True North

Virtual Tour

So you've heard me go on and on about the Artist Studio Tour that I was in last weekend. Enough talk. Wanna go on the tour yourself? Here, let me show you:

Actually, wait... just, OK, just a little primer first! So, since I don't have a proper studio that you can visit (I paint in my half of our tiny home office), I was hanging my work for the tour at The Purple Crayon Center for Learning and Social Innovation, a fantastic local organization that's owned and run by friends, for whom I occasionally do some freelance writing. I've really just gotten back to painting for myself since I took this online painting class last fall, so I only had four paintings to show... three-and-a-half if you consider that one of them was a work in progress. To plump up my offerings, I printed photos of other painting projects I've done in the past year or so, which I hung up as well.

OK, now enough talk. Here's the first painting:

Pomegranate with Knife, 2011.

This is the painting I did during the Get Your Paint On class. I've never been a Still Life kinda gal, which is exactly why I wanted to try one. I love pomegranates - their taste, their mythology, the insane bounty of opening them up and finding all those rubies inside... I really treated this as an exercise, though. I just wanted to see what would come of it.

Atlantic (Looking Back), 2012.

This is my little ladies on the beach at Montauk last summer. Here's a close-up:

I'm proud of how this painting manages to capture some physical truth about the girls - the way they stand, the way their bodies relate to each other... Initially, this was a much sunnier painting, but as it developed I realized I wanted to make it more ominous-skied. Not sure how it reads over your computer, but in person it feels slightly stormy.

Self-Portrait at Three with Traditional Calabrese Doll, 2012.

This is the piece I was desperately working on (read: not sleeping) in the week leading up to the Tour. It's based on a photograph of me as a little girl, with the doll and background all from memory of my Italian grandmother's house. I got lots of questions this weekend about the legs. I don't exactly know where they came from, except to say that my overarching memories of being at Mama's house as a child were of people everywhere, so a painting of me alone didn't quite capture what I was going for. The legs might be by mom's, but then again, since I used my own boots as a model, they might also be me as an adult. I don't have a definite answer.

Disembarking at Ellis Island.

This is the unfinished piece, inspired by a section on immigration at the turn of the last century in the book, New York: An Illustrated History (Burns, Ric and James Sanders). I was flipping through the book a few months ago and got completely hooked by this section. My own paternal ancestors came through Ellis Island from Italy around this time (and have their names on the wall to prove it), so this feels incredibly emotional for me. From the book, I got the photos that I referenced for this piece, and also the quote that I added as a second label under the title label:

At the baggage room on the building's first floor, new arrivals could arrange to have their bags and bundles forwarded to their final destination--but many, fearful of losing all their worldly possessions, kept their baggage with them through the entire inspection process.

This is so moving to me, the sense of significance and insecurity that this quote sums up about these people's experience. I'm completely enamored of how beautifully they were dressed, in their crisp white colors, shiny watch chains, and large flowered hats  - partly, one assumes, because they were wearing as much as they possibly could so that they didn't have to pack it, and partly to make a good impression on the inspectors.

I got tons of interesting feedback about this painting. Because it was unfinished, I think, people were very forthcoming about what they liked and thought about it, much more so that with the other pieces. The main thing I heard over and over was that folks were taken with the people being sepia-toned liked this - which is really just an under-painting - and with the focus being on the little boy, with his body having more color and clarity than the rest of the bodies in the line. I don't want it to veer too far into Schindler's List's girl in the red coat territory, but I do agree that there's something visually interesting about focusing on him, so at this point my plan is to build up the background and leave the people alone for a while, then see what happens.

For me, these paintings have a theme (except for the pomegranate, which just got me painting again). It's not necessarily clear from the outside, but this is a tracing back of my heritage - not just the Ellis Island painting, which is pretty clear, but also the self-portrait, in which I'm holding the doll dressed as my own ancestors would have been dressed on that inspection line, and the one of my girls, as they look back across the same sea those boats came across on their way to New York Harbor. I'm not sure where I'm headed after the Ellis Island piece is done. These past few months have been an interesting process, really painting again. I couldn't have predicted what I chose to paint. And mostly, that unknowing is just the way I like it. For now.

