Happy Birthday - My Best Friend Forever Has a Blog!

My BFF Leslie, whose birthday is today, just started a blog! It documents the cool paintings that she's been working on, most of them adapted from vintage photos . . .

This is one of my favorites . . . I love the composition . . . so drop by her blog, check it out, and leave her some happy birthday accolades of praise!!

Loose Ends . . .

I thought I'd share how a couple of pieces have progressed . . . one was the mandala that I started the first night of Artmaking as Playful Prayer . . . I started working on it, then photographed my own hands, my own lips, and my own vegetables to incorporate into it . . . I also photographed some of my own lipsticks . . . The orange and lemon slices are plastic fruit that I bought and made photocopies of! Anything I can do to build my own library of images . . .


And here's the four-part self-portrait that I started at Traci Bunkers class at Art and Soul . . . I changed up some of the collage, and added a few color washes, and it definitely feels more unified. Can't say I'm crazy about it, but it feels resolved - and I learned a lot from doing it. Incubation is your friend.

And whether a piece is "likable" or not is probably one of the least important things about it.

DEMO: Moldable Foam Stamps

I decided to participate in NaBloPoMo 2007 - it's not a new Polish Dance Craze, nor is it a traditional Italian noodle dish. Heck, it's not even a neighborhood in New York. No, it's just my comittment to post on this here blog once a day during the month of November.

It is possible that I will end up resorting to recitations of what I ate during the day, but I am starting with a bang - my first on-line DEMO! A NaBloPoMo Demo! I'll also be putting these up on the website - part of a diabolical long-term plan to offer ideas for quick and easy Creativity Breaks at the rate of one a month.

We'll see.

But now, you get a DEMO! of my new favorite thing - moldable foam. I am making stamps out of anything that doesn't move. Actually, the keyboard might make for a cool effect . . .

1. Start with some Moldable Foam! 3" x 4" of foam. I get mine locally at Collage on Alberta (they sell them singly for $1.00 each , or in packs of 8 for, well, $8). If you're not local, good luck finding them on the manufacturer's website (www.clearsnap.com) or googling Magic Stamp Moldable Foam Stamps.

2. Arrange the items you want to use to make an impression with - here, it's clothespins.
3. Heat the foam with an embossing tool for 30 seconds - keep it moving. And yes, it needs to be something hotter than a hairdryer - sorry!

4. Press the foam firmly into the texture objects for 15 seconds. Release! The impression will stay in the foam until the foam is reheated. Reheat the foam, and the impressions are *mostly* erased. And you can use both sides of the foam . . . yes, you can buy one foamie, make two stamps, then erase and start all over again!!!

5. Ink your stamp. I used a rubber brayer and a water-based printing ink, but use your imagination! Experiment! Basically, you just don't want the ink to dry on the stamp - you can probably use stamp pad ink or fabric paints with some kind of extender . . . you get the idea. (Note: I later used fabric paints . . . I found that it was easier to ink the foam with a foam brayer because the consistency of the fabric paint was different. Still got cool prints!)

6. Print! Just press the inked surface into the paper or fabric using firm, even pressure. Here, I printed on smooth Bristol Board. Very nice impression.

You can make a stamp from almost anything . . . Buttons

Rubber Bands

Even Corn Cobs! In fact, once you get started, it's hard to identify something that WOULDN'T make a cool stamp.

Here are some sample prints that I turned into ATCs. Still very attached to these today, but will be ready to trade some soon, I'm sure! (The ATCs shown above also include homemade stamps made from Friendly Foam glued to bits of acrylic board, an idea I got from Wendy Huhn.)

Back to School

The past month or so has been like "back to school" for me - taking classes at Art & Soul, getting my own class schedule up for fall, and then taking a class with Wendy Huhn at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts here in Portland (yes, a hoity-toity place that still actually uses the word "craft" in its name - wow). Wendy Huhn is a very cool fiber artist who lives here in the Great Northwest and the class I attended was called "Transferology" - oodles of cool techniques for transferring images to paper and fabric (yes, those are some of my samples above).

I had a lot of fun, met some other very cool mixed media artists, and got some great ideas for the pieces I'm working on for the December Gresham Arts Council Show "Postcards from Afar." It was great to see how the other folks in the class worked and experimented, see what their process was like, then see some finished stuff live and in person, and then go check out their work on-line! I love looking at other artist's work - These are the participants with websites that I know about: Trisha Hassler - who mixes fabric and metal in her work, quilter and fiber artist Gerrie Congdon, and mixed media artist Mar Goman (go to the site, click on "Artists" then on "Mar Goman").

Workshop: $$$
Supplies: $$
Getting to see other artists at work: Priceless!

