Two nanoscapes accepted into Altered Aesthetics' "Straight Trippin'"

The nanoscapes Fractured Glass 3 and All the Colors and Paths #1 were juried into Altered Aesthetics' 2013 "Straight Trippin'" Exhibition which will run from February 28 to March 28, 2013 at the gallery which is in the Q'arma Building at 1224 Quincy Street NW, Minneapolis, MN 55413 in the Northeast Minneapolis Artist District. 

Wild Triangles

Fractured Glass 3 is part of a series of watercolor paintings that answers the creative question "What happens when triangles go wild?"

I make these with my five-part Painstaking Exuberance process: (1) make a pencil drawing, (2) outline each shape with Winsor & Newton Davy's Gray, (3) paint inside the lines, (4) paint an outline for each triangle with a contrasting watercolor, and (5) paint a border for the entire piece. The paintings don't really come to life until I paint the outlines for each tiny triangle.

I have also used the triangles in a some of the whimsical creatures (small friends) in the Stained Glass Family, which includes Sarah Stained Glass Cat, The Stained Glass Elephant, Hernando Stained Glass Hippo,  Amelia Tall Glazed Window Cat, a Green Stained Glass Camel, and one of  the 7 Hippos Marching.

Fractured Glass 3 (22x33) Framed  $800

Bright Boxes

All the Colors and Paths is part of a series loosely called Bright Boxes which celebrate the depth of color achievable with watercolor while challenging space and perspective. I like to think that I am painting in two-and-a-half dimensions. Most (including this one) were painted on 300# paper which is like painting on felt or a very welcoming sponge.

All the Colors and Paths #1 (13x23) $350

Altered Aesthetics Gallery is at 1224 Quincy Street NW, Minneapolis, MN 55413 in the Q'arma Building in Minneapolis' Northeast Minneapolis Artist District. 

Bright Glass Bubbles Holiday Card is a "Today's Best" at zazzle.com

Bright Glass Bubbles

The Bright Glass Bubbles blank holiday card was selected as a "Today's Best" for June 6, 2012 at zazzle.com.


It was "...hand-picked as an example of creativity at its finest. Out of billions of products on Zazzle, your design was chosen for being one of the best!" I am honored.


Fans of nanoscapes may recall the 13 weeks in 2010 that I spent in the World of Fractured Glass when I painted Fractured Glass 1, 2, 3, and this glass bubble painting. It was fun!


Click here for the link to this card at my zazzle store

Stained Glass Cat: a creative conundrum

Stained Glass Cat

Stained Glass Cat will be a new small friend, but her roots are with the nanoscapes' Fractured Glass family. She has brought me to the brink with a creative conundrum: is she finished?

Because the Fractured Glass technique is in my comfort zone, I began work on her when I needed a break between identifying and painting new small friends and tackling new nanoscapes projects.

Now that all of her "glass bits" are finished and "grouted" with watercolor, she might be finished. But perhaps not. I might paint a "fractured glass" frame or add a horizontal line to anchor her. Or maybe not.

This eerie feeling -- hesitating before making a paint stroke -- may be as close as I ever get to what I imagine sculptors and gem cutters feel before making a critical cut. Will it work? Will it do what I want it to do? Will it do something better? Will it cause the entire enterprise to fall flat on its face?

Stained Glass Cat: progress report

First color

September 6

Friends and fans of nanoscapes may remember the Fractured Glass paintings that I made in 2010, and that there was a magical moment in each painting when the loops and whirls began to come together inside the image. It has happened again with the Stained Glass Cat.

Throughout this work, I have used a new brush: a #1 Rafael 8408 Martre Kolinsky Sable France which I purchased from Wet Paint in St. Paul, MN. It holds a lot of paint and gives me a lot of control, too. 

Stained Glass Cat is 15x22 and painted on 300# Fabriano Extra White paper. When complete, the Stained Glass Cat will join her family in the small friends website.

Stained Glass Cat: in progress

Stained Glass Cat Day 2

Yes. I love stained glass. Yes. I think that any work with glass is magic. No, I will never work with glass because it requires safety equipment for cutting or being a heat-resistant human who can work with the temperatures required by melting and fusing.

But wait! I can paint. Adding to the nanoscapes' Fractured Glass and The Glazes, this small friend Stained Glass Cat is based on a needlepoint pattern that I have carted around for 30 years. When complete, it will be for sale through the small friends website.

