was hard. I've been so busy painting people this last week, but of course I didn't have any wedding paintings! I tried to do a digital drawing, but found out I need to do way more work on my PS skills, at least in that direction!

Two more new paintings

Back in the studio today for a little while. School Board meeting tonight, which normally is not a big deal, but some things are going on that I'm concerned about, and since we all know how much I hate any kind of confrontation, I'm not looking forward to it. In retrospect, this may be named 'The Year of the Confrontation' for me.

Going to paint now!

Slipcovers

Jenny's been home sick for two days now, so I've been up in the house. I decided to work on a slipcover for my big chair and ottoman in my bedroom. Earlier this year, I'd purchased a very large cotton duck painter's drop cloth at Home Depot for $18. I washed and dried the fabric and have just been waiting for the right moment to work it into a sturdy slipcover--I'm not finished yet--still have to do the back and box pleat skirt--but I'm done with the footstool. I also made another slipcover for a beat-up little footstool that's been floating around the house. Hopefully I'll finish all the slipcovers tonight, Jenny will be well, and tomorrow I'll be back out in the studio!

Going Home

In the darkness up ahead, she could see it: home. She was almost there.

There Lived a Little Girl

I've had this canvas for almost a year and a half--all the text, red and gold paint--today I looked at it and thought 'I'll add hills and a loooong ladder, and paint one of my people!'

when I was little, I used to have the same dream over and over. I was in the middle of a huge room filled with adults. In the center of the room stood a red staircase, which I started to climb. At one point I realized that the stair was getting narrower and that there was no railing and I felt scared, but I kept climbing. Always, I would get to the ceiling, level with a huge crystal chandelier. And then I would wake up.

Land of Lost Luggage Mission Part One

The first day of the challenge was to use paper, paint, and ink on some surface. I chose a canvas board, glued down some crumpled up phone book pages, painted with washes of quinacridone burnt orange and quinacridone gold, and dribbled brown callligraphy ink along the top of the board. The funnest part was watching the ink s-l-o-w-l-y find its way to the bottom!

Check out other mission participants at The Land of Lost Luggage (is that a great name or what?).

In My Dreams, I Fly

This started out as a landscape...I am so relishing this feeling of LETTING GO. I don't know what's going to happen--what an adventure!

Listening to Peter and the Wolf with Jenny out in the studio. Joel's at his first high school football game! And after the game, he's going to A DANCE. I swear, I was just going to football games and dances. How could this happen?

IF Momentum and Tip for the Day

No matter what she did, Janie's hair had a mind of its own...

If you look at the previous post, you can see how almost everything is improved by a glaze of a single color--it unifies (or something). I glazed everything but the whites of the eyes with Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold, and I think it vastly improved Janie (though it didn't make her hair behave any better!)

It's like an Explosion

Ooooh, I am having fun. I feel like I should apologize for the quality, but I won't, because this is what coming out of my pencil. I'm sketching on paper, then using carbon paper to get the shapes down, then just painting and painting and painting till I'm done. I'm using paint pens in blue, white, red and black, and also my neocolorII crayons, all of which will write over acrylics.

My Half and Half Goat

Thought you all might like a good giggle tonight. Besides the two pygmy goats, we also have two Angora goats, which have long curly hair and look like poodle-y sheep. I wondered all along if the little brown goat was perhaps half Angora, and now I guess I'm sure. Leave it to me to have a goat that is LITERALLY half and half...

My Faces

These are very similar to two of the self-portrait quilts. I will try to dig those out tonight, so I can post pictures tomorrow.

Neither of these are done, I don't think. Leaves? Seaweed? Words? I'm not sure.

Out my back window

Took these tonight while walking down to the studio--you can see the roof of the studio at the bottom of the one picture...

An Epiphany

Isn't that a lovely word?

Epiphany...

You'd think, growing up so completely Catholic, that I'd always have known what it meant, but I didn't discover the word until college. It's one of my favorite words.

So, as I said yesterday, I've been struggling with faces for quite some time now. I've tried all sorts of things: gluing down faces and painting over them, sketching them and then transferring the sketch to the canvas, painting them freehand--and while I like the faces I draw, I was never happy with the results when I tried to paint them. Last night, I realized what was wrong. Part of the problem was PAINT. I can hear you saying 'Karen, if you're going to paint faces, then of course there's going to be paint!' and yes, I realize that. But I couldn't get the paint to do what I wanted it to do. I couldn't blend and shade the way I thought I should, couldn't paint delicate lines... I was very frustrated. This led to the second problem, which was that I wasn't making something that had a part of ME in it. I was getting so bogged down in the whole concept of painting a face and what it should look like, that there was none of my soul going into the piece.

Of course, you've already spotted part of the problem in italics above. I was thinking about what it should look like instead of just letting the image happen all on its own. When my cell phone turns on, I have it flash the message "just be the conduit" and yesterday, when I turned on my phone and saw that it was like a great big light bulb went off in my head. EPIPHANY! I need to just let the faces happen. I don't have to be in charge.

I don't have to be in charge.

Say it to yourself. "I don't have to be in charge."

Wow. That's a biggie. All I have to do is pay attention to opening up to something bigger than myself. I don't have to worry about what the face looks like, as long as it's the REAL image.

I may not be making myself clear, but yesterday something very profound happened to me.

