I am not worrying too much about image quality as I just want to keep things moving.
I have a day at home today... no appointments or necessary shopping trips till singing lesson (not mine) this evening.
So a warm up exercise and then some preps for the workshop on Thursday.
This one was a fool around with acrylics and then do what I thought was necessary with some stitching into the paper to give the piece a structure.  I am quite into playing with lines... are these lines or shapes one might ask... when is a line a shape...
I remember one teacher asking what makes a line... if not a series of dots,  so there we have it -
Dot - Line - Shape.
And it is even more complicated... as my line/shapes are made up of a series of lines in themselves...

Here is a piece of work by my daughter.

Thanks Lyn for getting us started on this project.
And thanks for the wonderful advice and wool from Legacy in Cochrane. Their blog is at this address.
Such wonderful help, how can I fail when I go into River Valley School to teach this semester?
It is one of those times when I don't know who is going to have more fun, the students or the teacher!
And check out their website... and see, I might even get some tasty morsels for my troubles... which wont be troubles at all.
Thanks to the generosity of the anonymous who is sponsoring these Friday events.  It couldn't be done without you.

Worked Up

The plans for the exhibition of works by participants of Jason Pollen's workshops in Alberta in June are coming to fruition.
Worked Up will be on show for a week - more details to follow, don't you worry.

Location will be Art Central, over a First Thursday evening event... brilliant exposure.
9 participants and good response on the request for stewards, without whom this show could not go ahead... Thank you, you know who you are.
I will have to be there a lot too though.  Can't see a way round that.

I might have something to show myself if I carry on like this.

I am giving myself plenty of time to move bits around, let it lie on the table, returning to it after a couple of hours, or overnight.  I seem to need this time to disconnect from the parts.  This is it so far... fabrics are not connected as yet... but soon they will be.  Do critique if you feel like it.

And then there is this which is probably upside down... it amazes me how the energy of piece can rise or drop depending on the orientation, landscape or portrait. Or the upside and the downside of it!

So far this is a paper collage but I am printing it out on my own prepared surface and have an idea for a workshop where this will be the item that I work on.  Fun idea for collage from some magazine photos, rather than fabrics.

No big deal

An item a day keeps....me working.

There were many things I could have done with this painted canvas... and the most obvious would have been to go with delicate and muted - traditionally my own marks.  But I am glad to say, I think that this outcome was an expression of me spreading my wings a bit and using some other tactic, not the most obvious.  

I enjoyed the mimicking of the ink by the machined lines.

The image doesn't show the contrast in the blue and the burgundy linen, but I am not worried. I am doing these pieces to encourage a loosey goosey approach to see where it takes me.

Oh and I need to sort out how to use Raw images in the blog... for some reason they open as Tiff files and then I can't save them as jpg... without a huge loss of quality.  Thanks J.

Old post recently published

Ouch...
It hurts to find an old post in the draft section... I had written this but not posted as I was waiting for a reply from Jane D.  It came swiftly but I forgot to act on it.  So... Thanks Jane for permission to post your work...ie, the link to the tutorials below.

During the recent workshops Jason talked about good and bad ways to finish and display your work.
Today I found this tutorial, about preparing an aluminium bar for hanging work, on Jane Dunnewold's site.  There are other useful tutorials there check out her website. 
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I was so lucky to find myself in Cactus (a new one on me, but you are probably very familiar with this art supplies store/art school in Calgary) when the man was cleaning the floor and thus deepening the colours. I enjoy the these colour chords?

One sees wonderful composition in the serendipitous - one just has to have ones eyes open

See the white stripe as a stripe and not glare from the overhead light and then you 'get' the composition, don't you.

In Digo Ink Splat

Felt creature and calls for participants...

Thanks to advice from my dear friend Lyn I created this mini-beast out of Merino wool (whilst my daughter produced a treasure with Nuno felting.  The monster has a ribbed body, large posterior.... anus!!!, and tentacles surrounding a wooly filtration system that is its mouth.

I am now well-equipped to teach the second semester of Art Days, at River Valley School... that is, if the first semester goes well... we are doing Volcano Freeze (actually a frieze) during the first session.

Visiting Artists:-
Heard from my preferred gallery with their costs, so now I can start to do the sums and see if we can realistically host a top notch artist this spring.  Now where did I put my abacus?

Call for works for Worked-Up:-
We have secured a venue at Arts Central, in downtown Calgary for  "Worked-Up" - where we will be showing studies and works developed via the workshops with Jason Pollen, please get in touch if you have decided that you want to participate, I need to know numbers and you need to know the details. It is going to be great with excellent exposure at that location and over a First Thursday evening event.

Interesting Link

Go here if you would like to see the 16 stages of production of a beautiful cloth by the Ajrakh Blockprinters, India. Posted by Maiwa.
Actually no words necessary.