Wednesday, August 31, 2011

A new series: The Glazes


Glaze of Many Colors 12x16
$250

Purple Glaze 123
20x13 limited edition / $75
http://www.etsy.com/listing/78788924/purple-glaze-123-limited-edition
In the spirit of my life-long affection for stained glass, I spent part of the previous two months working on a series of paintings that pay homage to the form. Unlike my Fractured Glass paintings from 2010, which focused on tiny details made by 1/4-inch virtual glass shards, the Glaze Paintings celebrate the colors and mimic larger pieces of glass.
Blue Glaze 7x10 $100

Orange Glaze Post Card NFS
Glaze of Many Colors and Blue Glaze are painted on 140# Arches hot press paper and they are available at the nanoscapes website. Purple Glaze123 is a limited edition of 50 printed on archival paper with museum matting available through the nanoscapes website and at etsy.com. The Orange Glaze post card is not for sale.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Fresh artist's palette: sign of the new school year

My watercolors
Signs of the new school year are everywhere.

Minnesota State Fair opening day --  Hooray!
Relentless tv ads for school supplies – Make them stop!
Artists’ fresh palettes – Huzzah!
The Biggest Crayon Box
from My Childhood

Although I am no longer a student, the school calendar appears to be part of my DNA. Perhaps it harks back to getting the biggest box of Crayola™ crayons that my parents could be persuaded to buy, but re-setting my palette just before school starts seems like the right thing to do.

Artists are lucky because we can mark a new year or a new project by setting up a fresh palette. Washing out the old colors, introducing new colors, and bringing back standards and favorites are a group of unalloyed pleasures. A fresh palette celebrates possibilities and sparks creativity.

NEED FOR COMPACT STORAGE  Because I travel to around the country to present Pass the Baton lectures to law students and lawyers, I need a portable watercolor infrastructure that takes up minimal space and slides through airport security. At home, I have a relatively small worktable, and need to keep my colors within easy reach. Just as I used to organize crayons by color, I set my palettes by color groups: yellow, green, blue, orange, pink, red, purple, brown-black-gray, and metallic.

LOADED WITH COLOR  With seven Dick Blick small folding plastic palettes loaded with 150 small blobs of individual watercolors packed in a plastic makeup bag, I am ready to go. Three Daniel Smith Autograph Kolinsky Travel Brushes, a 6H pencil, an eraser, and a small pencil sharpener fit into the bag. Although one set of screeners looked closely at the travel brushes which unscrew to reveal the brush inside, I have never had a security-screening issue with this kit.

FRESH PAINT and FRESH IDEAS  I paint every day and can’t wait to bring fresh ideas to works in progress and to start on entirely new projects. Reset your palette and go!

Friday, August 5, 2011

nanoscapes for August: 31 lost heirloom tomatoes

nanoscapes' 31 lost heirloom tomatoes
It is August, and high time that Minnesotans were able to tuck into local summer tomatoes. As a person who is ridiculously fond of all tomatoes, it is hard to pick a true "favorite." How am I supposed to decide when the choices are big ones, small ones, tiny ones, on-the-vine ones, with colors including red, yellow, orange, and wildly striped or beautifully blotched heirloom tomatoes?

While celebrating all of delicious tomatoes available today, it is also a time to lament the heirloom tomatoes whose tastes are lost to us. Although there are many seed savers and dozens, if not hundreds of vendors of heirloom tomato seeds, there are, indeed, lost tomatoes. To honor their memory,  nanoscapes celebrate 31 lost varieties of heirloom tomatoes: one for every day in August.