weekend pleasures

Art by Scott Bullik  * Nails Elephantastic Pink by OPI * Fused glass ring by Sam Leonard

White Tara

 

Tara with Plenty ©2011 Lasha Mutual

Isn't this absolutely gorgeous? I just ordered a limited edition print of this amazing watercolour by artist (and fellow Canadian) Lasha Mutual. She is working on a series of 108 White Taras, you can see the series here; each is just as sacred and beautiful as the next. I love it when the act of creation is also an act of devotion. Actually, I think it always is, but it can be especially powerful when the artist acknowledges this connection between creativity and what we sometimes call the Divine - the mystery, the life-force, the big energy we are all a part of.

The White Tara is special to me; you could call me a devotee. She is the feminine embodiment of compassion and wisdom, she is eternal-eyes-wide-open and never judging. She is the loving divine feminine who takes so many forms and is so universally beloved across cultures, whether she is seen as Kwan Yin or Mother Mary, Lady Liberty or the Tara Herself.

I strive to embody her wisdom, compassion, kindness, and discretion. Plus Beauty, both sensual and spiritual! The pink peony tattooed over my left shoulder is a daily reminder to aspire to her qualities of Grace. (She's shown with a lotus here, but sometimes it is a peony.)

Where do you turn for inspiration and aspiration? Is it to a divine image, the natural world, a real life mentor, or a vision of yourself as more whole? Wherever it is, I encourage you to spend some time there today.

 

Painting a Handmade Tile

Hello Beautiful,

While playing around and uploading some stuff onto Vimeo for my blogging e-course, I came across this video I made a couple of years ago of me painting a hand-made tile with slips and underglazes. I thought it might be a fun thing to share here on a Sunday, for artistic inspiration... so here it is.


 This video shows me working on a 6" tile with a rustic songbird motif. This motif was inspired by the frescoes of Pompeii which I visited in 2001. I especially loved the garden murals in the Villa of Venus, with their worn surfaces and naive, charming songbirds and flowers. I wanted to capture that naive charm and something of that mysterious, aged surface in my hand painted, hand made songbird tiles. These hand cut tiles are rustic red earthenware. In the video, I have already covered the unfired tile with a coat of pale yellow slip, and worked back into the slip to create an antiqued, distressed surface. The colours in the paintbox are not watercolours as they appear, but specially prepared underglazes. After painting, the tile will be fired, then glazed with a clear crackle glaze, and fired again. You can visit our studio and see more art tile at linguaterratile.com

New Wave, 2009, acrylic on canvas by Connie Treen ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Hello Beautiful,

I recently embarked on a new project. Between now and September 2011, I am going to visit and photograph the studios of 50 artists on my island. The visits will be fully documented on a new blog, The Artists of Denman Island, and also on my Flickr stream.

I thought it would be fun to share some sneak peaks with you here too - just a little taste of each studio I visit.  Here's my second  installment, a sneak peak at my visit to the serene and cloistered studio of painter Connie Treen. Connie's bright, tranquil space and clear palette of cerulean and yellow is a wonderful balm in this last dark slog of muddy winter... you can see the whole tour here.

The Ace of Cups, acrylic on paper by Roxanne MacPhail, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Hello Beautiful,

Have you ever visited a working artist's studio? They are such fascinating workspaces. I think all of us are curious about, and a bit in awe of, the creative process, and looking into an artist's space is like pulling back the curtain on the mysterious process of creation.

I am an artist, I grew up surrounded by artists, and most of my friends today are artists too. I grew up exploring and inhabiting the creative spaces of artists, and still I find them endlessly fascinating. My island home is rich in artistic talent, one reason I chose to live here!

With all this in mind, I recently embarked on a new project. Between now and September 2011, I am going to visit and photograph the studios of 50 artists on my island. The visits will be fully documented on a new blog, The Artists of Denman Island, and also on my Flickr stream.

I thought it would be fun to share some sneak peaks with you here too. So, I'm going to be doing a regular photo series here of artist's worktables - just a little taste of each studio I visit.  Here's my first installment, a sneak peak at my visit to the magical attic studio of painter Roxanne MacPhail.

You can check out the full studio tour of this fascinating artist here.

new creations

I'm having so much fun creating these pendants from porcelain and antique buttons. Those Victorians sure loved their pretty buttons. Each one is a little work of art. I set them into these pretty glazed porcelain pieces that I make from casts of 1940's bakelite buttons. Buttons on buttons. What do you think?

There's a craft fair coming up this weekend and I'll have a chance to show them off. There is the nicest article about my art and busines here, and more jewelery pics at my friend's flickr here. Enjoy!

mixed media monday - 'memories'

This week's challenge over at Mixed Media Monday is 'memories.' Here is a piece I created a few years ago during an artist's retreat at Hacienda Mosaico, using my favourite photo of myself as a child, running in a little grove of birch saplings on an early spring day. This piece reminds me that I still have access to that young girl who felt so lean and strong, who lived to be out of doors and at one with the elements, who was grounded in joy and a sense of belonging in the world.

