Paper Mache Cow - Session 1

 I decided I wanted to experience what it would be like to create a paper mache sculpture. So after watching a couple of youtube videos, I decided to launch into the project with both feet (and no additional resources, probably a bad idea, but how I usually do things).

In my first step, I wanted to just cut out a cardboard shape of the cow's body. I didn't worry about his ears or legs for now. You can see I have really leaped in - he will be a sizable cow for a first project. Who knows, maybe he'll turn out to look like a pig - anything is possible.

I then cut out the shape of the two legs from separate pieces of cardboard. I think I'm not going to worry about the other side of him, because his legs wrap underneath and I can probably build up the shape I need there from just the newspaper. I used masking tape and began build up shape to the two legs. It probably ought to look more exacting but it doesn't.

And that's it for Session 1. Now off to get a lot more recycled newspapers and more masking tape.

Open Studios 2008 Fort Mason

Last weekend, I did my annual Open Studios at Fort Mason, San Francisco. In past years, it has been the same weekend as when the October Fest is also being held at Fort Mason, so we also got good foot traffic, even if some had had one too many beers.

This year, however, it was fleet week and many many people come to the bay's edge at the Marina to picnic, party and watch the Blue Angels. The weather was great and there were a ton of boats on the water, leaving a wide swarth in the middle clear for where the Blue Angels swoop down close to the water and zoom around the tops of the boats.

It was a great weekend and one woman told me she comes every year to see what I'm working on and that she's "one of my groupies". That was very sweet to say.

Below are some pics from the weekend. I took a lot of photos of the blue angels, but most of them ended up being tiny little dots within gorgeous scenery but the jets were too small.

My display, showing encaustic paintings on the wall and miniature oil paintings on the table and other goodies:



A little fair being setup right next to our building:



The Blue Angels, doing their upside down flying thing:



Clear blue skies and the Blue Angels, flying close together:

Opening Art Reception April 25, 2008

This past Friday's exhibit opening reception went terrific.

I showed 4 pieces of my encaustic work from my Canyon Calls series, one abstract oil painting and of course my original oil miniature paintings which I only offer during Open Studios weekends. Some collectors chase me down during Open Studios just to get more miniatures because they know I only offer them twice a year at Open Studio times.

Open Studios in the Mission could not have been held on a better weekend. It was brilliantly sunny and warm - actually hot and everyone walking around looked so happy and pleased to be enjoying the warm weather and art. Yesterday was great and today, the last day of Open Studios looks like its going to be just as warm and wonderful as yesterday.

Here are just a couple of pics from the Friday night reception.

Open Studios April 25-27, 2008

I will be participating in the Mission district Spring Open Studios event, being held next weekend: Friday April 25 (7-9 pm), and Saturday and Sunday April 26-27 (11-5 pm).

There are at least 7 artist collective buildings in the Mission that will be open next weekend, full of interesting art. I will showing art work at a brand new building, called ActivSpace.

ActivSpace can be found at 3150 18th Street (which is really odd because the front door and all the mail boxes are actually on Treat Street - I'm not sure what the post office was thinking...) between Folsom and Harrison (Treat Street is located between 17th and 18th and is a one way street to be entered from 17th by car). By bus, both the 24 Mission and the 22 Fillmore bus lines run very nearby.

I will be showing some of my artwork in art space number 105 right along the street front. The exhibit my pieces are included in is called "A Room With a View" (which runs through the end of May).

I am looking forward to a great and busy weekend of meeting lots of great people!

This is one of my beeswax encaustic pieces in the exhibit:

Canyon Calls 4 Encaustic Painting

I worked all day yesterday on my recent wax painting in my Canyon Calls series, punctuated by interruptions of trying to upgrade the software I use to host an online community for professional hot glass blowers (quite a unique bunch, they are!).

The upgrade, which I had avoided doing for years, went really smoothly (a testament to careful preparation) but I became so engrossed in the process of doing this latest wax painting that I pretty much forgot to take the in-progress photos I was going to do to show customers the process of making an encaustic painting. I did take one at the beginning and one after I started my "underpainting", but after that I forgot and suddenly it was both the end of the day and the end of the painting. Ooops! I'll have to do a more complete documentation of the process on my next one.

