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″
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. ”
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.
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.
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.
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Check out my storefront!By day, I am a print and web designer who loves to do illustration and develop logos and identity systems. By night, I explore my artistic side and play a mean game of basketball.
From my photostream