Patience, my pretties...

Early readers of this blog may recall my near-death struggles with Feedburner. Their use of somewhat non-standard English didn't always help. However, I had to admire the silliness involved in creating the word "troubleshootize" to complete the sequence of operations Feedburner provides for blogs: "analyze, optimize, publicize, monetize, and (of course) troubleshootize."

I promised I'd start posting my 6x6 paintings for auction in a few weeks. That's still the plan. I've set up the Paypal part, but when I started to read about setting up an auction, I soon found myself in a veritable maze of information, much of it labelled "Must reads for newbies" or words to that effect. So as soon as I "educatize" myself in the ways of eBay, I'll be online with some art. Please hang in there.

I'm planning to put my acrylic on canvas paintings up for auction initially, but I may follow that with some small watercolors. Here's a prime candidate:

Cockamamie Cockatoo
6" x 6"
watercolor on Winsor Newton 140 lb. cold-pressed paper

Señor Terremoto and I are off on a little road trip for a few days, but I plan to go into high gear when we get back. Plans are in the works for some CafePress goodies too -- you'll be able to go green with canvas bags that feature vintage tin toys and other delights.

Still alive

In some twist of fate, the weekend for the fine arts festival broke all heat records for this area. A week before, we'd been turning on the heat to take the chill off the house in the morning and we're back to doing that again. But two days before the festival, the winds switched from the prevailing westerly direction to the east, bringing all the heat of central California to our normally temperate area. We set up the booth in near 100 degree heat; the next two days were slightly cooler, but still hot. I had the good luck to get assigned to a partly shady spot at the edge of a cluster of booths and we were able to bring some market umbrellas to add extra shade. There was a steady breeze most of the time, making it seem more like a vacation than work. The show organizers did a fabulous job. Everything ran smoothly, lunch was provided both days, and there were booth sitters to give the artists a break if they wanted one.


I snapped this photo just before opening time the first day. The crowds were lighter than usual this year and people were clearly mindful of the state of the economy, but I had sales nevertheless and a lot of interest in seeing more of my work. Both the show and my gallery are in the same town, so many of the visitors had already seen my gallery show. It was a nice chance to meet some of my patrons.

Meanwhile, the gallery show is in its last week. One of the joys of being in a cooperative gallery is the opportunity to be involved in all aspects of staging a show, including designing a window display. It's a chance to be playful, and especially for this show of vintage toys and silly saltshakers. I scanned the vintage tablecloth from my main show piece of saltshakers – "Heirlooms" – and scattered a couple of dozen rubber duckies on the windowsill, surrounding some of my small paintings. It's been a total kid magnet if the small handprints and noseprints at the bottom of the window are any proof.



The small paintings are from the "Cute as a Bug" series. My plan is to begin posting these paintings for auction in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

Swan song??

Ta-da!! So here's my big surprise, finished just in the nick of time. I put in my first all-nighter since college to get this little fellow done for my show and I'm here to report that I recovered a lot more quickly at 20 than I do now!! This is a snapshot taken under less than perfect lighting conditions, but it came out pretty close to the real thing.

Fe Fi Faux Fowl
30" x 30"
acrylic on canvas

The idea for this painting grew out of the show of small works that we hung last fall. I was one of the people who pushed for that show, so when I chose "Out of the Ordinary" as the theme for my feature show, the logical creative step was to "supersize" the little toys I'd painted in the fall.

I love the concept of taking a very small toy and blowing it up to such a large size, but the technical challenges of painting this in acrylic made for many frustrating moments and a lot of very long painting days. I know that working in oils would have made this a much simpler task, but I have a long history of chemical sensitivity that has made me wary of oil paints. As it turns out, I may have to back away from acrylics too. By the time I finished this piece, I was feeling weird and woozly at the end of every day. At first I thought it was just because of the long hours in the studio, but a few days after I finished it, I opened the sealed palette-keepers that I stored my paints in and the odor of the acrylic just about knocked me over. So, in addition to loving watercolor as a medium, it may truly be the only one I can tolerate. But I'm hoping that if I back off acrylics for a while and only work on small pieces when I start using it again, it may be OK. Acrylic has so many unique properties that I really want to be able to play with it some more. I feel like I've barely begun to discover what it can do.

Now I have to get ready for next weekend's outdoor show. There's a whole bunch of framing to do, prints to make and mat, and assorted other tasks. I've recently redesigned my publicity materials and have to update my booth signage to match. It should be a busy week.

My own personal albatross

"Oh, yeah!" you're saying. "She said she'd be posting more clues to the mystery painting. But a whole week and nada." You have my deepest apologies. I've been painting away until the wee hours and frankly, it seems like the more paint I put on this piece, the farther away I am from completing it. For someone who enjoys 6x6 paintings, I'm way out of my comfort zone here. I have less than a week to finish it and get everything else ready for my show, so you probably won't hear from me until that's all finished. But no more empty promises. I'll put up a proper image when the show is up.

