Finished (sort of) sketch–it looks a tad plain.  I think some understated/subtle journaling or words would help this page.

Remember about a thousand years ago I took an online sketching class with Jane LaFazio at Joggles.com?  Well, I’m getting back to posting some of the exercises.   This was the sketching from Life class…. despite living near the sea or ocean for a goodly part of my life, I had few seashell type things.   The spiral conch-type shell is quite small and actually came out of a scent-thingy ordered from somewhere, but the sea urchin shell we collected in Friday Harbor, Washington, where we lived before moving to Maine in 2004.

Here’s the sketch of the shell and original sea urchin:

The inked sketch. Miraculously, I remembered to take photocopies before adding watercolor.

I liked making each item look as if it were an old-timey photo with those deckle-edges that I love.  I then enlarged the inked sketch and traced onto tissue paper (a technique learned from Jane in an earlier online class).  I painted the page–I wanted it to look like the white foamy froth of the waves on the beach, but lacking such a photo and the skill to manage froth in watercolor, I just went for sand and curving edges….    Then I adhered the tissue to the page using Gel Medium (Matte) to blue it down…the tissue just disappears.  In this last photo, you can see the shell and sea urchin.  I loved the 5-sections on the urchin and how the dots repeat and echo in rhythmical patterns.

With the actual shell (small!) and sea urchin on the page

One of the last exercises in my Joggles class (which now feels like it was about a thousand years ago) was to work within a grid.  I chose to work with items in our living room from our life around the world.

The finished (I think it is finished) page….may add some color to the upper left corner, just a light wash of the ochre….

I chose things from my parents’ home, like the bedwarmer and the Tibetan horn:

The Peruvian copper bedwarmer (lift lid, fill with coals, close lid, pop in bed! from the pre-electric blanket era!). Behind it is a decorative Tibetan horn–think like on the Swiss Alps, except in Tibet. This one, since it is perforated with holes, clearly could not be used to signal a nearby mountaintop.

Things I sketched….observed by the dog! Left to right back row: one of Paul’s carved monkeys from Zaire (remember hear no evil, see no evil? This one is speak no evil–his buddies are still on the shelf), a Mate cup (tea, with a strainer on the bottom of the straw, used by the Gauchos aka cowboys) from Argentina, an M’Bigou soapstone carved head from Gabon, and a duck made from a pully. My half-brother TJ was very creative; he lived in LA near the docks, and made things from leftovers–our coffee table is actually one he made from a ship’s hatch cover. On the bottom it has a note from him to my dad, for whom he made the table. They are both gone, but the table lives on! In the front is a rebenque, the crop/whip used by the Argentine and Brazilian gauchos.  Not pictured is the bird on the left side of the page.  It also is M’Bigou soapstone.

Jane LaFazio was our teacher. She wanted us to draw a grid (3×4 squares or whatever filled your page) then fill the squares, sometimes merging a couple of squares if needed. This is at the inked-but-not-colored stage.  On the bottom I wrote the places I have lived.

With some of the items colored, but no background or border yet….

And now I’ll send you back to the top to see the finished page.  I rather like it!

Every year, Studio Art Quilt Associations (SAQA) has a fundraising auction of small works–all 12 by 12 inches– by some of the finest art quilters working today.  I’m thrilled to be able to donate this piece:

Conversations III

Inspired by a visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, I made a series of three quilts, a larger center panel flanked by two 12 x 12 inch quilts.  Conversations III was donated to the 2012 Studio Art Quilt Associates online auction fundraiser.

Detail from Conversations III

When I began this series, I thought first of the conversation my beloved Sister-in-law, her friend and I had at lunch, but then realized that there was a conversation between the architecture and the landscape, the sky and the stone in the buildings, the artists and the viewers, and in the case of these quilts:  between me and the cloth/dye/thread.  Yes, all of the fabric in these pieces began as white, and I dyed them.

Conversations I has been juried into A World of Beauty 2012, the judged show at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, and Conversations IIis now for sale. I am thrilled with how they turned out.  Quilted into the sky, and written in ink onto the table and chairs (for the shadowing on the wood) are words about the art and the conversation:  contrast, line, shape, form, sky, water, stone, shadow, sea breeze…..

Conversations I, II and III

Some of you  may recall seeing these three pieces when I blogged about them last summer (here and here) for The Frayed Edges show at the Camden Public Library.  The small quilt on the right is the one I have donated to the SAQA auction!  Learn more about the auction here, and see the quilts here.  I’ve just discovered that my quilt, Conversations 3, will be among those auctioned live (gulp, eek!) at the International Quilt Festival in Houston.  Thrillingly, Conversations 1 (the large central quilt) has just been juried in to the IQA World of Beauty contest.

The online auction is in three parts, starting September 10th.  Each week for three weeks, a group of quilts is auctioned.  On the first day, prices for the 12 by 12 inch quilts are $750.  The next day the price drops to $550, and so on down to $75 by the end of the week (tho not much is left by then!).  The risk is:  do you wait to get a lower price, or lose the quilt you really want?  Inevitably (sigh) the ones I want are gone in the first two days….  The auction in Houston will work similarly:  on Preview Night (Weds., Oct. 31) prices will be $750.  Thursday morning the price will drop, and again at 2 p.m.  And so on, through the end of Festival.  To buy one of the quilts at Houston, though, either you have to be there OR you need to have someone there to buy for you! I shall be nervous walking by the SAQA booth to see if mine has sold!  I wish SAQA all the best in fundraising!

