Mischievous Wind

My inner artist wanted to come out and play today...

The Eclectic Artist

I've been messing about with different art mediums and seeing what sort of art comes from it.  I have been reminded again of how eclectic I am.  The piece pictured below is one I worked on today.  It is absolutely unlike anything I have done before.  Though I have dabbled here and there in the art world I often come back to working in pen and ink that has a distinctive style to it no matter how much I mess with it.  But I can only do so much pen and ink.  It is very hard on my hands.  So I occasionally make myself take a break and try something different.  

This time around I started messing with altered art, paper art, and collage.  Collage has the potential for me to do larger pieces while still utilizing smaller pieces of my pen and ink work.  Though there is none in this piece, I hope to try integrating the two in the future.

Another tendency for my art (and creative writing) is for it to take on a life of it's own.  If I fight it, trying to make something look a certain preconceived (by me) way the flow stops and I can't continue.  When I give in to the stubborn spirit of the art piece and go with the flow things usually work out - but I never know what I'm going to end up with when I start out.  

For this piece, I had a stretched canvas that I had at some point in the past given a streaky gray acrylic wash

to.  I had gotten interrupted shortly after painting it and never got back to it.  So it was sitting there, waiting.  Last night, just before drifting off to sleep I had the idea of using buttons and scrap paper to do flowers on canvas.  That was all I had in my head when I started out today. And this is what I ended up with.

I used colored backgrounds of magazine pages to create the flower stalks, bird shapes, and clouds.

The leaves I created from cutting out text from the same magazine, searching for words that turned out to have a positive theme.

The clouds were three different colors from magazine pages that I layered and used some colored pencil on the white layer to tone it down a bit.  I found whole individual words to apply to the clouds as well.

I also took some stamp pad ink in a frosty blue on my finger and brushed it across the surface of the canvas and around the edges of the cloud.

The teal blue highlights were prompted by one bright button that insisted on being included, no matter how hard I tried to stay with the grey scale theme.  And I ended up carrying that over into the birds, which I cut out, free style, from a teal colored page in the magazine.

This is the first time I have ever posted any of my art.  It has taken me a while to get brave enough to do so.  Now that I have though, I plan on getting some decent pictures of other things I have done and get them up here as well, that way, when I call myself  'The Eclectic Artist', you'll understand why.

Catching Up

I saw the above on one of my favorite blogs that always perks me up.  I felt like it about said it - except the cute shoes part.  Cute's great, but Comfy is what's really important!

I had a few moments today to take a look at some of the blogs I love reading and realized that I wasn't the only one missing in action in the blog world or the only one thinking about blogging and wondering where to go from here.  That was a real comfort.  I'm hard on myself when I can't or don't get to everything.  So I'm hard on myself most of the time.  Now, I'm thinking maybe it wasn't just me and something universal was going on and several people were being effected in similar ways.  I feel better now.

I'm so behind on sharing what has been going on that it can be really overwhelming to even start to try and figure out where to begin.  I realized yesterday I hadn't been very communicative all around, not just on the blogs.  Guess I was in some introverted stage for a bit.  But I know that there are at least two people out there that would like to know what I've been up to.  So here ya go, Aunt Billy and Uncle Jim - your my best fans.

Weekend before last Mark was busy drying the dishes when my antique glass citrus juicer slipped from his hands and crashed into a million pieces on the kitchen floor.  So when a sunny day came the following week I walked on up the hill and did a little shopping.  The first order of business was to find another antique glass citrus juicer.  This went with our efforts to not bring new plastic into our house and to buy used whenever possible.  Not to mention it was a damn good excuse to go browse an antique store.  The ladies were super helpful at the antique store and I soon had three citrus juicers to chose from.  I went the smallest which was the mid-range in price and the cutest.  It has this little extra feature that really sold me on it - a primary ring with little slits that let the juice out but hold the seeds back.  It was also extra pointy and sharp so I was hoping it would be easier to use than my last one.  It is!  With out further ado - meet the new citrus juicer:

While I was up on the hill I stopped in at a consignment shop and was pleasantly surprised by what they had in there.  So often consignment shops are either focused towards teeny-boppers or old ladies.  I'm somewhere in between and I discovered that the shop was too.  There were several things to try on and I found a couple wonderful spring items.  Including this fun bright green dress.

And this beautiful cardigan.  Check out the detail!

And those are what I wore for our date on Sunday.

Mark surprised me with homemade whole wheat sticky buns for breakfast.  They were sticky gooey wonderful!

Then we caught the bus to downtown and went to the Seattle Art Museum to see the Calder exhibit which was fantastic.  This had to have been the best special exhibit in a while and the entry was the most spectacular I had ever seen with a huge Calder mobile sculpture turning in  the air.  I was so inspired by his creativity and use of random objects  and metal and color.  I walked away with lots of crazy art ideas in my head and I look forward to bringing them to life over time.  If you aren't aware of Calder and his art you can check it out here.


After we left the museum we walked through a fairly quiet Pike Place Market where most everything was closed due to the holiday but Mark did manage to get me a single daffodil, which was really sweet.  Then we stopped at a small coffee shop that is also a local roaster and had a some excellent cups o' bean juice.  

It was time to catch the bus and head back to our little Alki neighborhood with a quick stop for pictures at the beach.

The cats were happy to have us home and sitting still for a little while.

We finished the evening with a light and delicious Japanese meal of Miso soup with tofu, shitake and green onion, brown rice, cucumbers and onions with rice vinegar and a surprise attempt at little cucumber and avocado sushi rolls by Mark.  Great day.  Great Guy.  Lucky Me!

Blank Walls

Two large wall spaces in my living room have been suffereing from blank-wall-itis.  The art we had was either too small or too big.  There was just no Goldilocks in our collection.  So when we were driving through Belltown this weekend and my eyes spied a large and colorful piece of painted canvas just sitting there with a little post it on it (that just had to say FREE), I made Mark go around the block and then I made him try harder to fit the thing in the car, I knew it would and I was right!  We hadn't originally planned on driving to the family gathering we were going to and our bus rout would not have taken us past this spot so it made the fact that we ended up having to take the car (because of my little accident the day before) - well it made it worth it because this particular piece of art would have been several hundred dollars at a local import store.  So now, one of those blank wall spaces is no longer blank.  Instead there's a little bit of the European countryside in my living room.

 

This piece ended up being too big for over the fireplace mantle, but fit well on the wall behind the love seat.  I've had my  hope and heart set on a particular plaque for above the fireplace wall for quite some time. 

It's available from a local Celtic Store called GaelSong but at $185.00 for the set I have yet been able to afford it, let alone justify it.  Maybe, some day.  For now I have one less blank wall in my living room and that makes me happy.