An Artful Day

My house is a mess but I had an amazing Saturday making art. My dear friend, Miss Maggie (back from a 5 week holiday) came over and we spent the entire afternoon in the studio. Since neither of us had finished our Organic Background projects from our class with Paulette Insall last May, we decided to tackle the daunting task. We both loved the class but with each layer, we became less pleased with our projects. I imagine part of the problem was that, compared to Paulette's example piece, ours were a lot more "chaotic". Anyhow, on the last lesson we were supposed to add a focal point but neither of us could commit to an image so our paintings sat in the studio all summer - half naked.

Yesterday, we decided to shed our expectations and inhibitions and just do whatever we felt like doing while catching up on the details of summer. It was really wonderful! By the end of the day we had all 3 kids in the studio with us. They were painting clay beads we had made a few months earlier while Maggie and I transformed our pieces into something we could connect with.


I found a captivating picture of Yosemite in a 1936 Sunset magazine that I cut out and adhered to the right side with matte medium. I found another picture in a 1952 issue of National Geographic that I adhered to the left. I connected the two with acrylic paint and pen I covered the pink and green base I had created in the class with layers of blue, white, pink and purple, using the spray bottle technique with each layer to achieve some dimension and movement. I left the clouds make from sheet music alone since they worked with my over all design. I then found an old image of a small plane and a horse which I adhered with matte gel. I added photos of my family to give the collage life. Maggie was embossing right next to me and some of the opalescent embossing powder floated onto my picture. This was the perfect finishing touch. The end result was NOTHING like I expected nor what we learned in class, but I connected with the piece which is what I feel an artist needs to do to feel really satisfied with their work. Just my humble opinion.


Later in the evening, I finished my UGRA meet-up invites using the papers I made the night before. I covered postcard sized junk mail with several coats of gesso on each size. while they were drying, I cut the pages I had made the evening before into 3 x 2 squares. I adhered four squares to each post card then stamped and embossed UGRA across the front. I love the urban edge of these.