In Progress

Yep! I'm still here -- my computer was in for repairs and I'm painting away on my big surprise for my upcoming show, so I haven't posted for almost a week. Much remains to be done, so I'll be getting back to the studio now, but here's a sneak preview of the painting. Any guesses?


Look for more clues next week...

Battle weary

Turns out I didn't win the skirmish with Feedburner two weeks ago after all. After a complaint from a friend that she wasn't receiving notices of updates to my blog, I went back to the lair of the dragon known as feedburner. Let's just say that my armor is quite scorched. And leave it at that.

I hope I'm not giving false hope when I say that you should be able to subscribe to my feeds now.

Homage to Homer

No, not the famed author of antiquity, nor the renowned 19th century watercolorist. I'm paying homage to a much more recent Homer: infamous donut-eater, father of Bart -- yes, the Simpsons. I am particularly fond of Homer's signature exclamation -- D'oh!! -- as a way to express a moment of sudden enlightenment. (I suppose some might argue that this is really nothing more than awareness of prior stupidity, but it sounds so much better cast as enlightenment, don't you think?)

So this week, I started on an acrylic painting that dwarfs my usual efforts. Using the same brushes that I use on my 6x6's, I gamely started on the larger piece. Frustration multiplied by frustration!! In desperation, I finally resorted to some stiffer brushes designed for acrylics that I've been avoiding because I don't like long-handled brushes. Paint moved when I wanted it to, stayed where I put it, blended together easily!! Truly a Homeresque moment.

Since I'm going to keep that painting under wraps until my gallery show, I'll share the most recent 6x6, just being varnished today.

Quack-quack
6" x 6"
acrylic on canvas

Enjoy the weekend. I gotta go paint now.

My Monet period...

Back in the fall, my gallery decided to do a group show of 6x6-inch canvases. I was eager to try my hand at acrylics and decided to experiment with a looser, more impressionistic style after having followed Karin Jurick's blog for a while. Things started out well -- this little snail was my first painting:

Zoom-zoom
6" x 6"
acrylic on canvas

Notice the painterly approach on the shell, the suggestion of treads on the wheels, of light reflected on the face. I was pleased. I started on the second painting:

Buzz-buzz
6" x 6"
acrylic on canvas

Notice the slightly more controlled style! But there are still impressionistic elements in the piece. I started on the third painting:

Waddle-waddle
6" x 6"
acrylic on canvas

OK!! At this point, there's no denying that I've completely returned to my realistic roots. And in only three paintings!! A veritable nano-period in the history of art. Ah, Monet, we hardly knew ye....

I caught a "fish"

It's not like I've been living in a cave, unaware of the whole cyber-universe thingie. But more and more this past week, as I set up a website and this blog, I've been feeling like I set out to catch a fish and discovered that I'd somehow snagged a whale. The options for communication are SOOOOO vast -- well, it almost leaves me speechless. Which brings me around to the subject of chattiness. Those who know me in person are fully aware that I do not lack the gene for yakkety-yak. But set me in front of a blank sheet of paper and I kind of freeze up. Good thing this is an art blog, I guess!

I mentioned that I'd been honored to be chosen as artist of the month on The Artist's Magazine website back in January. Here's the piece that was featured:

Heirlooms
10" x 10"
watercolor

My mom had a pair of these little salt shakers in her china closet and I always loved them. Over the past several years, I've collected a whole flock of little guys like this, as well as some definitely stranger cousins. Look for more paintings featuring them in the future.

Whew!!

I've done battle with the blog setup options, and I *think* I won.... It really is mind-boggling. If all went as planned, you can now subscribe to a feed and see updates when I post them.

This week has been a flurry of computer work here at the studio -- website and blog all in one week. And the unfortunate downside is that I'm paying for it with back spasms caused by sitting in front of the computer for about 18 hours a day. But I'm being good and taking care to move around more, so things are improving.

For anyone interested, I used iWeb to set up my website. I found it to be easy to use and lots of fun. But I set it up on my studio computer and then wanted to copy it to my laptop so I could work on it outside the studio. To my utter amazement, there is NO WAY to simply move those design files, and a trip to the local Apple genius bar confirmed this. I can laboriously copy over individual elements and rebuild the site page by page, but c'mon.... computers are supposed to be here to serve us! Right?? And as a longtime Mac user, I can't believe they put out a piece of software that is so unfriendly. Very un-Mac!!!

To close, a little eye-candy from my upcoming show:

Peck-peck
6" x 6"
acrylic on canvas

Now, I'm off to update our gallery website for the new month's featured artist.