My next "7 Keys to an Artful Life e-Course" begins October 10th!
Start your autumn season with 7 weeks of creativity, life-balance, self-care, and fun. Read about it here.

cherry blossoms - new from my tile studio

This just came out of the kiln this morning, the very first one of this new design. I was over there as soon as the kiln could be opened, in my pajamas, with my dust mask pulled on over my bed-head!! My inspirations for this piece were antique Chinese stoneware ginger jars, Japanese woodblock prints, and the mineral jade. I love the liveliness of the cherry blossoms, and the antique feel of the glaze. Read more about it over here at my studio.

collage, visual memory and unconscious influences

I am still reflecting on the learning and inspiration from this weekend's collage workshop with Dorothy Field. I spent some time today documenting the pieces I created over the weekend, and found one I felt was good enough to mount - it fit beautifully into a black shadowbox I've been hoarding in my studio for a while. Other pieces may not be worthy of framing, but are still worth looking at and learning from, and I've posted a few here.

Dorothy articulated the process of collage really well, I thought. It is an artform that is loose, intuitive, playful, and unconscious, yes; but there comes a point in the process when careful observation, a tight modulation of visual energy, and a rational, focused approach to composition become very important. It's all about relationships, and finding a reason for the various visual elements, the bits and pieces, to converse and conspire together. It may be about harmony or dissonance, connection or contrast, but it is always, primarily, about relationship.

In this exercise I was exploring visual weight and contrast.

I've also been reflecting on the fact that collage as an artform did not emerge until the 20th Century - which makes complete sense, really, when we consider the nature of the modern world. We have so much STUFF. More than we have ever had before. We have so much waste, so many scraps and bits and pieces. Imagine the value of things like paper, ink, glue, and pigment, not to mention print and photographs, in pre-industrial or early-industrial society, then imagine our own mountains of scraps and packaging and print and paper... the human imagination, and the artmaking urge, play on whatever is available, from bone and mud to newspapers and packaging. Collage is the timeless artmaking urge playing on modern materials.

I'm thinking of it as visual composting now. From a pile of messy, disparate scraps, comes this rich loam of visual art, right? (Please forgive me, I've been gardening a lot lately, and am especially proud of my newly acquired composting skills!!)

This little collage (top) is a good example of visual composting. This was done as a warm up exercise in the workshop. I adore Chinoiserie wallpaper and Toile (examples, bottom) and have spent lots of time looking at various specimens of them, but they were the farthest things from my mind when I did this little exercise. You see what my visual memory, collaborating with my unconscious mind, did?

Here's another bit of wisdom I got from Dorothy, and it applies not only to the physical elements of collage, but to the bits and pieces of ourselves that we bring to our artmaking. It falls into the simple-and-obvious yet pithy-and-profound category: Everything you know you gotta use. That means don't hide from the stuff (in yourself) that you happen to think is ugly, or boring, or irrelevant. Use all the juice of your life. Do you want to be making art with your ego, or with your whole, authentic self?

a teaching adventure

I've been away, teaching in the beautiful central interior of BC. Highlights of my journey were:

• flying over the wild expanse of the coastal range in a 12 seat turbo prop aircraft - close up views of icy peaks, glaciers, uninhabited river valleys and the stark plateau of the Cariboo.
• experiencing northern hospitality: being welcomed in to a warm household of vibrant creative women
• teaching all my favourite things: dance, yoga, journaling, collage...
  
• having my tea leaves read
• shopping eco-friendly gypsy/steampunk inspired attire and getting the cutest bustle skirt...
• enjoying an evening of silk-painting/block-printing in my hostess's textile studio
• jacuzzi bathtub + wine
• waking up to a glittering blanket of fresh snow
  
• lots and lots of girl talk

Mysterious Goings On in the Sacred Grove

Primavera (Spring) by Sandro Botticelli, Florence, Italy, 1482, tempera (egg and oil paint) on wood panel, 80" X 124"; the painting is now housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

I love this painting. Really. I have studied it and written about it. (it's big, you'll have to click on it to see the whole thing.) I have visited it twice over the years and cried both times. I even created and produced a choreography based on it. The crazy early spring weather we are having right now reminds me of the dance here between Zephyr, the North Wind (blue guy) and the maiden Flora (vomiting flowers. That's also Flora in the Betsey Johnson dress, but she's a more mature Flora.) We've had days of warm sun followed by days (today) of cold blue fog. The daffodils are ready to burst and the plum blossoms are out a full two months earlier than last year. It's dramatic and beautiful and it makes me giddy. I love the energy of early Spring. Yesterday we had a little walk in an old, established public garden, with big lawns, a collection of unusual trees and a rose allee, right on the shore of the estuary. It was empty and bare bones, and a fog was rolling in off the water. There was blue sky showing straight overhead and the bare oaks and beeches were tall and grand. Everything was just at that stage of starting to press into bud, or starting to push green spikes through soil - looking like bare ground and branches, but feeling like a building pressure, an ecstatic opening just about to happen.

Another ALterEd BoOk SHrine

This was an old book I found at the Free Store, a ponderous tome called Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, translated from the German. I think it's much better in it's new incarnation. The gold hand had been sitting around the studio for a long time, waiting for just the right project. The religious medals were saved from trips to Italy and Mexico.

