A New Act

That was WAYYYYYY too long to neglect my little corner of cyberspace out here! Life has shifted considerably since July, when I left my workshop at QBL in Syracuse full of big ideas about which art project to start next. Just days later, I was offered a job teaching the art classes at Paul Smith's College, I had a new car (due to an unfortunate but harmless - to any humans - car accident), and brand new whirlwinds started up. All good. But time in my studio has been too sparse and instead of being covered with piles of my own watercolors and fiber collage scraps, my horizontal surfaces look like this.

Books on painting and drawing, my students' paintings, lesson plans, and art experiments are happily littering my life. The time has come, however, to focus all possible time and energy on my own work.

And part of that needed focus is due to another adventure: membership in the newish cooperative art gallery NorthWind Fine Arts in Saranac Lake. The nine of us agreed to put up new work in November, and I am scurrying to finish several little watercolor and collage pieces. Here are some samples.

The basic concept for these originated after reading the article by Roxanne Stout in the Nov/Dec 2011 issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors on her mountain collages. As I drive to and from the college, I see the most incredible mountain views of the Adirondack High Peaks (and loads of lower peaks) in wide panoramas. I paint the landscape portions of these pieces from the photos I take when I just have to pull the car over to take it all in. More photos soon, when these pieces and their siblings are completed.