On a wall near the paintings, I hung the photographs. It's all stuff you've seen before, if you read the blog: this onesie for the nursery school auction, this grown-up painted t-shirt, this rainbow butterfly kiddo birthday present, this doggie kiddo birthday present, the dolls, this Goodnight Moon baby sign, this train-themed toy chest, this painted scarf, and of course the murals - the mosaic mural and the kindergarten murals, plus the kindergarten blacktop games design. Lots of projects I'm proud of.

I wish I could offer you a glass of wine and some Milanos, as I did on the tour! Thanks for coming on my virtual tour, though, and cheers :)

 

Came, Toured, Conquered

It has taken me a few days to be able to sit and organize my thoughts about the Artist Studio Tour in which I participated last weekend because yes, it was fun, but man was it also intense. The whole process, from initially registering for the Tour ("Am I good enough? Am I ready?"), to hanging my paintings in public and inviting total strangers to talk about my work with and in front of me, pushed me so far outside my comfort zone that I practically had vertigo. I had to cut waaaaay back on my coffee intake last week just to get through those last few anticipatory days leading up to the weekend without succumbing to a full-on caffeine-induced panic attack. But despite how neurotic this all makes me sound, I really did thoroughly enjoy the Tour. Enjoyed seeing the people I had invited and meeting the new folks, enjoyed workshopping the one unfinished painting I had hung and benefitting immensely from people's feedback, and most of all enjoyed that Big Life feeling that comes - if you can get past the fear - from pushing beyond the boundaries you thought were set in stone and realizing that maybe a lot more is possible than you thought.

with my wonderful stepmom, Karen, in front of some of my work

Tomorrow I'll be posting a virtual tour so that you can check out the paintings yourself. For today, I want to focus a little bit on the take-aways from submitting myself to this experience. What did I get out of it? What did I learn?

• Well, for one thing, the reminder that deadlines are really, really good for me. The painting I was working on all last week so it would be finished in time to show? Not only would I not have finished it by now if I hadn't signed up for the Studio Tour, I don't think I would've finished it three months from now. When left to my own devices, creatively, things can get very sloooowwwww. I hem and haw, do a teensy bit before taking a break, decide I need to live with it as is for a while before moving forward. Perhaps you can identify? And all that is fine - after all, I'm not competing in a race; this is all for my own growth and enjoyment - but there is something to be said for finishing, and making space for the next endeavor. I've got some real momentum going now.
• That giving yourself (or forcing yourself into) bigger boundaries makes you expand yourself to fill them. I did not think I was ready to show, and would never have signed up for the Tour without this one particular, unexpected day in March, when coincidences and opportunities conspired to make it briefly seem possible. Once I signed up, I had to turn myself into an artist that was ready to show. I worked on getting my actual paintings ready, as I have said, but I also ordered myself a bunch of contact cards from Vistaprint to give out during the weekend, a business-y step I wouldn't have found necessary otherwise, but which I'm so happy about now - I feel about a thousand times more legit with the cards in my wallet and the Tour under my proverbial belt, a feeling I could have waited around forever for, but which would never have actually happened without just doing it.

card front

pretty, pretty card back

• That my school marmish tendency to want to do it all by the book (the "Artist" book, as if there even is such a thing) just needs to be ignored. In preparing for the Studio Tour, I kept banging up against my "better judgement." It's amazing how quickly I can decide that I am somehow cheating. Hanging one unfinished painting, for example, was cheating, until I talked myself into it by thinking that if people were visiting my actual studio, they would surely be seeing some works in progress. Putting up photos of recent painting projects I couldn't show (murals, gifts, etc.) was cheating, until I convinced myself that not to put them up would be a missed opportunity to show the things someone can hire me for and therefore not to do it would be stupid, cheating or not. I am not the same as every other creative person, but I'm confident that anyone else trying to recover or reclaim their artist self will doubtlessly run into their own better judgement: all those protective mechanisms that seem very rational, or pure, or smart, or _______, but which also keep you from creating and then putting your work out there. For me, pure is a big one - "if it can't be perfect/right, it's not worth doing" is an insidious thing I tell myself to keep me from moving forward. This weekend helped loosen its power, which is great. Especially since showing pictures of my murals seems to have (fingers crossed) garnered me a new mural commission: I'm meeting with a possible new client next week, whom I met when her family stopped by on the Tour. Take that, school marm!
• And lastly, the weekend made it clear that I am lucky to have some truly generous, supportive, loving people in my life. So many friends and family members came out, driving in from Brooklyn and New Jersey, coming with newborns or all four children or between dashing to other commitments, and the ones who live too far away have made a point since of calling or writing to say they were thinking about me. My husband single-parented for days and days without complaint. This may sound like boasting, but the reason I'm saying it is that - once again - it was signing up for the Tour, despite all the compelling reasons not to, that gave me the chance to see and feel the community I really do have encouraging these crazy dreams of mine. I knew that in theory before, but now I know it for sure.

