Fermentation

Nope, I haven't taken up wine or sauerkraut making. Just lots of fermentation going on inside me. The "sabbatical" I have been on for the past several months is nearly over. The final stage consists of moving my studio from my little seasonal cabin in the woods to my Pink House right in downtown Saranac Lake. With much help from strong, kind friends, that process began a couple of weeks ago. My wonderful (incredibly heavy!) work table, my sewing machine and its cabinet, my flat files of papers, an impressive stack of boxes, and more stuff are sitting in their new home now.

Besides the sheer volume of art supplies I've accumulated, there are folders and boxes full of drawings, watercolors, prints, and doodles resulting from years of studying and experimenting with a huge range of mediums and techniques. And there are a surprising number of journals from my days in graduate school when I was studying the reproduction ecology of native orchids, with loads of handwritten notes and sketches. I'm going to take some pages to make into some "history" collage work. I see that this stage of my adventure must include a long look back and a refining of the images and techniques that speak strongly to me now. There's not much time for going through all of this detritus. I have to get my personal stuff moved in this week, along with my Self. But it's worth spending some time to pull out the gems that still grab me and to toss them into this fermentation vessel I've been tending.

The Best Kind of Limitation

Often I talk with my students about how limitations and constraints can be good for an artist. They can increase creativity by reducing the sometimes mind-numbing thousands of directions and options. At least, that's what they often do for me.

This science-and-art project that focuses on the processes of management, regrowth, and ecology in the Long Term Ecology Research sites at the Paul Smith's College VIC is a challenge. There are so many organisms, microhabitats, seasonal changes, and management types that making art to interpret any of this can feel too big and too complex.

I worked through various styles and formats for making artwork of my own for our exhibition, and I could not settle on what I wanted until a perfect collaboration occurred to me. The professor teaching the class that is organizing this project is also a poet - my friend Craig Milewski. When I realized I wanted words to combine with my images, the poem Craig is writing about this place and its ecological processes seemed like the right fit. And Craig agreed.

What you see above is a try-out of several pieces that will be layered to make one of five for the show opening on April 24th at the VIC, one for each of the parts of Craig's poem. The perfect and best kind of limitation - and collaboration.

The Holiday Flurry

Here it is December already! There is a dusting of snow this morning, with more on the way tomorrow. I love the earliest of the snow falls, transforming the landscape.

The Big Holiday Celebration is beginning here in Saranac Lake - art openings, The Nutcracker, school chorus performances, craft fairs, little and big parties. I am involved in three of them this weekend - an opening at NorthWind Fine Arts on Friday evening (from 5 - 7 PM: a collaboration with The Left Bank Cafe, right next door), the opening of the Big Little Show at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts on Saturday afternoon (1 - 3 PM), and the first Saturday (of two) of the Enchanted Christmas on Helen Hill. 

This morning, I was delighted to see that one of my "mountain collages" entered in the LPCA show was featured as the Artwork of the Day on North Country Public Radio's website. Here it is - a study in complementary colors, based on a view near the ADK Loj road outside of Lake Placid.

In the Mountaine - mixed media collage

                                       

The Post Card Project

Upon leaving Florida (tomorrow morning) I am finally getting back to my blog! My current project is making 14 or so post cards, mailing them to friends, retrieving them later, and making them into a piece for my show coming up in late March at Paul Smiths College. Each one is about some aspect of this wonderful trip my sweetie and I have been engaged in since late December. A recent post to my Inkjet Transfers Yahoo Group spurred me to show a few of the cards for which I used inkjet transfers.

 

This card was made from a photo I took of a sweet little cottage in Bradenton, Fl. I printed the image on brochure paper and transferred to the watercolor card using Golden soft gel medium, with a spritz of water on the printed image before placing it facedown on the medium. It turned out very well. The painted borders are cut from the map in the Village of the Arts booklet I received when Mom and I went to studio/gallery tour the Village in January, along with a little strip of lovely painted paper on the right edge.

This card is made from an inkjet transfer on plain paper, using Golden matte medium. A little less successful than the image above but the strong photo of the palm leaflet worked well anyway. I used map fragment for this card as well.

This image transfer is of a gorgeous sunset, made as the one above. I enhanced it with watercolor pencil and spread the pigment with matte medium to make it more durable for its postal journey. Painted handmade paper is attached with matte medium along the bottom and right edge.

Hope you enjoy some tropical thoughts when you look at these. I feel so lucky to have had all this sun while you poor dears are digging out from under the winter!