In Canyon Calls 3, I explored a little with reflections at the bottom of a canyon with towering walls. In Canyon Calls 4, I shifted to an image across a canyon valley - Monument Valley to be exact. I'm still working on my skills in working in a kind of representational style in hot beeswax (wax often does just what it wants to do and sometimes I'm not completely in charge [smile]), but I've been finding a sort of minimalist landscape style to be where I want to explore right now.

I'm still working towards my goal of 9 of these so I can display them in a grid 3 across and 3 down, so I'll begin #5 today (which is kind of number 4 because the first one I did was accepted into a nationwide exhibit tour throughout 2008 and is not available for me to show this year).

In the below photos, the first one shows my surface before I begin to add color. Encaustic artists have all different approaches to this - some have very thin initial layers and some thick (like mine). I have 10 clear layers fused together on that piece. I like how the thickness - for this series, makes the final painting really juicy looking.

Some artists paint on the sides, but I've not found a good way of doing that yet (putting the wax there is no problem for me - but heating it with a heat gun and not affecting the top layer or have the sides look "even", well, I'm not good at that yet, so I just choose to tape all the sides with painters tape and remove that at the end for clean wooden sides).

In the second photo, I have my initial layers of color. As mentioned in previous posts, I extensively use a razor blade to scrape, scrape, scrape.

And in the third photo, we jump to the end when I have added about 20 more layers with much scraping back to get the affect.

Canyon Calls 3 Encaustic Painting

I'm continuing my work on my Canyon Calls series of encaustic paintings. Even though these are all 12x12", I'm surprised the amount of labor and attention each one requires. I'm getting handy using a razor blade to carefully scrape back the layers and layers of wax to reveal all kinds of interesting colors and patterns. Hard on the fingers and wrists but rewarding! I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Some of these now have over 50 layers of pigmented beeswax on them. I still like the first one I did in this series the best so far, but I also like the feelings I get when I display them all together.

Something about these images of canyons and wide open spaces also seem to reflect something about our interior canyons of the heart and mind for me.

I've started a fourth one (and am documenting the stages of developing it for a storyboard to show people how at least I construct my encaustics. Every artist has their own process, but I think collectors love to get a little insight into what it takes to make one of these) but my hand got too tired about 1/3rd the way into it (because I had been painting and scraping for over 5 hours yesterday), so the rest is for another day.



You can see more of my encaustic paintings here

or just all my paintings for sale here.

Canyon Calls 2 Encaustic Painting

It seems like it has been so long since I've posted here.

I've been sidetracked by family stuff. My Mom died New Year's Eve and that was a difficult loss, not only because it was my Mom but because it was my last parent to pass. I had a plane ticket all set to go see her in Florida but she died just a couple of days before I arrived.

I rented a studio space in the Mission district of San Francisco and will be using it both as a place to work and also as a commercial gallery. It's small but its right on the street level and the whole front wall is glass. I just had it painted (its a brand new building so my space was just a hollow shell of dry walls and back concrete wall) and I'm having flooring put in this week. So I've been busy preparing the space. It has a tall ceiling which is nice.

I haven't had much time to do art lately, as I go through these life changes, but I did manage to do another encaustic painting this past weekend in my Canyon Calls series that I'm doing (all in 12x12" size). It has over 30 layers of pigmented wax that have been applied and then carefully scraped back with a razor blade. It's tedious work but I like how they are coming out. The first one you'll see in my previous post that I made last December (before all the family stuff got intense). I have two others started and plan to do 9 of them.

Latest Encaustic

Here is my latest completed encaustic painting:



It is called Canyon Calls and is 12x12". It is part of a diptych collaboration project I am participating in. I now send this and a blank wood panel of the same size to an artist I've been partnered with from an East Coast encaustic wax group. She will paint on the blank panel influenced by what I've already done. And she has already done her 12x12" encaustic and sent me her painting and a blank panel and I still need to paint that one influenced by her painting (she did a loosely sketched black and white figurative drawing so painting a matching piece to that will be challenging for me... but given I'm so into color and minimalist landscapes, mine will probably be challenging for her as well). It will be interesting to see how it all turns out.

The two groups have gotten together and already organized 4 or 5 exhibits for all the diptychs in different galleries and other locations around the U.S. throughout 2008. It should be interesting!