Blog Action Day & Junk to Funk

It's a double whammy: Art and Environmentalism, with a splash of Fashion. Blog Action Day meets Junk to Funk. Write to raise awareness of environmental action. Make clothes to raise awareness of environmental action. I'm a big fan of micro-action, action on a personal level. And I'm a big fan of art. And, let's face it, I love clothes. So, this is perfect. This is my Junk to Funk entry, using reclaimed materials (the thread and the snaps are new - everything else is recycled). I've got used bicycle inner tubes, an old bicycle reflector, and funny rubber bands from SCRAP; shrunken sweaters and faded t-shirts from Goodwill, vintage buttons and jewelry findings from an estate sale. Traditionally, art materials are chemical intensive, and the cotton industry puts more pesticides and pollutants into the ecosystem than any other crop. Art garments from reclaimed materials? What could be cooler? Oh, of course. A Carmen Miranda hat made from an old sweater, minus the composted fruit.

Time to Incubate . . .

Ok, after four classes at Art & Soul I hit total overwhelm . . . I needed a little time to absorb it all and let it marinate . . . My last class on Sunday was with Traci Bunkers. It was a very cool self-portrait class. We took a photograph of ourselves, cut it into four pieces, blew it up on a copier, and then used it essentially as an underpainting and built up layers of color, collage, and texture on top of it. The idea is to work on each piece of the image separately and then integrate them into a unified piece. I like fragmenting images, and I've used photocopies as underpainting before (I can get really lazy about drawing and love this kind of shorcut!). I used a fun, kind of sexy-sassy picture that my friend Michael Burton took of me (he also did the shot of me on this blog).
And while I like elements of each fragment, I ended up not liking the way the fragments come together . . . . Part of it is that I ended up working very opaque with acrylics and collage materials when I think a little more transparency would have served me well. I also didn't do much to integrate the pieces.



And I can be pretty stubborn - meaning I plan to work the piece until it comes to some kind of resolution.

And part of that for me is setting it down in my studio or somewhere else where I'll walk by it several times a day and keep my subconscious working on it. I may eventually just let it go - decide the piece itself isn't really interesting, and just take the idea and do other things with it. Or it may be like the painting I started ten years ago and still haven't finished. It's sitting there, and yet it's still engaging me. Come to think of it, that painting is also a portrait, and it's fragmented to a certain extent . . . themes.

Art and Soul

I love Portland. I've lived here for 15 years, and it still surprises and delights me. Art and Soul is a cool mixed media arts retreat that's been held in Portland for 5 years now - finally, this year, I got to go! I took a class today from Diane Downs today on how to alter a canvas by adding niches to it - one of those things that I'd read about, but really needed to see hands-on to "get." I had made some paper by arranging and color photocopying recipe cards from a box of old family recipes that my mom gave me - things in my mom's handwriting, my dad's, my grandmother's - even old ones my mom had typed! I used the paper as a cover for the foam core that formed the niche, and for the background of the canvas.


And then somehow the heart just seemed right, along with the white picket fence and the dollhouse window (a gift from Diane - I love it!) Later, I added some matches to one of the niches and have my eye on some etchings of cutlery and my artmaking neighbor from Texas, Ann Webb, gave me some skulls that may need to find a home here . . . there's a strange death and domesticity theme popping up - again.
A friend recently asked me "why shrines"? I think it's largely because I was turned off by modern art and art that was only about deconstructing and challenging the aesthetic ideals of other artists. This happened during art school. I think it happens to a lot of artists. We lose the soul, and get caught up in critiques and techniques and how our work contributes to "the art dialogue." It was around this time that I was really drawn to craft, to outsider art, to process art, to folk art, and to devotional art. Art that was made out of passion, compulsion, prayer or practicality. Art that came out of the need and desire of people to make meaning out of their lives, not just the work of other artists. Devotional art and folk art let me to mandalas, masks, rituals and shrines, as did my own exploration of different spiritual traditions. And I began to look at my precious artmaking objects and my memorabilia and all the evidence of my history and experience of spirit and gather those things together into shrines as a way of both understanding them and honoring them and making art that was meaningful to me. More later, but that's it in a nutshell. Whew!

Art Grrll on the Town

Besides watching CSI last night and staying up until 3 am trolling blogs on the web, I also went to Last Thursday on Alberta . . . my first stop was the Guardino Gallery. I've seen a lot of things there in the past that I like - they have a huge variety of work and seem very comfortable bouncing back and forth across the great art/craft divide and ignoring it as is appropriate.

This show blew me away - Diane Archer was one of the featured artists, and she uses topographical maps combined with natural found objects to create what I think of as interior landscapes set in the natural world. And sometimes they have words! What could be better than that? Maps, bones, words . . . I was in heaven. So I bought a piece. After all, if I'm not out there supporting artists in a town where art is really pretty cheap, then who the heck will? I got to talk with her a little bit about her process - she described a level of precision and planning that is utterly alien to me - but looking at her jewelry, it makes total sense. And Oregon Art Beat (I love public television!) is even featuring her this month!

And I got a really cool piece by Julia Gardner - an artist whose work I've had my eye on for a while . . . transparencies and found objects and resin and text . . . Yummy! Though she doesn't seem to have a website anywhere . . . so I took a picture of it sitting on my file cabinet in my office. Right now, it's sitting there inspiring me - soon it will go up to the living room.

Life is good that there are such beautiful things in it!