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 II

After decorating paper eggs and fingernails, we were ready to get our hands on some actual eggs!

I hardboiled two dozen white eggs (my favorite method is to place eggs in a large pot, cover with warm water, bring to a boil, turn off the heat and cover, let sit 13 minutes, then cool in cold water and dry). In past years we've dyed using the ubiquitous Paas kits you get from the supermarket, but this year I decided to branch out and make our own food coloring dyes. Next year I'd love to try making some natural vegetable dyes, but this year I just wanted to be able to decide on our own colors and determine their intensities.

The super simple recipe is: 1 cup warm water + 1 tsp white vinegar + about 20 drops food coloring. You can easily do more or less food coloring, depending on how pale or strong you want your colors to be.

For our egg dyeing party, the girls and I had red, pink, orangey-gold, pale yellow, deep green, blue and purple. I covered our kitchen table with old towels (I've learned from previous frosting-making experience that food coloring just loves to stain our wooden table), and put out the fancy sparkling lemonade that I wouldn't let the girls drink until egg dyeing time, because I am weirdly mean. Ha! Really because I like making these little holiday events seem more special and ceremonial. And because I am maybe a little bit weird.

Newly this year, I learned this great DIY egg-drying trick from Martha Stewart online. I bought a piece of foam board, drew a grid on it with lines about an inch apart, and stuck a straight sewing pin into each intersection. It really works to keep the dyed eggs upright and not touching anything while they dry.

With 24 eggs, the girls and I were each able to decorate eight - I did end up giving one of mine to Maeve, who raced through hers and then was sad that she didn't have any more. But I really like this project myself, and wanted it to be something the girls and I did together, as opposed to it being a just-for-children craft. My decorating ideas inspired the girls to try some things they wouldn't have thought of otherwise, and hopefully I modeled for them that this kind of creative fun doesn't have to have an age limit.

Some of the different decorating techniques we used:

Ombre eggs~ Dye the whole egg yellow. Holding the top half, dip the bottom in green and hold there for a few seconds. Then raise egg a little bit out of the green and hold again. Keep raising it out and holding until egg is totally out of the dye and the bottom is a deep green. Dry, then turn over to hold bottom and repeat the whole process, dipping the top in orange. Make sure you leave a section of yellow in the middle. Obviously, could be done with any other colors you want.

Mottled egg~ Stella did this pretty one by dipping different parts of the egg in blue, then pink, then yellow. Then she went back and spooned other colors of dye over the egg and let them drip down.

Crayon resist drawing~ We used white crayons to draw on some eggs before we dyed them. The areas where you draw resist the dye and stay white. There's a really fun, secret-messages-in-invisible-ink feeling to these.

Glitter eggs~ We dipped already-dyed eggs in slightly watered-down Elmer's glue, let it drip a bit, then sprinkled with glitter and let dry. For this color blocked, red and purple egg, I used a mix of red and purple glitter. I love how it turned out.

Glitter writing~ I also used glue squeezed straight from the bottle to write the letters of my niece's name, then sprinkled with glitter and gently tapped off the excess. It was hard for the girls to manage controlling the speed of the glue enough to do this successfully, but they could do the glitter part. The trick to this technique was doing only half the name and letting it dry before doing the other half. Otherwise there was no way to set down the egg to dry without smudging some of the letters, even on the pin board.

Marker drawing~ So simple. We had a bunch of different colored sharpies, and used them just to draw right on to the eggs once they were dyed. The trick to these is definitely using permanent markers, since typical, washable kids' markers would blur right away and get all over everything.

Tattoo eggs~ Learned this one from Pinterest :) Turns out you can use temporary tattoos on eggs, exactly the same way you'd put them on skin. We just used tattoos we had left over from goody bags, but I'd love in the future to buy some really detailed flower and butterfly tattoos especially for this purpose, think it'd look gorgeous.

I had also wanted to do rubber band resists and marbleizing with oiled dye, but we didn't get to those. Sometimes it's good to do ENOUGH, and then stop, especially when crafting with kiddos. There's always next year. And in the meantime, I'm looking forward to nestling these little guys in my in-laws' garden and letting the girls and their cousin loose on an egg hunt today!