Technorati tags: art , encaustic , encaustic painting , diptych

Concrete Spheres

I took an interesting class on making sculptures using a type of concrete called acrylic concrete, which when made over an armature comes out pretty darn light-weight, for concrete. It is typically used on the outside of buildings (because it's a little more malleable than regular concrete, as a building settles and may crack, this type of concrete can handle a little movement without cracking) and in under-developed countries.

The class focused on making a sphere, which is the hardest shape to do, but any armature can be used - square or an animal shape or whatever.

The acrylic concrete is made into a liquidy slip-like material (for those who do clay, this terminology is familiar) and cut up strips of fiberglass meshing is used to give the concrete something to adhere to and build a strong structure.

Our armature was actually an inflated rubber ball, which can be of any size. When covered with two layers of fiberglass mesh - a fist-size hole is left at the bottom where the pin hole is on the rubber ball and after the concrete sets, the ball is deflated and removed through the hole. Then we used more fiberglass mesh to cover up the hole (which was hard because there was no longer an armature underneath to support it). When that was set, an more liquidy slip was used with a brush to smooth the surface and then it was all allowed to dry. It usually only takes hours but it rained that weekend so ours took longer.

Most students were going to then use their spheres to mosaic on top of them, which did look very cool, but I wanted to try encaustics on mine. Realizing this type of concrete had acrylic in it (wax does not adhere to plastics and acrylic is a form of plastics), I first had to gesso my sphere with non-acrylic based gesso.

I then added maybe over 20 layers of wax, using clear first, then oranges and yellows with a little blue (which turned out to look green under the yellow layers) and kept fusing lightly between layers with my heat gun. It began to look like the sun to me. I decided to call the piece "Solar Energy" and it will stand on a nice glass bowl support underneath.

It was an interesting and different project. I love exploring completely new mediums like that. I can see where it could get interesting with embedding things into the wax and exploring shapes other than the sphere.

Below, you will see an example of what the globes look like when they are first drying (and you can even see the blue ball inside one of them because their exposed area on the sphere is showing), a photo of how my sphere looked when the concrete was dry, and a photo of how mine looked with the encaustic layers on it.






Technorati tags: art , encaustics , beeswax , concrete forms

Open Studios 2007 at Hunter's Point, San Francisco

On Saturday, I went to visit the Open Studios at Hunter's Point in San Francisco. Despite all the piles of dirt and construction down there, I was able to find a parking spot. Admittedly, I only visit the studios in the main 101 building because I always get kind of burnt out before I venture to any of the outlying buildings of studio.

Here is a picture of outside the main 101 building. I thought it would be more crowded but maybe it was related to when I went:


Here is a shot of the Silent Auction Gallery they have every year:


Here is my friend Idell Weiss. I always end up at her studio and hang out for a bit and say hello to all the visitors wandering into her studio:


Here is Idell's favorite painting. She paints in two tracks - abstract and landscapes:


And here is one of her landscapes that I like a lot:


I'm on several waiting lists to get a studio space of my own and I hope to having Open Studios 2008 from my own space in one of the artist collectives.


Technorati tags: art , Open Studios , Hunters Point , San Francisco

Open Studios San Francisco 2007 Report

It's Monday morning after a weekend of Open Studios. What an experience. I think, foot traffic wise, it was the worst of any of the 5 years I've shown down at Fort Mason. Every year, it seems to get worse and worse - because I don't think Fort Mason really cares if Open Studios is held down there or not and they don't promote it or make it visible. Every year I tell myself I am not going to do it again next year there, but then I do. Fort Mason keeps raising the prices by large leaps every year and provides less and less service for it. It really is time to find another alternative place but the choices are very few and far between in the city and in a group large enough to attract visitors to come to it.

Saturday was just bizarre down at Fort Mason. In a larger pavilion building there, they were also hosting the Oktoberfest. And different than other years of the Oktoberfest, this year there were tons of twenty-something kids who were *way* too drunk, and while they didn't come into our building where all the artists were holding Open Studios, they were loud and yelling in the parking lot, peeing against the other buildings, being generally scary, and twice during the day we saw 6 police cars, 3 ambulances and a fire engine, and sirens over at that building (we could see the entrance from our windows). As I was driving out of the Fort Mason parking lot at the end of Saturday, it was almost dangerous, with drunk kids leaping out in front of cars and yelling at the drivers and knocking into one another and streaming out of the parking lot on to the city streets nearby. It was just bizarre.

