Florida Whirlwind Week

Saturday February 28th, I drove 13.5 hours down to Florida to deliver work, hang a show, visit friends, work out details for a collaborative art project, attend my show's opening, give a demo, and do 2 photo shoots.  Whew - just listing that out makes me want to take a nap!  

I want to thank Lois and Mark Mittleman for hosting me early in the week and for inviting me to do the show at the Fifth Avenue Art Gallery.  It was such a neat experience to return to the place where I'd had my very first solo show almost a decade ago.  

2007

2015

Hanging the show was definitely a group effort.

It's good to have precise friends!  Here's Teresa keeping me on even keel.

Nancy and Lois seeing to the details.

Less talking more working!  Love those socks Suzanne.

The best thing about hanging a show is definitely the lunch afterwards!
Notice the multiple drinks with umbrellas...

After hanging the show, I was able to spend some quality time with Teresa working out the details of a project we will be doing together.  Getting to bounce ideas back and forth for a few days made me feel like I was 5 again and someone had just handed me a bag full of Tootsie-Rolls!

Why yes - that is Teresa making lasagna!  This was my real reason for driving almost 14 hours...















The trip had it's challenging moments.  It was one of those weeks where Mother Nature decided to mess with me.  On a shoot where I could have used some clouds, it was 91 degrees and blindingly sunny.  For the underwater shoot it was dismally grey and the pool turned out to be a dark color.  What are you going to do?  Shoot, pray, and roll with it...  

A huge thanks to Suzanne and Jill for being so patient with this scatterbrained photographer!

My show "Sirens & Muses" will be up at the Fifth Avenue Art Gallery until March 28th for those of you who happen to be in the Melbourne, FL area.  

Luckily, as my trips usually do, this one paid off a week or so after I got back home with a tidal wave of ideas that started flowing faster than I could write them down.

Back to work!

Merry Christmas/Happy Birthday/Cyanotypes Rule

Not too long ago, someone asked me what I got for Christmas. When I rattled off hammers to texturize metal, an R2D2 measuring spoon set, and cyanotype chemicals I got the quizzical, confused, cocked puppy head look back. No really - that made me quite happy I assured them!

Flash forward a month, my photography buddy Tad Barney came to my studio for a visit and some playtime. He was very kind to come hold my hand.  It's been about a decade since I played with creating cyanotypes and I was a bit nervous.

I lugged my printer, laptop, and Pictorico Inkjet Transparencies to the studio, but Tad gets the award for strangest contraption. He brought his homemade UV light source. It was a wonder to behold!

Tad's magic blacklight box

We painted the emulsion on all kinds of different papers, including book pages, watercolor paper, pastel paper, and even some antique paper I bought as a bundle but had never figured out how to use. The antique paper (shown below) has a wonderful circular mark on some of the pages that Tad put to good use to accentuate the composition of one of his images.

Tad showed me how he has been staining his cyanotypes with instant coffee.

 

I was particularly enchanted with Tad's dreamy image of his daughter Lily on the book page.

My main goal for the day was to see if cyanotypes would work with a super thin unryu combined with my encaustic work. While I don't have the exposure dialed in yet, this was definitely a successful proof of concept.

All Hail King Tad!

Out With the Old!

One of my studio mates decided to move on and out of her studio which happens to be twice the size of mine and it has a bathroom!  New Year's Eve, I gave into temptation and decided to move into the new studio space.  It really didn't take much of a push...

It's a big white box right now.  Unfortunately I'm going to have to move in before I can figure out how to make it mine.  There are too many deadlines coming up to patch and paint immediately, but that can come later. 

Here are some shots of the new space before I started moving in and cluttering it up:

The massive cabinet is staying and it has already sparked a photo shoot idea.

Things are starting to shape up.  This weekend I spent some time moving. Where did all this stuff come from anyway??? 

 
I'm going to miss my little beige studio.  It was my first honest-to-goodness space away from my dining room table.  But I'm sure the next artist to occupy it will be able to feed off of the good vibes I'm leaving behind.

The old studio

This past weekend my friend, Patricia McQuade came and helped me break in the new space.  We had a great time and I didn't even blow the breakers once!

What did we do before smart phones?

I've always been hopeless with directions and seldom had my camera with me when I really needed it.  Enter the smart phone and shazaam!  I can find interesting places with little forethought and take so many more pictures than I used to before this addictive little piece of metal and plastic became permanently attached to my hand.

Enter the victory dance over boredom...

My Mother

My mother likes to shop.  There, I said it.  She's particularly fond of antique stores.  I've discovered a nifty way to entertain myself while she is sifting through the never-ending minutiae of tchotchkes. Most of these stores have mannequins and busts from various eras.  

I'm especially fond of the busts with fake eyelashes. If I have more time to kill, I wander around the store again looking for interesting textures to sandwich with these plastic faces.  Old upholstered chairs, text in vintage books, rusty metal, scarves, and vintage table linens have all proved useful. Mentally, this is really just an extension of the work that I've previously enjoyed doing in Photoshop, but the immediacy of having the camera and the processing all in the palm of your hand whenever you want it is awesome.

Here's a before and after example:

This antique mannequin from a wonderful vintage clothing store in Ohio didn't have the prettiest of faces but she took on this mysterious personality once combined with other images.  She has been combined with a shot of some paper star lights from a shop window, bare tree branches, and some texture from a curtain.

On to the techie side of things...  I consider myself a complete neophyte when it comes to processing on the phone and not in Photoshop.  There is a ton to learn. I was first introduced to this idea by Susan Tuttle's wonderful work and tutorials. 

These are the apps I've been exploring:  Oggl, Image Blender, DistressedFX, SuperImpose, ScratchCam, BlurFX, PicGrunger, and FilterStorm.

Image Blender in particular is a favorite.  It allows you to combine 2 photos using a process similar to Layer Effects in Photoshop.  You can choose the amount the top picture effects the bottom one and in what way.  It also gives you the ability to doodle a mask to hide parts of the top picture.

A few more examples:

This new way of working has reignited the creative spark once again.  Now I'm ready for my Mother's next shopping trip.  In fact, she's probably going to be dragging me out of the stores now.