Found on the Trail

Last season's Beech leaves and Usnea lichen found on my last visit to the research site. Layered between silk organza. Hung in my forest studio window.

This one with Beech leaf, Yellow Birch bark fragment, and decorative papers.

                     

Arranging Images

Some of my photos from the research site, printed and arranged on color-splashed watercolor paper and text photocopied from a Forest Service publication Vascular Plant Species of the Forest Ecology Research and Demonstration Area, Paul Smith's, New York.

This is my image-collection-and-arrangement process. I like to include maps in place-based work, and I found on-line topographic maps from both 1905 and 1955, northeast section of the Town of Brighton, New York.

Today I'm printing maps and playing with leaves and fabric. It all becomes part of the final product, even if it isn't seen by anyone else.   

Finding the Essence

Paul Smith's College Student Center on Lower St. Regis Lake

Teaching art classes at Paul Smith's College since last September has been an adventure. The students are lively, creative, and friendly. And many of them are most at home in the northern forest or on pristine lakes. After all, it is a forestry and natural resources school, among other things. For fun, some of these young people snow shoe, climb trees, and throw axes. Others are in the culinary  and hospitality programs - some of them like to play with food (and sometimes bring me exquisite bites of their creations). In these and the other programs, they are very hands-on people, which makes them great art students. They amaze and inspire me. The faculty does no less.

Recently I was invited, along with several other artists, to interpret the science involved in setting up and monitoring a Long Term Ecological Research Project by students in a senior-level course. That Art & Science connection is dear to my heart - having loved and worked in the ecological field as scientist for years - and I am honored to be part of the project. I was out at the research site last weekend, and now I am processing images and information to determine how I want to make a visual artwork for the exhibition of the science and the art at the Paul Smith's College VIC, which will open on April 24th.

The research and monitoring will take place - hopefully over at least the next 200 years (!!!) - in the plots set up about 15 years ago along the Jenkins Mountain Trail to study the effects of 5 timbering techniques in the forest at the Paul Smith's College Visitor Interpretive Center, formerly owned by NY State and now owned and managed by the college. The photo above summarizes the challenge of telling this story with visual arts - ecological interactions, human use, history, and regeneration. 


I'll show my process here of experiencing the site; learning what is know about it already; talking with the students, faculty, and other scientists about the project; and then making some art that tells this story from my own point of view. I hope you'll tell me what you think, offer your ideas, and enjoy the process. Thanks!

 

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

                                       

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.                                  

Fun with Paper and Dye

This week I am at the Quilting By the Lake extravaganza in Syracuse, New York. I'm not quilting and the lake is not too close, but this event is in its 31st year, so the name seems kinda beside the point now. I'm taking a workshop with Hollie Heller and about 15 other people and it's all about collage - of papers, fabrics, threads, you-name-it. I haven't done much surface design work before and I am soaking up a lot of information. The pieces above were done with dyes and wax batik on wasa paper. Others were done with shibori dying of folded paper, batik on waxed paper, discharge of dye, etc. Here is a little gallery - more details later.         

                                                  

Flowers on the Brain

View near Glacier Point

We just returned from a trip to California and Yosemite National Park. It was all wonderful and interesting. Of course, some of us were looking at birds in great detail and we found some fascinating ones. Our first full day there, we hiked from Glacier Point to  Illilouette Falls - a 5 hour trip with a 1200 foot drop to start off (and you know what that means for the "back"), and the start was at about 7000 feet. It wasn't the best idea for two relative flatlanders before much acclimating, but we did survive. And one of the very best things about the hike was the chorus of Fox Sparrows all around us. We could hear at least 5 singing at any moment, along with lots of other birds. But the Fox Sparrows were incredible in their virtuosity and richness. They also looked quite different from their larger and lighter-colored cousins we see here in the northeast during migration (if we are very lucky). Not many watercolor sketches were completed - much hiking with others, birding with other(s), and general busyness. Maybe now that I am home...

CA Poppies and Miniature Lupines

But, I digress. The thing that really grabbed me most was the abundance of wildflowers, many that were completely new to me. Every trail was lined with wonderful little gems.       

Indian Pink

Mustang Clover

Violet species

Lily species

There were many I could not identify with the smaller field guides, and I didn't want to carry around the giant ones that would actually have been more useful. Made me think (as I do on every trip I take) that I would love a digital field guide to the plants of a region that I could load onto my laptop for trips such as this one. I may have to figure this out. There is an online guide to flora of California that I will use at home to make some more IDs, but we didn't have internet service up there in the mountains.

As these lovely flower images danced around in my head while we prepared to leave, I happened to see a couple of huge posters in the San Francisco airport about a show of Josef Frank's work. Two huge cases of Frank's fabric and design work was located in the International Terminal. What a fantastic exhibit to have at an airport - the place of Eternal Waiting. Knocked me out!!! He used mostly botanical images and transformed them into gorgeous designs for fabrics and other household goods. Here are some of the images I found online later.

Several of these were on display. Almost worth a trip to the SF Airport just to see it. A Google search on his name turned up all kinds of cool information and images. Once again, my ignorance of amazing things astounds me! Now I am experimenting with using plant images from my travels as well as from my garden. To be revealed after some more playtime.