Sunday was also Oktoberfest but it seemed a lot calmer and more family-oriented. And more people (who did not seem drunk like the day before) did come into our building to view the art and artists did make more sales on Sunday than Saturday. I did horribly - only selling 5 miniature paintings the whole weekend and not even making the cost to rent the room (but fortunately had sold a bunch before the show in Indiana so in the end it was fine for me). On the good side, some friends did stop by to visit, and some people I had not seen in awhile which was fun, and other visitors who were very interested in my encaustics and wanted to know all about the process, so it was enjoyable educating more people on what makes encaustic beeswax so interesting to work with.

My legs are quite sore this morning from standing for two days and I'm feeling my back ache from the setup and take-down, but another Open Studios has come and gone and now its on to the next thing. I have a juried exhibition to get ready to enter on October 28th.





This is a shot of my setup. It does not include all of my setup - as there are some oil paintings off to the left and a larger encaustic painting off to the right... but it shows most of it.





Here are a couple of "roommates" (five artists shared our room), with Peggie MacDonald talking back at Sandra Riker's table. The very last hour of Sunday, Sandra had a customer buy the $800 bronze sculpture you can see in the upper right part of her table in the photo. In total she sold 7 sculptures so she did very well in the end.

Now I get to go visit my artist friends who are holding their Open Studios on the remaining weekends of October (in other parts of the city) and the Hunter's Point artist collective (which still remains the largest collection of artist studios in the city) has theirs the first weekend of November.





Technorati tags: art , oil painting , miniature painting , Open Studios

San Francisco Open Studios Oct 13-14, 2007

I'm all set for my busy weekend for Open Studios Oct 13-14th. I'll be at Fort Mason in San Francisco, Building C, Room 210. 11-5pm.

I didn't expect to pre-sell some of my miniatures (which I never show on my website) and a $1500 painting when I was in Indiana, just showing people what I had prepared for Open Studios. So I enter this weekend totally relaxed - I have already made back the money on the room rental cost and much much more so everything I sell this weekend is just "gravy", at least in my perception.

So I'll feel more relaxed to just meet and enjoy people who are coming to look at art... and something tells me that will probably help my sales even more, but I guess time will tell.

Now I'm just doing the last-minute stuff, preparing my table coverings, getting candy to have in a basket, and this year I'm going to actually make my lunch beforehand. Every year I tell myself I'll leave briefly to go buy a salad or sandwich, but I never do. So this year, I'll make sure I have something healthy in the room.

I'll post the results of my weekend experience on Monday.




4x4" miniature


Technorati tags: art , oil painting , miniature painting , Open Studios

Coming Home

I am back in San Francisco after a month in Indiana and adjusting back to my daily routines here.

Here is a 3x4 foot oil painting I completed while in Indiana, called "Coming Home". It is the largest-sized painting I've done so far.



And here it is on the client's wall:



My Open Studios is this 13-14th, so I'm just going to get started on before-show things, like labels and signs and gathering all together my selling supplies. I might try to squeeze in painting some more miniatures as I completely unexpectedly pre-sold 6 of them in Indiana at a book club meeting!

Technorati tags: art , oil painting , cow painting , Open Studios

Miniature Landscape Oil Paintings

This summer has been an intense time for some serious health issues of a couple of family members (one relative being diagnosed with a terminal illness in June which had all my attention that month [and more], and July my mother fell ill and almost died from a drug-resistant staph infection).

After all the recent intensity, August has been a quiet time for me to paint and continue making more paintings for my Open Studios, which will be held, for me, October 13-14 at Fort Mason in San Francisco. I'll be showing a smattering of the different types of works I've been doing over the past year - my larger traditional landscape oil paintings, my larger oil abstract paintings, and my encaustic wax paintings (which most of them are 12x12").

I always make some 4x4" miniature oil landscape paintings, which visitors seem to love and I usually make about 25 of them and typically sell around 20. This year I'm goaling myself to make 50 and I'm up to 44 of them so far so I'm close to my goal. I have been finding customers buying these more in sets than previous years so I'm trying to have enough of what they typically ask for (northern california trees/open space, chicken barns [classic to the northern california area], cows, and some coastals). I'm also doing some stylized ones of trees that mix abstract elements and the trees.

