Eggstravaganza, wild egg decorating soiree

Last night was our annual night-before-Easter egg-decorating party. Six creative people and five dozen eggs later, here are the favorites! Any tool/technique and combining of colors was fair game. We used Paas® egg colors, rubber bands, string, cello tape, duct tape, china markers, Sharpie® markers, pencils, colored pencils, crayons, etc. Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate it!

Now that I've got most of the colors off my hands, I'm heading to the gallery to take down my show... Rather bittersweet as it has been such a great experience for me with positive comments, sales, good connections made, and an invitation to join the coop gallery. 

Kevin Spacey on the importance of the arts

Worth watching... the entire Nancy Hanks Lecture at The Kennedy Center (April 4th, 2011) which prompted this interview about the role of the arts is here.

Big collage update

So, here are some photos taken a few days ago of progress on the "biggie" collage (three by four feet). Working title is "Nodes." Sometimes I'm considering it vertically, sometimes horizontally, sometimes working flat, sometimes on the easel. I think the horizontal orientation will ultimately win out. So far this collage is composed of mostly cardboard, kraft papers, shopping bags, envelopes... with only a small portion of magazine papers. More photos to come. 

Incoming: playing with daily discoveries

Several times a day I find oddball bits and pieces* that I want to play with... and these elements most often don't relate to the larger collages in process. So, I've been experimenting with some free form collage compositions on lined banana paper, which has been coated front and back with acrylic medium, to add heft and some durability. The banana paper has a wonderful random speckled texture, and the brown ruled lines are in opposition to that... there's something quite delightful about working on it.Here's a detail from one in progress that includes a questionable bit of positive thinking. What struck me as unusual about it was the passivity of the comment. It seems there is a lot of encouragement in print, much of it the "shelf-help" variety -- which sounds good at first, but is entirely too trite for my taste.*Doodles, packaging fragments, snippets of text, stamps, junk mail, to-do lists, leftover scraps, fruit labels, receipts, handwritten notes, the photos you always meant to throw away... you get the drift, anything goes!