So at the risk of sounding like a Nike commercial, I'd say the overarching lesson learned was just to do it. "It" being whatever feels hard or scary but which you really, secretly would love to do. Because no matter what happens, just putting yourself out there brings you rewards you can't expect. And because action is good for art - your art, Art in general, all of it. Thinking about action? Preparing for someday? Pondering when is the right time to do something brave?.. NOT so good for art. That's the thing about creativity - it doesn't really give a shit about what you think, but it does respond really well to what you do.

Bouquets

Taking a quick break from the all out paint-a-thon I'm doing here to get ready for this coming weekend's Studio Tour. (Official website here.) Unfortunately I have no studio to call my own (yet) but I've wrangled myself a spot on the tour anyway, hanging a few new paintings at The Purple Crayon Center in Hastings. It'll be the first time I ever show my personal, non-comissioned work in a public space to people I don't know. A little bit hair raising! So I'm spending the next few days touching up the older pieces and finishing the new ones. That's a nice, calm way of saying the truth, which is that I am neurotically questing for impossible perfection, and not even trying to fight it.

But hey, at least it's fun!...

Nature Layette

After tea dyeing the onesie, hat and blanket for the nursery school auction, it was time to paint. I knew I wanted to do another tree, and once that idea for the onesie was set in my mind, an acorn hat and leaf blanket seemed obvious. That's how most creative ideas come to me - all at once, like they're obvious, with little thinking or explanation. Then the figuring out comes afterwards, when I have to work on manifesting what's in my head out onto the canvas or wall or fabric. But I rarely have much insight into that first thought.

For this blanket I knew I wanted to paint an assortment of leaves, and because of the acorn hat I decided to make them oak leaves. Black oak leaves, to be exact, because their shape is the right mix of complex and simple and leafy.

I drew two different sized leaves, plus one acorn shape, on cardboard and cut them out with an exacto knife to make stencils. I used a fabric marker and the stencils to get the outlines onto the blanket where I wanted them, and then painted over the marker lines with fabric paint in three different greens. I would have liked to have given them a little more detail, but the waffle texture of the blanket was hard to get good paint coverage with - I had suspected it would be, but had so much trouble finding an plain blanket without any cuteness already on it that I just decided to go with the waffle and a more outline-y design. I chose to paint leaves on three corners of the blanket, one corner with the majority of leaves and two more corners with just one leaf. The fabric paint changes the softness and flexibility of fabric a little bit, so I didn't want to cover the whole blanket, but instead leave most of it natural and soft to wrap up a baby in. Here's one corner (the dark dot is a shadow, was taking these photos super quick before getting them over to the auction committee!):

And here's another corner:

And another:

The onesie is definitely my favorite piece from this little collection. I love how it turned out:

And here is the cute little acorn hat. I had originally wanted to leave more of the hat's cotton fabric showing through the design (especially after I had taken the trouble to dye it!) but it just didn't look right that way, so I ended up really saturating it with green. Have to roll with your projects, right? Here's the side view:

And the top:

The actual auction was a blast, and one of my favorite teachers from the school ended up winning the layette set for her niece who is having a baby. Love when something I've made goes off to a good home...

Easter Fun, Part I

We've been doing lots of colorful, springtime- and bunnies-inspired crafting this week.

PAPER EASTER EGGS

trace:

color:

inspiration:

cut out, then hide, play or display:

 

EASTER EGG NAILS

choose colors: 

make dotting tool (straight sewing pin stuck into pencil eraser):

go crazy!

So much fun.

Heads Up

I took an online painting class last fall called Get Your Paint On: Beyond the Basics, with teachers Lisa Congdon and Mati McDonough, and it was really fantastic. I'd never taken a ecourse before and wasn't sure how it would work for me, but I loved it. The teaching happens through a mix of written instruction, videos, and inspiration jumping-off points, all presented in the style of a daily blog that you get password access to by registering. Plus they start a flickr group for the class so that students can see and comment on each other's work, which surprisingly was one of my favorite things about the class. The site stays up for about a month after the course is over so that you can continue to work if the five week timeframe doesn't suit you. The course got me inspired to paint on canvases again and really upped my motivation to paint more regularly just for myself as opposed to for a comissioned project. (I wrote a little bit about the course previously here and here.)