I never keep track of which ones sell, so this year I'm going to better document them beforehand and then I can go back and see which ones sold.

Here's just one photo with just a sampling of some I've completed so far.



I've submitted the first fully wax sculpture I've ever attempted to a juried competition. It's a little bizarre looking but I'm hoping different enough that the juror will like it. And it really fits the theme of the show, which is called "Renewal".

I'm heading to Evansville Indiana at the end of August, to spend all of September there. I'll be helping with my youngest brother's family and I have a 3x4 foot commission painting to start and complete in that month. What did the client want? Cows, of course. Can't get away from them! I have a nice scene planned of cows grazing with the Pacific Ocean in the background - sweeping looking. I may also try to kick out some more miniatures while I'm there and ship them back to myself before Open Studios. Maybe. Oils can be funky sometimes in how long it takes them to dry to the touch. I'll have to see how it feels when I get there and get into an Indiana frame of mind.

Technorati tags: art , miniature paintings , oil landscape paintings , Open Studios , miniature paintings , oil landscape paintings , Fort Mason

Coastal Rocks

I painted this quick painting as a thank you gift for a neurologist who took such great care of my sister-in-law recently (who is more my sister than my sister-in-law) and who is also an old friend of my sister-in-law's family. I could not think of anything that would be sufficient in thanking her for her medical advocacy when we needed it, for her compassion also just when we needed it, and for all the care and just being the wonderful person she is - and being a great doctor. How lucky we were/are for her presence and help. So a painting isn't really going to cover how grateful and thankful I feel, but it is a small thing. She saw my paintings on my website and said she liked my seascapes, so I wanted to paint her one as my personal thank you. It is simple but I think she will like it. It is 10x20", oil, and of some coastal rocks along the California coast.












Technorati tags: art , oil painting , seascape painting , coastal rocks

An Eye for an Eye

There will be no image today. I'm just not prepared to post it.

I spent 7 hours on trying to do my very first self-portrait, with no prior skills or ability to do this.

It is going to be quite the process for me. I started with my eyes, and then had to contemplate the bags under my eyes. It's only the first layer, in all in raw sienna, and I think I got the position of the eyes okay, but still - because I am far from putting in highlights yet, I look like I have an eye disease. My nose is too big, my chin too fat - do I sound like I have body issues??

I won't care if its realistic - that's hardly a goal I can harbor on my first attempt, but I do hope there is *something* of me in there so that I'm recognizable at the end.

I did my face and upper torso (without hair I looked like a cancer patient), then added the shape of my hair - again, all in raw sienna and I'm going to stop there and let it dry (it is oil) and contemplate my next stage.

I knew it was going to be hard, on many levels - which is probably why I have always been afraid to attempt a self-portrait. But I'm all about facing down my fears and now some under-developed facsimile of me sits there all in brown for me to contemplate this week.

I look forward to seeing what I learn and how I feel at the end of this project, though I suspect I won't be going into the portrait business any time soon!

I think I'll shift back to safer and familiar painting territory tomorrow. But I like when I get in the mood to shake things up and do something I've always avoided doing.

Technorati tags: art , oil painting , self-portrait

What's Up With the Bees?

I mentioned in my past post that I was thinking about several news articles that came out forecasting the extinction of honeybees.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is the newest affliction to strike the worldwide honeybee population. To date it has been observed in 27 U.S. states, Canada, Brazil, Europe, and possibly Taiwan. CCD is the name given to a specific set of characteristics observed in honeybee colonies that have failed. These characteristics include the absence of dead bees within or around the collapsed hive, a hive that has sufficient stores of honey, developing larvae in combs, and a delayed invasion of honey raiding pests. It has been suggested that bee losses on the west coast of the United States at 60 percent and 70 percent on the east coast.

Recently, a study done at Landau University in Germany showed that cell phones had a negative affect on honeybee hives. Researchers placed cell phones in and near active hives and the bees lost their desire to return to the hive. These results have also been documented in bees that live near power lines. Another theory is that the bees could also be becoming victims to a new unknown parasite. Another problem working against the bees is a reduced gene pool within the honeybee industry. These little guys have a lot stacked against them!