Happy spring holidays to all, whatever you celebrate... <3

Tour

So excited to announce that I'll be part of the Rivertown Arts Council's annual Studio Tour this year!

I'll be showing some brand new paintings, most of which no one has seen yet. Someday soon I look forward to having a studio that you can come visit on the Studio Tour, instead of one half of a tiny home office, but in the meantime my fabulous friends at The Purple Crayon Center are letting me hang paintings in their downstairs space, The Inc, for the weekend of the tour. If you're local, come by and say hi! And grab a tour map and check out the other artists, too - there are some wonderful pieces being shown that weekend, and it's always exciting to see the spaces where artists work.

I've gone on the tour almost every year since they started it, so it'll be interesting to be on the other side of it, showing rather than visiting. If you had told me like five years ago, as I tried to work out babysitting for toddler Stella so I could get away for a few hours to enviously ogle all those other artists' work, that I'd be one of those artists, I wouldn't have believed you. It's a pinch-me moment for sure.

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.

Auction Basket

School auction time is here again. Got an email yesterday about donating a creative good or service to the annual gala-auction-event at our old nursery school. I'll have to come up with something good this year. Last year I donated a custom mural in someone's home, and the year before it was the tattoo-inspired painted denim jackets (see those here. And peek into the process of making them here and here). Hmmm....

At the girls' current school, auctioning happens along simpler lines, with a silent auction to which each class in the school donates a themed basket--a movie-night basket, a wine-lovers basket, a scrapbooking basket, you get the idea. As head class parent in Stella's class, I was responsible for putting together our class' donation back in December, and I loved what I came up with: an art basket.

The idea was that you could bid on this for an artistic child who's ready to move beyond their Crayola watercolor set and crappy paper, or for an adult who needs a little encouragement to get creative. Either way, the materials would be easy and fun to use, but enough of a challenge to keep you interested. Kids need decent art materials too!

So into a basket full of feathers (just for fun), I put: a set of acrylic paints in basic colors, a set of ten paintbrushes in different sizes, two canvases, a palette, a color wheel, and a little note from me. I had originally wanted to include a mini how-to book on the basics of working with acrylics, but wasn't able to find exactly what I was looking for. So I ended up just making my own. I figure if you're going to be opening up a basket of art supplies all by yourself instead of in a class setting, you could probably use a little guidance to get you going.

The whole thing, including the basket and plastic wrap (but not counting the feathers, which I already had) came in just under $50 and I understand from the auction committee we made money on it, so I'm pleased. But even more rewarding is the idea that maybe this little basket of goodies inspired someone to start painting, or to take their painting a little more seriously. Seriously, how cool, right?

A New Year

Happy 2012!

I didn't manage to get here to post one single time in December, which seems completely in keeping with how crazy the month felt. Good crazy, mama-crazy, with present shopping to do and cards to write, class parties to organize and teacher gifts to plan, and last-minute volunteered-for projects to complete. (Because somehow, the longer the to-do list gets, the more I want to say yes to everything. Why is that??)

I didn't do as much handmade Christmas gifting as I've done in past years, but it was a pretty creatively productive month anyway. One cute project was preparing for Stella's Girl Scout troop's holiday performance at a local nursing home/adult care community, The Wartburg. The girls did a variety show to entertain the seniors, with talent acts, a mini play, and caroling, all against the backdrop of a gingerbread village that the troop families had made to recreate the buildings of the community's campus. Our family's contribution was the President's house, in the foreground below. Not our finest creative moment, but gingerbread is a new medium for us. ;)  And no one seemed to mind our wonky windows: on a whim, our troop leader entered the village in This Old House online's annual gingerbread competition, and we took the Grand Prize!

When we weren't obsessing about gingerbread baking times and royal icing composition that week, I was busy making the sign you see in the background above, and collaborating with Chris on a prop tree for the girls' play... thank goodness for handy husbands!