Hi all…just a quick note for any of you who are lucky enough to find yourselves in the Midcoast part of Maine.  In our online newspaper, Village Soup, I read an article about a local guy who is an artist:  Wilder Oakes (alas, the article requires one to either pay to view or have a subscription).  His work sounded intriguing, and the photo included intrigued me enough that I asked my Frayed Edges friend Kathy if she wanted to meet me and go to the show. BOY am I glad I did! You can’t read the article, but you can get a glimpse of the image here.  The show runs through July 27.

Wilder Oakes at work on The Lovers; click to see larger.

Oakes’ oil paintings, some with mixed media, are at Assymetrick Arts in downtown Rockland at 405 Main Street (about a block away from the Farnsworth Museum).  The centrepiece of the exhibit was The Lovers Over Port Clyde, which was the painting in the article.  On the bench beneath the painting were a couple aerial photos of the area where Oakes lives, so you could see how he has portrayed his home town, the buildings and inlets…. Some of the houses (just to the left of the man’s outstretched hand) were small bits of painted wood affixed to the large canvas (apparently he had to take a window out of his home to get this big piece out!), giving a great bit of literal dimension to the work.  As a textile artist and quilter, I loved the colors on the quilt on the bed, but also the colors worked into the paintings of the houses…an amazing blending of small brushstrokes of pink, blue, goldenrod,  mauve, green… just fabulous.

On the gallery website (here) you can see some of the artwork as well as a shot of what one sees as you walk in the door.  One piece is A Portrait of the Artist a Neil Diamond.  Oakes is only a bit younger than Diamond, and the two looked amazingly alike in photos of them from when they were younger (tho no resemblance today).  As we were preparing to leave, Kathy and I were chatting with the gallery owner when ever-alert Kathy noticed that Oakes himself had come in.  She went over to introduce herself, and as the owner went to greet a new person, I joined them.  What a treat….

Oakes chatted with us, telling us about his work, answering our questions (yes, things like:  how did you make those shapes in the frame?  answer:  carved them, then dipped them in several layers of gesso).  He then showed us the *back* of the self-portrait, which has an album by Diamond (yes, the entire disc!) plus  more of the story of this painting.  Oakes told us that he included a note written to him by his first love (which he still had in his high school yearbook) because she was as much a part of the story as he was.  And –goosebumps– she still lives in the area and came to play music at the show opening! On the front, where you see part of an album (painted) in the lower left corner, he has written in paint part of the story of who he (Oakes) was then, the songs, about his life then.  I noticed that the house behind the figure looked like a house in the Lovers, one where an angel is in the street, so I asked, and indeed it is the same house, where he grew up.

It was a totally cool visit—I left wanting to dash home and make art!  Instead, sigh, I stopped at Home Depot, came home, cooked, etc.  But just had to share with you all.   DO drop in to the show if you are in the are.  You can also see a bit of Oakes on his Facebook page.

May all of you have a moment like this, that inspires you and gets your creative juices flowing…. it was just wonderful!

We were a small but content twosome this month.  Deborah of course is far afield, and Kate is busy beyond belief, so Kathy and I got together at her house (OH how wonderful it is to have her living locally!) and we enjoyed her new screened in porch!   Last time, we managed not to get around to collaging, so I lugged WAY too many pounds of magazine clippings and STUFF (including the square and round paper punches I have) to her house and played!  Before that, though, Kathy showed me the progress in the garden, including the newly sunny spot where a tree is no longer.  There were two stumps, so I asked her what she was going to do with them…..heh heh!  But first…

My collaged pages from my play day with Kathy. Yes, kindergarten for grown-ups in OH SO the BEST way! Pass the glue-stick please!

Kathy’s page–just love the cascading houses, and that blue on the right and and and… you can tell she liked playing with my punches, tho I must admit I’m not thrilled that several of the ones I’ve bought don’t seem to cut cleanly for me. I’ll try the aluminum foil trick for sharpening the one that was acting up. Not sure if it is uneven pressure by me (as in operator error) or if the punch isn’t quite so well machined… Anyway, thank you Kath for a PERFECT June day (and letting me share your page).

Then those stumps….Kathy was going to have someone come take them away, so I asked if that someone could be ME…YIPPEEEE!   Paul (hubby) didn’t even roll his eyes at me when I called to consult on their soon-to-be use….just said yes, he and Eli would come help me haul them away!!!!  Herewith:

Our new end table for the front porch! Next time Max or True is over to chop some tree trunks into firewood, I’ll ask them to take the chain saw and flatten two of the tops of the stumps so the glasses won’t tip quite so much!

And the Hammock Step! At first I thought the multi-stump end table would be too low and I would use this piece underneath, but that wasn’t necessary. So we rolled it over to the hammock…. I’ve blurred Paul’s face as he doesn’t have a pic of himself even on his FB page (yes, we finally got him onto FB!). As you can see, he is engaged in his favorite summer passtime….

And because I couldn’t resist…. Eli and I went shopping for shorts for him (he keeps doing that eating and growing thing), we stopped to stock up on cat litter at the big-box pet store up in Augusta (the capitol of Maine, an hour west of here by 2-lane route).  I had been wanting since we moved early last year to get a doggie bed for Widgeon to use down in my studio, as the floor gets COLD even in summer, and he’s gonna squish/trash the settee cushions.  So I found this lovely one with zip-off/washable cover (from Martha Stewart no less…. is there anything left in America that she doesn’t have a line of product for? –to use some horrid diction).  Isn’t he ADORABLE?  He LOVES it!

When you are a small dog of even smaller brain (with apologies to Pooh and Mr. Milne), it is simply too difficult to hold up one’s chin or keep the eyelids open…..Plus the doggie bed is quilted in dog bones like the background quilting I did on the portrait of him, AND he matches the color, so it won’t show how much he sheds!