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.

nanoscapes' interview @Still Point Gallery Blog

  

When the three Fractured Glass paintings were accepted into  Still Point Gallery's TRUE ARTIST exhibition, I was honored and delighted.  Gallery owner Christine Cote interviewed for the gallery's blog and I talked about nanoscapes, Fractured Glass 1,2 & 3, and Painstaking Exuberance.

Fractured Glass #1 and #3 are for sale through Still Point.

 

Nameless traveling nano: Day 11

One of the pleasures of creating nanoscapes is endless surprise at what the shapes do with (and to) one another. The Wild Triangles of the Fractured Glass Family (FG 1,2,3, & Fractured Glass Bubbles) had boundless energy that became apparent as I added more and more color, and then began outlining each shape.

As the nameless nano's shapes began to cover the paper, first with pencil, then Davy's Gray and finally, with colors, they asked me "What are we? Leaves? Printed Circuits? Paper cutouts? Hawaiian Quilts? Molecules? Cast-off movie tickets?"  No answer yet...

Late yesterday, I began to outline some shapes in the lower left corner,  and started to paint in some of the links. As always, that defining step changed the character and the motion of the piece....

     

Earlier in the day, when I finished painting all of the shapes, I was very tempted to stop -- or at least to paint the outline for each shape, and then to stop.  Not possible, though, because the Davy's Gray connecting pieces are already painted in.

I am really fond of these shapes, and I see (hear) their potential.  I know that I will revisit them in a much much larger painting.

Fractured Glass Meets Kaleidoscopes: Day 11. The End.

It took 11 days to paint 39 "Fractured Glass Bubbles."  I used new colors, and, in three of the bubbles, worked out a new approach to painting Fractured Glass -- painting all of the lines in one color, and then filling in the spaces.

I took all of the blog photos with my Palm PRE.  This afternoon "Fractured Glass Bubbles" will have its professional digital image taken.

Fractured Glass Meets Kaleidoscopes: Days 9 and 10 ...getting very near the end

Getting very near the end...  As I bounce between focusing on the choosing the shapes' colors and enhancing tiny lines, I wonder what I've painted...a lucky lady's jewel box, a box of holiday decorations, molecules through an electron microscope, a box of marbles (do kids play with marbles anymore?)...

End of Day 9

End of Day 10

Fractured Glass Meets Kaleidoscopes: Day 8 (with a respectful tour of origami)

When Wet Paint in St. Paul has a sidewalk sale, I do my best to get there. Last year I snagged my easel; this morning I found a treasure trove of Schmincke Horadam watercolor tubes, and some beautiful watercolor paper. Waiting to pay, I saw some origami papers and kits, and began to think about how many triangles I saw in their designs. Might there be a kinship between origami and Fractured Glass?

It took no time at all to find Robert J. Lang and his breathtakingly origami masterpieces on the web. A physicist and engineer, Lang has been doing origami for 40 years, and he is one of the pioneers of the cross-disciplinary work between origami and math.  Yesterday, I admitted to being inspired  by solid geometry. Today I am inspired by origami, which takes a one-dimensional piece of paper and goes straight to three dimensions.


Peter's Snowflake, is part of Robert J. Lang's collection of Geometrics & Tesselations. 
At the end of the eighth day, the finish line was in sight.  On the morning of the ninth day, I have a flock of new colors in hand...

Fractured Glass Meets Kaleidoscopes: Day 7

Day 7:  7 blank bubbles to go. 

We spent a lot of time with triangles in 9th grade Geometry, including the unforgettable Pythagorean Theorem Project for which we had to create 50 word problems, do the drawings, and then write out the math IN INK with no mistakes.  Our teacher was a terror, or rather, she was a stickler for accuracy that was even then decidedly old fashioned.

9th grade grumpiness aside, my favorite math that year (and forever), was Solid Geometry, whose mathematical purpose of measuring the volume of solid spaces has never come up in conversation. While I don't recall the mathematical properties,  I love the shapes.  This lovely Small Stellated Dodecahedron has been used in art, and its celebration of the triangle makes it very dear to me.

Fractured Glass Meets Kaleidoscopes: Day 6

As the canvas fills up, it becomes more challenging and interesting to fill the remaining spaces with colors that keep the balance, maintain the energy, and keep me entertained.

Fractured Glass Meets Kaleidoscopes: Day 5

Because the canvas (140# Arches paper, actually) is beginning to look half-finished, I started to count the bubbles, dividing them into three categories: complete, partly-painted, and undone.

