Pencils & Crayons of September: image a day

Pencils & Crayons of September

An image a day. In 2010, as an artist at the Hopkins (MN) Farmers Market, I was inspired by the farmer vendors to paint pumpkin post cards. After posting a pumpkin-a-day on my Facebook page in October, I could not stop.

By February 2011, the Post Card Project had moved from postcards to large sheets of Arches 140# paper. While most are seasonal, I also introduced the LLLama Families and the small friends, a group of whimsical creatures. The geometric abstractions called nanoscapes and the small friends are now in separate websites.  

Month-by-month: January (lost left-handed gloves), February (missing socks), March (basketballs and a Shamrock), April (raindrops), May (introducing the LLLama Families), June (introducing the small friends), July (corn), August (heirloom tomatoes), September (pencils & crayons), October (pumpkins), November (leaves), and December (Hanukah candles & snowflakes.)

Will I continue with an image a day? Yes, but I will begin in an organized way on January 1, 2012. I have lots of projects to complete between now and then: a calendar, the small friends alphabet, the Lives of the LLLamas, and more! I am also committed to the work of the Small Friends Research Institute, which is dedicated to the discovery and documentation of new whimsical creatures. 

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.

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!

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.

Banish Blank Pages With Solid Geometry Inspiration

Spaces With Stripes 1

In the beginning...

It is one thing to paint every day (which I do), but quite another thing to imagine that I might have a Great Inspiration every time I pick up a paintbrush.

Spaces With Stripes 2

Instead of gazing endlessly at a blank sheet of paper, I often pick up a pencil and begin with a doodle sparked by a memory of Solid Geometry which creates an opportunity to explore of light, intricate spaces, and color.  Solid Geometry was my only beloved area of mathematics, and I am never surprised that while filling in the spaces that I both learn and have fun. 

Spaces With Stripes 3

While starting with random spaces may not be an inspiration for plein air painters or artists who focus on pristine and precise  representational work, I find is useful for experimenting with new colors, papers, brushes and techniques. 

I learned this technique from Russ Dittmar, who also taught me how to coax brilliant colors out of watercolor when he suggested: "lots of pigment, not a lot of water." When I taught this to a group of young students at the R.H. Stafford Library in Woodbury, MN, they jumped in with enthusiasm. Leaving no blank paper in their wake, they filled in the spaces and the space around the spaces.


Spaces With Stripes 1, 2 and 3 These three paintings took me through a "break" during July 2011 when I left the search for Great Inspiration to the rest of the world.  

Each Spaces With Stripes is painted on 7-3/4 x 7-3/4 inch Arches 140# hot press paper.  Each original: $200.  A signed and numbered limited edition matted print called Three-in-a-Row is $100.  (Matt size is 36x14 inches.) Find them all at the nanoscapes' website.

Kitchen tools: a quick cure for blank canvas panic

Sushi Roosters

If you have run through your check list of artwork starters and blank canvas has induced inspiration-free panic, try looking at your kitchen tools for new beginning.

Full disclosure #1: I am a watercolorist who always travels with paints and paper. Even before the coffee, I am the early-rising house guest who will rifle through my host’s kitchen drawer for inspiration. I always find it.

Full disclosure #2: I know that there are purists who decry tracing as any sort of art activity, but in my constant search for interesting shapes and patterns, I will take my inspiration where I find it.

Potato Masher 1

Potato Masher 4

Kitchen tools come in wonderful shapes and all sorts of sizes. Use them to get past your empty-paper panic. 

Tomato Forks

Sterling Silver Cake Servers

I made the first potato masher painting at my sister Elaine's house, and I now have a world-class collection  which has inspired four Potato Masher paintings. Part of the engrossing challenge of these shapes is working out the connections between each ring and link, a theme that connects them to all of the nanoscapes' rings and links, which are hanging at FrameWorks Gallery in Saint Paul, MN until September 3, 2011.

Forest of Fondue Forks

The Sushi Roosters, which were tricky to trace and to paint, make me smile.  The cake servers were part of my 50th birthday celebration, and the Fondue Fork Forest forks belong to my cousin Theda. The Tomato Fork is my own.

While I make no claim to dictionary uniqueness -- someone else must do this, too -- I suspect that there are not many painters of Fondue Fork Forests, Tomato Forks, and Sterling Silver Cake Servers.

If kitchen tools don't inspire you, find a friend with a woodshop or wander around a hardware store. Great shapes are everywhere. 

31 Ears of corn: nanoscapes celebrate July

31 Ears of Corn for July

31 Ears of Corn for July  When I painted 31 pumpkins for October 2010, I didn't plan to keep up painting and posting an image-a-day for a year on Facebook, but here I am in July with 31 ears of corn painted on a piece of 22x33" Arches 140# paper.

Like all corn lovers, I haunt farmers' markets, looking for local sweet corn. Everyone knows that the best corn is the freshest corn and the fewest number of minutes between picking and cooking makes the best corn. Sadly, during this first week of July in Minnesota, the only corn to be found is from elsewhere. It will be here soon.

A 10-month review: pumpkins (October), leaves (November), Hanukah candles and snowflakes (December), lost left-handed gloves (January), missing socks (February), basketballs (March), raindrops (April), LLLamas (May), the whimsical creatures known as small friends (June), and corn (July).