As a person who enjoys painting with pigmented beeswax and even the smell of the beeswax on the painting, I certainly hope these little guys survive. I'm rooting for them. But if it turns out the cellphone theory is correct, I don't know.... I don't see people giving up their cellphones to get their hands on some real honey.

Anyway, all these articles about bees got me thinking about them on all kinds of ways, like how they see, how they measure distance using optical flow (how much an image appears to move as the position of the observer moves), and I just got in the mood to paint bees.

This encaustic (thankfully, still made with 100% natural beeswax) piece is TOTALLY silly and whimsical, but that was the mood I was in today. It's titled, "What's Up With the Bees?"


Technorati tags: art , encaustic , encaustic painting , bees , honeybees

Marin Open Studios May 5-6, 2007

My friend Glynis and I took a field trip up to the Marin Open Studios weekend in Novato at the Hamilton Art Center. There were three buildings that had art in it . Although we came on Sunday and arrived there well after the opening time of 11am, we were kind of surprised at how many artists were not actually in their studios. But we still saw a lot of art.

I know some people there from my encaustics painting group and I grabbed two pictures of the two that were around.

Above is Kathy Knebel from the wax painting group speaking with my friend Glynis.

Above is Sandi Miot from the wax painting group, working bright and early in her studio.

It was amazingly warm and bright and sunny, so Glynis and I drove to Sausalito to eat lunch by the water and everyone was out enjoying the great weather:

And here is a good view of San Francisco from the waterfront at Sausalito:
Everything about the day felt great, the weather, visiting with good friends, seeing good art, getting a perfect parking spot in Sausalito (no easy feat!), getting a table right on the water with no reservations (again, no easy feat on a nice Sunday!), and after lunch found a cool spot on the waterfront to sit in the shade (it was actually too hot in the sun) to just soak up the view and the people and the great weather.

I could not have asked for a better Sunday.



Technorati tags: art , encaustic , Marin Open Studios , Hamilton Art Center

Cow Descending

The good news for me in today's painting session is that my second attempt at a cow at least looks like a cow... I think.... [as for my first attempt last weekend, let's just say I had a cow "accident" and it so didn't look like *any* animal that I had to wipe it out. No genetic animal experiments gone wrong on my hands!]

I'm learning the ins and outs of painting with painting knives. It's more challenging than I anticipated. But I like it so far and want to do more.

I wanted this painting to be minimalist, abstracty (I'm pretty sure THAT is not a word!) in nature, and moody. I'm going to live with it for a few days and see if I just leave it as it is or if it is calling out for more work on it.

Sometimes I won't like a piece of work and quit it for that reason, only to learn either (a) I like it better after some time, (b) I never end up liking it any better but other people do. Not saying either of these apply to this painting, I've just learned to reserve my internal judgment (which can be so severe) and see what the painting says to me after I let a little time pass.

Also, my friends have been teasing me lately for my cow paintings (which I *always* get requests for from collectors), so I thought I'd take a cow out of my usual landscapes and put him (her?) in unfamiliar surroundings.




Technorati tags: art , abstract painting , cow painting

The Deadly Poppy Field

Okay, maybe it is NOT the deadly poppy field of The Wizard of Oz (I have the tune running in my head now!), but I completed an oil painting of the Sonoma Coast (in Northern California) in the spring, with the poppies in bloom.

It's a somewhat loose painting because it is done entirely with painting knives. It is for entering an upcoming juried exhibit where the theme is flora and fauna. I figure this fits flora, but my other entry is actually going to be a knife painting of a cow... so not exactly fauna (my friend Lisa says, "But they roam!")



I had a very good week with art this week. On Wednesday, I sold an encaustic painting and on Friday I sold an oil painting plus the collector is discussing to have me do a commissioned piece because they liked one of my paintings but it is not big enough. I wouldn't mind painting at that locale again because its been several years and I enjoy the view of the Palace of Fine Arts from there. I have two paintings on exhibit at galleries and two more entry dates coming up. And I'm in a phase of painting with knives and I like it. Definitely a good art week.

Technorati tags: art , encaustic , seascape painting , Sonoma Coast,poppy field