GirlMeetsArt

Monotype print of angel hovering over childhood home © Chris Raymond

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how one’s home environment can greatly affect one’s creative energy. Over the past two-plus years, I have become more and more disaffected by the place where I live, a oldish, sorta run-down garden-style apartment. Friends have noticed how my demeanor has taken a turn for the worse.

Why? Let me count the ways:

• A half-dozen yapping dogs whose owners walk them outside my bedroom window, on the ground floor, and wake me up early in the morning and late at night.
• The way that the front lawn outside my apartment has become the complex’s sports park, in spite of the large open field and playground equipment available at the back of the complex.
• The regular banging and yelling that accompanies the basketball games at the hoop in the parking lot outside my balcony.
• Walls so paper thin you can hear people vacuuming or using a rowing machine—in the adjacent building!

I used to enjoy sitting out on my balcony after work, sipping a cocktail and reading; that pleasure lost its allure when a new tenant started teaching his son to throw a football or hit a baseball literally at the foot of my balcony, and when I got to “enjoy” the parade of dogs doing their duty 10 yards in front of me. Read the rest of this entry »

Doggie heaven, a fiber sculpture in progress © Chris Raymond

Having caught the embroidery bug at Penland, when I saw that the Art League School was offering a two-Saturday workshop to make a fiber sculpture, I quickly signed on. Being a dog lover, I decided to create a stylized dog figure that would be large enough to use to hold the day’s mail and my cell phone and keys.

What would a dog’s version of heaven be? Well, for one thing, biscuits would rain down from the skies. Fire hydrants would be plentiful for those calls of nature. And of course, there would always be a hand to rub the tummy.

These are a few pics of the work in progress. The head and tail were made from Sculpey. The fabrics have been hanging out in my closet for years after I picked up a pack of remnants at an outlet store.

Update June 20, 2009:

The dog gains some clothes.

Acrylic painting of a blue barn © Chris Raymond

Detail of an acrylic painting of a blue barn © Chris Raymond

Big juicy color. Who doesn’t love it? This particular palette is one of my favorites. I used it to paint a somewhat abstracted barn in a weekend workshop taught by Brenda Belfield at the Art League School in Alexandria, VA. Actual size is 36″ x 24″

Oil painting of tree and flowers © Chris Raymond

In the late 1980s, I attended the Oxbow Art Colony to take a painting class. I had never worked in oils before, and I had a huge mental block about drawing elements of nature. But working in a small studio on a lovely sunny day, with music in the background, I released my internal editor and just started in. Working on paper with a pre-existing texture, I just let my imagination flow from the initial tree trunk into an imaginary “tree of life. ”

A print of tropical shoes with water color washes © Chris Raymond

I did this print in 2001. It was originally a black monotype, but at the request of a friend who liked the design but also loved color, I applied washes of water color to give it its “tropical” feel. Hence the title: Tropical shoes. It hangs proudly in my friend’s apartment.

Decade two spread from Mom and Dad’s 50th anniversary scrapbook album © Chris Raymond

In 1998, my parents celebrated their 50th anniversary, and renewed their vows. I wanted to do something special.

The preceding summer, I had spent many hours with my Mom, poring over boxes of pictures so I could organize them by year. So I decided to create a scrapbook that include five montages of scanned images, one from each decade of their marriage. Then I researched cultural and personal milestones from each decade, and created lists of the milestones (including the decade during which my father finally learned how to program the VCR!).

Finally, I found stock images of things in pairs, scanned them, and printed them out on vellum, alongside the list of milestones. I used colored pencils to hand color the stock photos.

To complete the scrapbook, I made a cassette tape of the song Grow Old Along With Me, which I put in a pocket I made on the inside cover of the album.

Accordion book of dating advice for women © Chris Raymond

Remember Melissa Bank’s book about falling in love, Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing? Well, my helpful advice book is A Girl’s Guide to Running and Screaming. Its advice is based on some oh-so-awful dating experiences, including the slobbery kisser and the one who heard voices promising him the formula for an AIDS cure.

I made 12 editions of this accordion book to share with classmates at Penland, and to put in the box of books our class auctioned to support Penland. Final bid: $1000.

Paper quilt with handmade paper and dried and pressed leaves © Chris Raymond

If you’re like me, you buy lots of crafts books with good intentions of doing the projects within. They are kind of like porn for crafters, don’t you think?

Well, over Christmas, while away from home for a week, I decided to try some paper quilting, inspired by Bridget Hoff’s book, Paper Quilting.

I had made some thick paper, embedded with stray fibers and such, many moons ago at Penland. And when I’d first read Hoff’s book, I went out and collected and dried lots of leaves. Now, thanks to a Penland workshop on embroidered maps I took from Melinda Barta, I had some embroidery skills, too. Voilá, my own paper quilts!

I used embroidery floss, usually with only 3 of the six strands, and an awl to pre-punch the holes for sewing. Then I just let myself play with integrating stitches, color, and the leaves, along with some buttons also stashed away in my crafts drawers.

You may have noticed (or maybe not!) a watermark on many of my pieces of work. And maybe (again, maybe not) you’ve wondered what the heck it is.

A few months ago, I took a weekend workshop on printmaking using a hand drill on woodblocks to create imagery. The instructor, master printmaker Steve Prince, showed us a lot of his work, and the pieces included a stamp of something he called a “chop”: essentially, a graphic signature.

This got me thinking and I decided to work up my own and apply it as a watermark for digital versions of my work. Read the rest of this entry »

Merry Christmas card © Chris Raymond

This year, the creative urge hit me around the time I began considering what Christmas cards to send out this year. How could I combine some of the many techniques I’ve learned at workshops over the years? So I dug out some fabric I’d screenprinted, pulled out the embroidery stitches guide, and started working.

Thankfully, I only send out a few cards these days. Each one is unique. Half use those neat Italian paper clips as “ornaments.” Some include “snow.”

Ho, ho, ho!