Month: May 2015

acrylic yarn, knitted
—NOT AVAILABLE—

I just finished my knitted pieces for the Des Moines Art Center’s Calling All Needles project, which will reimagine Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting, From the Lake No. 1, “in a large-scale community-made tapestry to be displayed on the Richard Meier building of the Art Center.” The Art Center is providing the yarn to members of the community and will gather hundreds of individual fiber submissions with which to create the large fiber piece. Submissions are due June 21, so I have plenty of time to turn these in (it would be fun to help assemble the big piece, too!). The reimagined work will debut on the evening of July 10.

5×6.75″ acrylic, ink

This is the third attempt at using a new block print (loosely based on a peony). The first was just the lines on a small piece of paper—I liked the abstractness, but was looking for more, and the limitations of the original block became more apparent. The second one I tried adding a few more lines and then painted in between, but it still wasn’t right.

For my third try, I printed the block on this watercolor paper blank greeting card using acrylic paint. Then I colored in the narrow middle areas with orange ink. Then I drew and painted even more lines beyond the original image. Then I mixed up some lavender-pink acrylic glaze and painted it using a lot of water as well. Finally, I mixed some transparent greens and sienna and painted a mottled background.

The final result is more what I had in mind when I first started out (except for the color).

9×7.5″ acrylic on matboard

I was just noticing how I’m seeing several works that include a capital “H” for some reason, and this is one. I have no idea why.

This has been evolving over the past few days. I haven’t been happy enough with it to post it. Today I added some little bits of other paint, and now it marginally passes inspection. Or maybe I’m just tired. 😉

5×7″ card, block prints with acrylic, ink embellishment on inside
—NOT AVAILABLE—

Today my farmer friends are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their Blue Gate Farm, the place we buy a lot of eggs, produce, and yarn at the downtown farmers market. We wish we could be with all of those at the farm today to help celebrate this great milestone!

This is the front and the inside image from a greeting card to celebrate their anniversary. I already had the wavy lines block from an earlier project, but I cut the new block (blue gate with ten “sticks”) on Friday so I could give this to Jill and Sean on Saturday at the market. The flames on the blue gate candles on the inside of the card were done with ink.

Long live Blue Gate Farm! 🙂

digital photo

I painted today. But I couldn’t come up with anything this afternoon that I was willing to share yet. *sigh* So, I took my camera outside and took some close-up photos of some rock—new to our yard. This is the best one. Kind of like a map to the past, to solid ground, to a new place, to where I want to go.

4.5×3.5″ acrylic, ink

This was a difficult art-making day. Did I have a lot of other stuff to do? Yes, but that isn’t unusual. I don’t know why it was so difficult. Maybe I’m just in a funk. Anyway, I did some rolling of acrylic (after texturizing the brayer with a couple of print blocks), overlaid with a block print of acrylic, overlaid with brushed on transparent acrylic and (for lack of a better word) stippled acrylic, overlaid with another block print of acrylic, overlaid with some ink shapes and solids. So, the final product is what it is: unsure. But done.

7.5×5.5″ acrylic on matboard

Scraped and over-scraped, and then some block-printing with more acrylic.

First I was going to call this “wind over water,” but then what are all of those vertical lines? Then I considered titling it “depth charges,” but that sounded too violent. So I settled on “sinking,” because that’s just how I feel some days!

8×6″ acrylic on matboard

Scraped painting. I had the purple and magenta scraped on previously, but it was just too much of a good thing. The green seems to break it up a bit and give it some vitality that was missing.