I sketched a big tree silhouette (about 6 ft tall) onto two pieces of plywood, which Chris cut out with the jigsaw and assembled by screwing them into a support base he built, and then I painted the whole thing with a mix of house paint and acrylics. It was one of those projects I didn't have a ton of time to work on, which can sometimes - as in this case - be a blessing, since then I can't afford to become too much of a control freak-perfectionist. There's a time and place for slapping something together. And then, you know, being done...

My favorite part of all this was definitely the sign. After mapping out some ideas on paper first, I penciled the layout of Christmas lights onto a big piece of foam board. To keep the lights a consistent size, I made an easy little stencil out of a post-it. And to make absolutely sure I didn't mess up the Girl Scout insignia at the top, I printed out a copy of the emblem in the size I wanted and used graphite transfer paper to trace it onto the foam board. The transfer paper is a relatively new discovery for me and it is AWESOME. I've even been using it in my personal painting when I want to get something just right or use a piece of a previous design. It's so easy use, and when you paint over it, it doesn't muddy the color of the paint. I generally like to freehand everything, but have been learning lately to allow myself the occasional shortcut in the name of moving forward and accompishing more. Feels creatively healthy.

Once the layout was set, I painted in the lights and the blue background. I knew I wanted to do some faded snowflakes behind the lettering, and figured keeping the whole background light (instead of doing it in red or green) would allow for that busyness without taking too much attention away from the words. Then I painted in the snowflakes, and liked them so much I almost didn't want to put any lettering on top of them!

When it came time for the lettering, I went for a 'more is more' approach, with a bunch of different fonts and colors, vintage circus poster-style. I actually wish I had bumped up the size of the words so that the whole thing was even crazier, but overall I like how cheerful and celebratory it turned out. The candy cane 2011 numbers were fun, and I also loved the red and white mirrored design of GIRL SCOUT. Will  definitely be bringing that idea back into another project in the future.

Off now to enjoy the last little bit of family hang-out time before the realities of work and school start up again tomorrow. But I'm looking forward to a new year and new possibilities to come - one of my new year's resolutions is to be better about sharing those possibilities here!

Ready to Launch

If you're coming over from Amanda's blog, hello and welcome!

As many of you local folks know, the organization I work for, The Purple Crayon Center for Learning and Social Innovation, celebrated its opening with a huge launch party this past weekend. It was an amazing night! I'll post more about the actual event soon, but I'm still in that aftermath-y, catching-up mode, and I wanted to put up more pics of working on the entryway mural first.

I'm really excited about how the mural turned out! I wrote about starting it here and then other, non-painting work for the Center had taken over and caused me to go on a long painting break before getting back to it a couple of weeks ago. I painted three days last week and finally got it done the day before the party. To those of you reading who have known me for a long time and are nodding your heads at this, may I just say - getting it done the day before the party is a huge victory over getting it done the day OF the party, no??

It's not such a large piece, but it took a long time. Partly it was that I was painting it on walls that were already a pretty saturated blue, so it took three coats of almost every color to get the coverage I wanted. And while painting the geometric shapes was easy in some respects - it was a very meditative process; the original design was creative but the actual painting was more zen than anything else - it was hard in others, since they called for a uniformity that doesn't leave a ton of room for error. On top of that, I really wanted it to look hand-done and have an organic, almost sketchy quality, but I couldn't let it look unfinished or just... bad. So it was a bit of a balancing act, though that challenge was itself enjoyable. I always like the part of making art that feels like solving a problem or answering a question. These innate dilemmas always present themselves, and then the work has to respond... I love feeling like both the responder and just an observer at the same time. I really don't know whether that makes any sense! It's hard to put words to the process.

I love the colors, the mix of the watery blue and green with the vibrancy of the orange and pink. But it wasn't until the brown kite-shapes went up that it started to visually make sense to me. The brown grounds it, I think. It's the bass note. And the brown is also completely a result of collaborating with my friend and the Center's executive director, Sarah. She advocated for brown when I was hemming and hawing about more orange (you can see my original sketch in this post - middle photo) and thank god she's the boss so that I went with it, because it made the difference.

Tomorrow I'll put up some pics of the finished thing.

Until then,

Alison (the luckiest girl in the world)