So once this huge idea got through to my puny brain, I thought about other faces that I'd done and liked--on quilts. Quilting Arts magazine had a challenge a while back for self-portrait quilts, and I did three of them. (Of course, I didn't actually submit any to the magazine, but that's an epiphany that will have to wait for another day.) When I thought about these quilt faces, I realized that because they were from fabric I had let go of preconceived notions about shading and color and shape and line, producing images that I felt (and still feel) are very potent and real.

My first coat of paint is dry, so I'm going to wrap this up. Just in case you missed the important points in this heavily italicized post, let me summarize:

...what I wanted it do...
...the way I thought I should...
...what it should look like...

...let go of preconceived notions...
...just be the conduit...

I DON'T HAVE TO BE IN CHARGE

wow.

Better, but still too pretty

Well, it's an improvement over what she looked like this morning...but she still looks very polished and symmetrical.

I had a mini-breakthrough with regards to how I was thinking about the faces, so I should have more interesting things to post tomorrow...

What I'm Working On

Just a picture of my [very messy] work table and some of the things I've been working on. I've been trying to paint faces for what seems like forever, never being happy with the result--either they were too "pretty" or bore no resemblance whatsoever to a face--I'm trying to strike a happy medium in between, but not there yet... The houses are very similar to ones I did last year after seeing an article in Somerset Studio, though these are short and squatty rather than tall and skinny. I've also collaged all over the surface before I textured it. A friend asked me if I could do a neighborhood for her, and so I'm experimenting. A trio of houses might be neat in a kid's room...

Little Art Quilts

I finished off some art quilts this weekend and really like both of these. I experimented with bobbin stitching, which is a process that allows you to use thicker embroidery thread with your sewing machine. You wind the embroidery thread on your bobbin, and thread the machine with a matching color of thread. Then you stitch from the back, so that the bobbin thread, which would normally be on the back of your piece, is on the front. It's very cool-looking, and the only thing to watch out for is that the tension on the machine may need to be adjusted. My super-dee-duper embroidery machine that my sister bought for us several years ago adjusts the tension automatically, which makes it much easier.

My Sacred Life and Committed to Creativity

The last few days have felt like maybe I should just be COMMITTED. Period. I've fallen behind in writing about my Sacred Life and about what I've been doing that's creative, so this is my attempt at a catch-up for everything, bad and good, that's been going on around here.

I'm spending the weekend with just the girls, as Joel has recently been invited to play baseball with a very good traveling team from Visalia--So he and Richard are at a tournament in Santa Maria this weekend. I let the Katie have three girlfriends over to spend Friday night (what was I thinking?!!). Actually they were great, but when they left they were all going to a birthday party to which Katie had not been invited. To Katie's credit, she handled it very well, helping them to make birthday cards out here in the studio, and even helping to wrap the presents, since I said I'd drop the girls off instead of their moms coming to get them and then bringing them back for the party, which was just down the road from us. Incidents like this make me feel very humble and blessed, watching twelve-year-old Katie deal so graciously with something that would be difficult for me at 43...

I've sold two paintings during the last ten days, always exciting to think that someone wants to share my art...

I got an email Friday morning from another artist that threw me for a loop. She explained that she has been using the sea urchins (from Albertus Seba's 'Cabinet of Curiousities') for a long time as trees, and that they were sort of her thing, and she was attached to them, and would I stop using them. I went and looked, and sure enough, she's done LOTS and LOTS of paintings using the sea urchins as trees. So I started to reply, saying 'oh, certainly, I won't use them as I can see you're very attached to them, I can go back to using flowers and decorative papers' and then I thought--wait a minute. She mentions 'artistic integrity' as though I copied her, which I did not. It really bothered me, not only that she would write to me in the first place, but that, just like a 'nice girl,' I would just automatically do as she asked. Now the truth is, I probably won't use them anymore, since after seeing all her many many many paintings using them, I want to use something else. But I am not going to apologize or make promises when I did nothing wrong.

This was an unpleasant experience, but looking at it from a little distance I can see that this is part of my Sacred Life Journey as well. Just as five years ago I could not have stood up to the neighbors about their killer dogs, five years ago I would have apologized just to make someone else happy, even if it wasn't the right thing for me. Am I making sense? I'm growing and stretching a little bit here, I think.

Last night Katie and Jenny and I spent some time all together in Katie's room. Jenny was watching a movie (the kids don't have cable in their rooms, but my sister bought them DVD players, so they each have a small TV), and Katie and I were lying on the bed. We had Jack and Jill, the two little feral kittens we are trying to tame, running around the room with us, and I thought, oh, what a nice moment this is... Again, how blessed I am, how full is my life...

Finally, I think back to earlier this week, when I was woken up by Katie at two o'clock in the morning. "Mom, there's a lunar eclipse tonight! Want to go outside and watch it with me?" Well, no, actually I'm asleep and I'd like to continue sleeping... But, okay. We get a sleeping bag and go and lie in the front yard together, and for a most magical hour we watched the shadow of the earth creep across the face of the moon, snuggled together in the sleeping bag on the grass, cats playing around us and old black dog watching over us. And just before the eclipse was complete, Katie squeezed me and said, "Oh, Mom, we are so lucky."

And I thought, well, yes. We are.