Sacred Text: Mixed Media ALtered Book SHrine

Inspired by the work of Rosemary Broton Boyle, I created this altered book shrine (and two more) in a weekend art binge last weekend. I grew up in a household where books were treated with great respect - books as physical objects were highly valued, and I saw the adults in my life treat these objects with more responsible tender care than they did their own health and bodies at times... interesting. A vivid early memory is of being roundly scolded for drawing inside a book. I clearly remember my fascination with the shapes the words made on the page (this was well before the age of literacy) and carefully using my pencil to follow the maze from the top of the page to the bottom - I also remember my mother's absolutely horrified expression when she discovered me defacing a book. I did grow up to be very literary, and a true bibliophile and collector of books. I do love books as objects - but it has been liberating to engage in the art of altering books ( I must admit that at first I found the idea horrifying.) This one was really a leap, however; in order to create this shrine, I had to absolutely gut this book. The book had been on my shelves for some 20 years, a nice hard cover, but not of any particular value, not antique, and I have another volume which is a better, more readable translation of the same texts. It is a volume of selections from Aristotle. Oh my. I really did feel like a bold iconoclast when I took a craft knife to this one. It was worth it. I'm absolutely infatuated with the result.

Altered Book

Yesterday we had some pretty high winds here on the island, and our power went out. This left me unable to work on the computer, fire my kilns, or do just about everything else productive I do during the day. My sweetie set up our little car-battery generator, so I had one reading lamp, and after grumbling and pacing for a bit, I settled down with some art supplies and created this altered book spread. Remember my fave thrift store, where I found a fantastic set of 1940's kid's encylopaedia? Well, I was there again a few days ago, and found another amazing set of books, five volumes, beautifully bound in red leather and rich marbled paper, printed in Swedish (I think). As far as I can tell, it is a set of manly travel memoirs. There are some great photo plates, and charming line drawings adorn the margins. I decided to take one of the volumes and create an altered book. This piece is the first spread. I am also submitting it for Illustration Friday, whose theme this week (by coincidence) is adrift. Let me know what you think.

another little house - ceramic!

Here is a little heart-house I made. It'll be in the shop later today. I'm not sure about the psychology of my current fond feelings for tiny houses. I've also been spending a lot of time looking at beautifully detailed vintage buttons (more on this later!) There's such a sweet quality to tiny, perfect things; they belong to some special section of my imagination, the place where I can fall deliciously into a limitless, untainted world... do you know what I mean? On the same theme, here is a wonderful peek into tiny rooms and childhood vision.

Lotus

The day of this photo, muggy August in Northern Ontario, a wild and private lake, off the road, off the grid, a day of canoeing, calm waters, exploring a tiny island, then drifting through a floating meadow of these perfect pristine white wild fragrant water lilies. That fragrance! So sweet and clean, both earthy and otherworldly, unforgettable. I took this photo with my old 35mm with the broken light metre (my 'intuitive' light settings made for some amazing atmospheres, like this one.) I love the juxtaposition of my husbands strong, wiry hand and those delicate petals. Sexy and spiritual. Sacred and sensual. So much is there, in that image, what I love about the world.

DIY project: pretty pushpins!

I'm cleaning my studio really thoroughly this month. Yesterday, when I started to pin images back on to my freshly painted design wall, I was disappointed with how blah my plain clear plastic push pins looked. I've seen the pretty glass magnets that people make from glass drops and images, so I thought I'd try creating some push pins the same way. It was easy, and I'm really happy with how they turned out! You can try it too.

Things you'll need:

• some pretty magazines
• scissors
• white glue, acrylic medium, or any acrylic adhesive that dries clear
• flat headed metal push pins
• clear glass drops
• 5 minute adhesive, the kind that comes in two tubes
  

1. go through your magazines, and pick some small, pretty images. High contrast, simple, graphic motifs like this one work best.

2. using the glass drop as a template, draw around your images.



3. cut out the images









4. assemble your glue, cut outs, and glass drops.








5. apply a small drop of glue to the back of the glass drop, and spread around, making sure the whole surface is covered. Press the image onto the glue, carefully pressing out all the bubbles.









6. Set aside and let dry.

7. Mix your 5 minute epoxy according to the package directions. Messy and smelly! Use rubber gloves and open the window! Working quickly, cover the back of the pushpin with a big drop of epoxy, and press on to the back of the glass drop. Don't touch it again! Allow it to set - I left mine over night. Done!



I got excited and glued some other things to my push pins, like sea shells, beach glass, and these ceramic "buddha buttons" that I made in December. My new design wall is going to be so pretty!

Artful Reminders:


Soulful, artful island RETREATS for women - make art, journal, dance, do yoga, practice deep self care, learn to celebrate the sacred in daily life - all with a group of like minded women in our forest retreat at the heart of our Gulf Island... YUM!!!!!! Read more here, and join the mailing list here.





Seven Keys to an Artful Life - I'm so excited about launching this on-line circle for artful living - begins February 15th! Read more here.