No matter how I calculated, counting and re-counting, there are just 9 finished bubbles with all of their painted lines, and I'm nowhere near even half done.

I should have known better.  When I painted "100 Buttons," I began to count and learned that there were far more than 100 buttons, and that the finish line was far, far away.

"100 Buttons" was inspired by a line drawing of a shoe  with covered buttons.

I said "Ah ha! I can do that!" and traced nickels, dimes, quarters, and an assortment of French coins, painted Davy's Gray outlines, and then painted in their solid colors.

These "buttons" were particularly engaging, and most of them have multiple layers of watercolor underneath their painted threads.

Although most of my paintings are part of families (Bright Boxes, Small Friends, Kaleidoscopes, LLLamas, Cats, Rings & Links), 100 Buttons is now and probably forever will be an orphan -- just one in the family.

Fractured Glass Meets Kaleidoscopes: Day 4

In the ordinary course of painting nanoscapes, I paint in all of the shapes before painting in all of the outlines.

However, as the Boss of Myself, I can test, bend or break my rules. 

I couldn't resist painting the lines in the orange ball near the bottom left, pointing the way to the shape of things to come.

Fractured Glass Meets Kaleidoscopes: Day 3

I had imagined that each of these bubbles would be absolutely monochromatic, but I find that colors that complement and contrast are irresistible.

For the record, I took this photograph at the end of the third day of work on this painting.  This is the second blog post.

When Fractured Glass and Kaleidoscopes Collide

Having acquired a number of new paint colors during the past few weeks, I want to explore them and to see how they work with one another, and with the related colors on my ever-expanding palette.

As you can see, I am not yet finished with Fractured Glass (three paintings unambiguously celebrating random color), nor have I abandoned the nanoscapes' vision of Kaleidoscopes and Molecular Biology. DISCLAIMER: My version of molecular biology is not a reflection of what I may have learned in 9th grade Biology in 1963 at Hyattsville Junior High School in Hyattsville, MD.

Fractured Glass #1 celebrates random color and begins to answer the question "What happens when triangles go wild?" It is 12x16 inches.

For a painter who can't have or make too many colors and who (as she learned from Russ Dittmar) never met a color she didn't want to enhance, Fractured Glass is a platform for fun.

Among the earliest nanoscapes, Molecular Biology 112 shows things heretofore unrevealed by electronic microscopes.  It is 4x6 inches.

In 2007, in the beginning of the nanoscapes' creative process now called Painstaking Enthusiasm, I used cookie cutters to create the circles, drew the patterns, painted them with Sepia (now abandoned for the lighter Davy's Gray), painted in the shapes, and outlined the shapes with a Rapidograph,  a technical pen with a very, very tiny point. Once I was brave and confident enough to use a tiny watercolor brush, I ditched the Rapidograph.

This first and as-yet-unnamed marriage (or collision) of the Fractured Glass and Kaleidoscope Families (12x16 inches) may be an exploration of patterns of surface tension on bubbles of unknown origin.  Or perhaps not.


But each color will be fun to explore.

Robert the Tap Dancing Rooster

After six weeks of painting with Painstaking Exuberance entirely in the world of Fractured Glass, I needed a break.

And what a break!  Today, through Pass the Baton, I booked some "Alternative Careers" and "Professionalism Has Attached" programs, and then I painted a rooster. 

Meet my new Small Friend, Robert The Tap Dancing Rooster.  Because tap dancing 'til 2 a.m. annoyed the hens and cut into his ability to crow at dawn, he was banished from the hen house. He has landed in my studio.  Except for attacking the paint brushes while I worked on Robert's portrait, my cats have ignored him.

Robert will appear on a note card and in a small (6x9") print. He and the now completed 22x33" Fractured Glass #3 will be on the nanoscape website next week.

Saturday July 17, Woodbury Lakes Art Faire (Woodbury, MN)

I have been painting on Fractured Glass #3 non-stop for two days, and hope to finish tonight...if you are out and about on Saturday or Sunday July 17 and 18, drop by the Woodbury Lakes Art Faire and check out the work of members of HandmadeMN, a group of Minnesota-based ETSY artists and craftspeople.

I'll be there on Saturday with nanoscapes.

Fractured Glass #3 on July 8: the shadow is the detail

From July 8 in the a.m. 

 to July 8 in the p.m.

Details.

Details.

Details.

I am painting the lines with Winsor Newton Winsor Violet (Dioxazine).