New Year, New Home, New Inspiration

I am moving in a few days. That, combined with the holiday season, and my kids all home with me, has not been conducive to art-making.

This week I got the keys to my new place and I am having some rooms painted before I am living there. I was bringing boxes over tonight, and it was the first time I enjoyed watching the sun set over the ocean from the third floor. I was overwhelmed by the colors of the sky. I know I will want to paint sunsets once I start seeing them daily but I will have to find a way to make them unique.

In the mean time, I have decided to frame the mural I painted from my creative movement class and once I have figured out the proper wall space I can take it to be framed. I am also going to paint the wicker furniture for my daughter's room - she wants black with neon designs, so I guess my creativity will be taking a different direction for now!

New work posted will have to wait and once I am settled I will be back blogging.

Happy Holidays to everyone!

size matters (in a stage production)

My interpretation of the 7 Stages of Creation (6 ft. 9 in. x 3 ft. 9 in.)

Tomorrow is the second half of the creative movement class that has caused me a great deal of stress and insecurity. Last month when we met for the first half of the class, we were introduced to creative movement as a way of expressing oneself as well as a tool that can be used in teaching other subjects in a school curriculum. I have always appreciated the performing arts and realize how wonderful it is to watch dancers move and create energy using their motion in space - but now I am being taught how to be the dancer, do the movements, and express my body in space! It is not something I ever have wanted to do and I am much happier sitting in the audience watching rather than being on the stage dancing.

This weekend I will be participating in a group dance with my cohorts, in front of an audience in the school's performing arts center, and I am not a happy camper! We are also going to perform our individual "life dance" the next day, and we have been encouraged to use props, creative dress, and music, all as a way of conveying the theme we have chosen for our life dance. I think there is an interesting karma that exists in all of our lives and it is up to each of us to identify it, learn from it, and flow with it.

A few weeks ago I painted a series of art cards based on the 7 Stages of Creation that Jeanne Carbonetti writes about in her book, "Making Pearls". I knew I did not want to trade these cards on an artist trading card website, and that I wanted to hold on to them. What I didn't realize then was that these cards would become the theme for the life dance I will be doing this weekend. It made sense to me to use the stages of creation - the ideas, the colors, the visual interpretation, and the message, when I do my dance. I have spent the past few weeks collecting my thoughts, finding a way to use this concept in visual art and then translate it into performing art. I decided to paint a mural and I am focusing on the colors of the 7 stages, and I also added the dragonfly; it is an important symbol to me and personalizes everything else I am doing. I will try to express these things when I dance. Let me just say right now that the "weak link" will be in my dance movements (and I am OK with that).

I felt the need to find proper dance attire, but more enthusiastically, I painted the mural and put together a brochure that I will hand out before my dance, to make sure my cohorts understand there is a specific theme behind each color in the 7 stages of creation. I also have a large piece of sheer white fabric but I am still not sure how I will incorporate using it.

Above I have posted the mural I will have on the stage (my security blanket is the visual art). I will be dancing to a song called "Across the Lake" by Dan Gibson, wearing a plain black leotard.

I am looking forward to putting this class behind me.

Encaustic transfers of original artwork

The holiday season is not going to stress me out, I am making that promise to myself! I am also in class next weekend, moving to a new home end of the month, and in order to remain somewhat peaceful (something I am not that good at) I have to make time for art, small scale art... that is why I enjoy making the art cards.

ATCs - small size works, quick results.

I have had many requests for geisha atcs. The geishas as a theme seems to be popular worldwide, (I had no idea), and I had already been painting geishas regularly. I decided to use the jpg images of my paintings to transfer into wax medium.

I am still trying to improve my transfer technique. Shown below are my first and 2nd batch of encaustic geisha atcs.

2nd attempt at geisha transfers

(this time I used an uncropped version of my painting)

1st attempt at geisha transfers

(cropped version of geisha painting)

protecting your copyright

I recently had a disturbing experience with one of the websites I use to post my artwork and I want to share it. I know there is not too much I can do to control what happens once my art images are posted on the internet other than putting my copyright with every image posted. It makes you wonder how much you really want to make available on the world wide web.

Flickr.com is a free website people can use to post photos of anything - whether it be family photographs, images of artwork, or any other type of jpg. I have been using the site to post my artist trading cards and have been trading with other members; we view each other's cards once they are posted and then choose our individual trades. I decided to also post some of my larger paintings because I wanted to share the type of art I create with the members I have met. What I didn't expect was to find my painting images copied into random member made galleries! I had one member ask if he could use my painting in his gallery, and had another member copy the image and include it in his online gallery without even asking me! After this happened, I decided to review the flickr privacy controls and that is when I discovered that I had to change how accessible I wanted my images to be plus I had to decide how much I wanted to share.

In the past, I have had people visit my professional website and ask if they could copy my work for their personal reference. Many years ago a man that lived in Texas claimed to have known relatives of mine in Boston.. what are the chances? I always have known resolution of internet images is 72 dpi's and if someone is copying my work they are only getting a small thumbnail. But still, what can be done to prevent this from happening without permission? (my experience says very little without incurring legal fees).

I am about to get busy with the holiday season, the completion of another one of my courses, and even hope to continue to make time for new creating. I just felt compelled to share my warning about the lack of control over your internet copyright.