I'm telling you all this because Lisa and Mati have opened registration on another offering of the basic Get Your Paint On course this spring, and until March 31st registration is only $99. I'm not getting compensated in any way to endorse this, I just think it's a wonderful opportunity that I want to let people know about. If you're creative and want to get back into a more regular rhythm, or want to learn some basic painting skills (even if you're not a beginner, it's always helpful to see how other artists do things), jump on this! It is really fun and rewarding. Go here to learn more and to register.

Happy Weekend!
Alison

New Piece

Remember this old canvas from high school that I painted over with white, so I could turn it into something new?

I turned it on its side and started a new painting of my girls. These days it's looking more like this:

It's based on this photo I took of them last summer in Montauk:

Not quite done, but I'm happy with it so far, and happy to share it here.

Living Room Art Class

[Henri Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905, owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art]

Last week I had the chance to go see a preview of the new exhibit, "The Steins Collect," at The Metropolitan Museum with my mom, and it was fantastic. If you can get to it, and if you have any interest in Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Matisse, Paris in the early 20th century, the birth of bohemian counterculture, the origins of modern art collecting, the importance of supporting and encouraging artists... just go. The sheer quantity of amazing art on the walls is pretty mind-blowing.

Afterwards, at the museum store, I scooped up this book, The Usborne Book of Art Ideas:

It's not a new book - I think it was published in 2000 - but it doesn't feel remotely out of date. And it's packed with great technical how-tos and project ideas. It's my perfect type of mix between being good for both kids and adults: whimsical and fun (check out those pink bugs on the cover!) but also meaty. It doesn't talk down to its reader.

Stella just lost art class in her school week schedule (oh, urban public school, how I love/hate you) and has been asking me to give her art classes at home. Before getting the book, we had done one class, on drawing what you see: strengthening the connection between your eyes and your hands. My kids get frustrated that they can't "draw like Mommy," so I look for opportunities to assure them that their style is valid no matter what their age, AND that their abilities will change with time and that they can't compare themselves to me, who has been doing it quite a bit longer than them. It's a balance. I want them to feel the joy of creating without rules, but I also want to give them access to techniques that it took me so much trial and error to figure out on my own. And mostly I try to emphasize for them that drawing and painting is like anything else - it requires practice! It's not something you're just "good" or "not good" at. I truly believe that.

For our second class, with the book on hand, we decided to do a painting class. Specifically, a color-mixing class, inspired by the page above. I wanted the girls to do a little experimenting with color on its own, without starting to paint a scene right away. We decided to learn about purple and pink, especially how working with different reds will get you very different results.

We mixed one blue with a couple of different reds and talked about which resulting purple we liked best and why. I pointed out that a more orangey-red is going to give you a muddier purple when mixed with blue than a purer red will, because an orangey-red has yellow in it, and red+yellow+blue makes brown. Some of it was over their heads, but I wanted to start them thinking about colors as recipes, as mixes of other colors - a little bit of this and an little bit of that. What does the purple look like with more blue in it than red? With more red in it than blue? 

For the pinks, we mixed white with five different pinks and reds. It was cool to see how just adding the white could really make a whole new color, and how the red that the girls thought would make the best pink actually didn't. And how we disagreed about which was our favorite pink! Variation is good.

I'm excited to be thinking about other art class subjects for the future, and wondering if eventually this might be a fun idea to take out of our house and do for other kids, too...

Happy weekend, all! I hope it is lovely.

Paint-it-Yourself Scarf

For a while I've had this idea that I wanted to find or make a scarf that felt like a favorite t-shirt. Recently, on a Valentines supplies aquisition mission at JoAnn's, I took a detour into the fabric section and searched for a pattern and material that I could just cut and wear, but didn't find anything I loved. So I ended up settling on about 3/4 yard of super-soft, white stretch jersey that I could paint my own pattern onto, and yesterday I finally did it.

If I didn't already know that I love the combination of yellow and grey, Pinterest has now made it abundantly clear. Like half my pins are of yellow and grey quilts or sweaters or pillows or entire rooms. So it was an easy choice of colors for the scarf. Not sure why I came up with the diamond pattern, except that I wanted it to be something pretty simple that I could easily repeat over and over.

