National CYT Blog Features My Work

The National CYT (Christian Youth Theater) Blog featured my sets work again.  Go to http://cytglobal.com/cytblog/?m=201012 find December 22, and there it is!  Awesome!

A Salute to Old Age

This Christmas I took a picture of my mother with our cat, Calypso, on her lap. The contrast of her beautiful, wrinkly old hands and the silky young cat are striking, as well as the contrast between lights and darks.  But more than the visual contrasts, it makes me think of youth and old age, and how thankful I am for my aging parents.  We had a lovely Christmas together.  It was made all the sweeter because I don't know how many more Christmases we will have with them.  These are the hands that loved and cared for me all my life.  These are the hands that gave me a beautiful childhood.  These are the hands that gave me a home filled with solid Christian values.  Now it's my turn.  Now I will use my hands for them.

Metal Embossing, Peony Final

As I promised in my Metal Embossing post, here is the finished piece.  Scroll down to the one entitled 'Metal Embossing' to see how I did this before adding color.

I chose a nice neutral brown, two reds, an opalescent pink and two greens for the color.  These are liquid acrylics - very heavily pigmented.

Because the gesso is super absorbent, I worked one small area at a time, the size of, say, half a peony.

With the inks, I would paint or pour them on, one or two colors at a time, and work them into the crevices with a rag.  I wanted to go for an antiqued, old look, so I rubbed the paint off in
varying degrees.  Some spots I left more pigmented, and some I rubbed harder.  In most of the highly embossed places, I rubbed hard enough so that the shine of the metal glistened through.
The second picture shows  detail so you can see how I treated the outside edges.  Some I rubbed down to the gesso, letting the white peek through.  In some parts I layered colors and rubbed one or the other off to varying degrees to get that ancient look.  I've always liked pinks and greens together, they give me a nice, peaceful feeling.

By the way, the complex leaves surrounding the flowers are rose geraniums.  If you aren't familiar with them, seek them out.  The flowers are insignificant, but the leaves smell like fresh roses.  I use them in bouquets always.  They're also great when you toss a couple leaves into your iced tea glass - how can iced tea not be good when it smells like roses?  They're also a wonderful flavor enhancer for homemade apple jelly.  Just imagine light pink sweet rose-scented apple jelly on your toast.  Oh, heaven!  And of course my signature is down by all those rich, textured browns.  Let me know what you think.  AND... merry Christmas.

Impressionist Art Colony - Exploring!

When we were in New England this November we went to the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. 

 Outside the museum was this - structure - which beckoned us over before we even entered the museum.  It begged us to explore and play.  This is my son looking at it.  Here's a little video -

It was built by a man named Patrick Dougherty, who travels worldwide building these artistic structures from the materials at hand.  It really was remarkable, and overlooked pretty much the whole of the museum property, and the unbelievably beautiful and fast-moving Lieutenant River.

 When we first came into the museum parking lot, there was a from what I understand rare and very beautiful crab apple tree. We took full advantage of it and Noah and I had a dandy crabapple fight. :)  Here's the tree:

 

It was so beautiful.  And the day was perfect, too - can you imagine Connecticut the week before Thanksgiving in the 50s and sunny?!  Great traveling for us thin-blooded Texans!  The pic below shows me with the last of my ammunition.  (of course, a squished one turned up in my hair later, so I guess Noah won!)

You can see the Lieutenant River in the background.  One of the things that made this place special is the fact that Childe Hassam resided there for some time.  His Impressionist art influenced the other artists, as you can see if you check out their works.

Below is the entrance to the museum, uh, as you can see it says 'Museum Entrance...' and, Yours Truly in paint jeans.  Oh, yeah... how could I forget?  ALL of my jeans are paint jeans! 

Below is a picture of the museum building.  Can you believe I somehow didn't get a shot of the house?  Oh, brother!  I know why - they maintain a garden between museum and house that was beautiful even in its dormancy.  Because I'm a gardener, it distracted me!  To this day, they maintain the gardens in the same way that they were maintained in its artistic heyday, same plants, same layout.  It was pretty easy to figure that out just by looking at the artists' paintings!

As I said before, the foilage was really breathtaking.

 My last shot for you is one of my favorites - my son facing the Lieutenant River in an Adirondack chair. Great way to end our museum tour.

 

Woodlands Waterfall

By the way, this pic that I'm using as my header temporarily, Woodlands Waterfall, looks pretty terrible online.  The colors are really, really off and I'm pretty sure I'm going to leave it up only for a couple days.  Believe me when I say that it IS really pretty in person.  I did it with colored inks on YUPO.  YUPO is a polyurethane paper (basically plastic) that is absolutely non-absorbant.  I added a lot of pearlescents into the water, so it fairly glows.

 If you view this in person, it looks so much better. I kept the brushstrokes big and loose to give it a painterly feeling and did a lot of direct painting on the 'paper' to let the colors mix there instead of in my pallet.  There are a lot of rich neutrals in the rocks and shadows that just don't come out in a photograph.  Close to our home there's a waterfall over by The Woodlands Waterway that we enjoy climbing around.  We had kids climbing all over the rocks and I took a bunch of shots only with my phone, but that was all I needed to spark the idea.  I'd actually like to do an entire series of Woodlands waterfalls as we've got a bunch of 'em.  Time, time, time!

Metal Embossing

I brought home three cherished peonies from the store the other day, an extravagant purchase, but I NEEDED them!  In each state we have lived in, I planted a row of peonies, and have left a peony trail behind me.  Here in Texas the climate is too warm for them, so I can't grow them anymore. Lucky people in a number of states are benefiting from my labors!  Peonies are my favorite flowers and have an unbeatable, heady fragrance.  So, because I had these lovelies, I just had to draw them.  Decided to try it on metal.
Here it is with my etching finished - as you can see, it's pretty thin and floppy.

This shows a close up of a little section so you can see the detail a little better.  Because the metal is so reflective (and because I'm not great with cameras) it's kind of hard to show what I want, but you get the idea.  Peonies are so multi-petaled, that I wanted it to be complex, and metals really beg to be heavily etched to show off their reflective qualities.

My next step was to gesso it to a board because the metal needs support.  I used a LOT of gesso and laid it thickly on both board and metal, filling in all the indentations to preserve the etching.  It'll probably take three years to dry.

Here it is sitting on my workspace drying.  I haven't measured it but it's probably 11x14 or so.

My next step will be to paint it; I think I'm going to paint it in some pastel tones.  I'll take some pics of that and post it very soon.

Let me know what you think of it so far, and if you've had any experiences with metals.  I do these every year (on a smaller scale) with my art students.  The younger the student, the smaller the piece.  They invariable LOVE it!

A Thankful Nod

Tomorrow morning we're going to go down to the Veteran's Memorial Cemetery.  It will be my second funeral in two weeks and my third funeral at that cemetery in the past couple years.  My love and prayers to the families of those two very special young men who gave their lives for us all.  May we live well as thanks to them.