I got a cardboard cereal box out of the recycling bin and cut out a stencil from it. Two stencils, really: a little square cut out of a bigger square. Then I painted around the stencils' edges, feathering the brushstrokes out, to create a pattern of alternating big, grey double diamonds with small, yellow single diamonds.

I concentrated the shapes into a repeating pattern on each end of the scarf and let the pattern "fade" or separate out as it made its way up to the middle of the scarf.

This design, of interlocking pieces that dissipate, is similar to the mural I painted at The Purple Crayon Center last year, which I am standing in front of in the photos above and below. (More on that mural, including lots of photos, in these posts from a year ago: Mural Preparation, Mural Process, Ready to Launch, and Mosaic Mural Wrap-up.) I wasn't thinking of the mural when I did the scarf, but then when I was at the Center last night for a concert (Ruth Moody, so good), I realized the connection and and had to take pictures in front of it.

The scarf is so soft and comfortable. I'm definitely going to be wearing it a lot. But the best was what Stella said when she walked in as I was painting it yesterday. She watched me for a little while and then said, "Mommy, I like that you can just make yourself the things you want." I like it too, Stella. I really do.

Butterflies and Rainbows

This week, one of Maeve's little school buddies was having a birthday party and we needed a present for her. Hopefully a present that was low on the expensiveness scale but high on the specialness scale. So I resorted to my old standby - the painted t-shirt. 

The twist this time was that I made two matching shirts - one girl-sized and one doll-sized. (Two certain people in my house are big into all things American Girl, a company which very much promotes the idea of dressing alike with your doll. Evidently I am easily influenced...)

I bought the doll shirt at Jo-Ann's - it's part of the knock-off American Girl doll line they sell there (and other places too, I think), Springfield Collection. They're a decent, affordable alternative to AG, and good for basics like plain white shirts. The kid-sized shirt is a Hanes child's undershirt, which I buy packages of to have on hand for just this purpose.

I asked Maeve what she thought her friend would like, and she went into an enraptured monologue about butterflies and flowers and hearts and clouds and sparkling rainbows. I worked with her to rein it in a little, and we settled on a rainbow butterfly surrounded by hearts.

(For both my girls, 4 years old seems to be the peak of an obsession with this kind of "girly" aesthetic. If Stella's trajectory is anything to go on, Maeve's likes and dislikes will get a little more complex in the next few years. For now, I try just to go with it, and only offer my opinion when what she Likes becomes fodder for how she thinks Things Should Be, eg. "I don't like that game because it's for boys" or "That's not a boy, Mommy, it's a girl because see her long hair, only girls have long hair." Sometimes it feels like I'm raising a couple of 1950s squares, but I have to remember it's just a phase of trying to organize and understand the world, and in the end our influence as parents and the things/people we expose them to will win out. Anyway. Moving on.)

So a rainbow butterfly and hearts it was. Here is my little model and her own dolly modeling the results for me.

(doll accessories styled by Maeve)

Mostly the designs are free-handed, though to get the big butterfly just right, I did do a search and found this nice black-and-white printable for children to color (from a butterfly teaching unit on "The Homeschool Club" on Squidoo, tons of stuff there). I printed out the butterfly and cut it out to make a template, like so: (I decided to forgo trying to cut out the teeny tiny antennae)

Then I traced around the butterfly with pencil onto the kiddo t-shirt. The rest, and all of the dolly design, I just did by eye. There are definitely some mistakes but my motto is always that mistakes add to the charm of something handmade/handpainted. If I had wanted a little more help from my paper butterfly, I could have cut out all the white spaces with an exacto knife and traced the entire pattern onto the fabric. Or even traced the pattern onto freezer paper and cut that out, then ironed the freezer paper onto the fabric which would have given me a budge-proof stencil to work with. But all that would have taken a lot longer.

Big butterfly:

Unfortunately our iron is broken right now, can you tell? ;)

Little butterfly:

Then both butterflies got a sprinkling of tiny hearts and dots, for pizzazz:

I hope the little recipient likes it. If she doesn't, she can always give it back to Maeve, who really wished I had made two... I mean, four!

If you're like this, check out some other painted clothing gifts I've made for our small friends over the years: some tree-inspired baby pajamas, a pink retriever t-shirt, a firefighter t-shirt, and a do-it-yourself t-shirt painting kit.