Having Fun with Seattle Art and Photography

My trips to Seattle generally result in at least one attempt at a portrait of grandson Wilson.  Unlike his twin Cole, he is more amenable to posing.  However, like any normal 8 year old, posing doesn't last very long (which I can blame for the my inability to capture his likeness).  The result this time is "Wilson and his Toys," a 10 x 14 pen and ink and watercolor painting.  To try to improve on the original, I tweaked the resulting watercolor by doing a bit of over painting in Photoshop, then added a background that was a blurred version of a Home Depot product shot.  All of the elements are shown above, including a refreshingly more appealing photo of Wilson, walking the dog Riley, while wearing a T shirt in 30+ degree weather.

Magnolias

Latest quilted wall hanging tells the story of white and pink magnolia flowers going from bud to bloom.  Center is a patchwork of photos printed on silk surrounded by raw edge applique of various cotton and silk fabrics showing a portion of a Magnolia flower's life cycle.  It's amazing how much time these things take!  But creating art works wonders in taking the mind off the horrors of our current government. 

Yes, I am a Pack Rat

Santa Barbara elementary school photos from 1955 through 1961

I Wish

Now that I've starting writing poems again (for the recently self published Blurb book "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blue Jay")  http://www.blurb.com/b/8507763-thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-a-blue-jay, I started going back through poems I've written in the past.  Most were done for a family writing collective called "Round Robin."  Here's one from 2000 I found particularly relevant to today:

I wish for a fish
A fish of green and violet stripes
In a warm ocean pool
I can swim in
while I'm on a vacation
That lasts forever
In the sun, having fun
Staying eternally young
And in this unrealistic fantasy
The fish will talk to me
And give me words of wisdom
That bubble up through the water
And dry in iridescent drops on my skin
Where everyone else can read them
And learn something

I still wish for an eternal vacation but more realistically, what I'm wishing for today, is a better government! 

What's maybe more interesting is how often one does get what one wishes for.  I had totally forgotten this poem, but realize now my trip to the Galapagos last year, where I snorkeled with beautiful fish, was exactly what I had wished for 17 years earlier.

"Sewing Tools Used and New" - a Recently Finished New Art Quilt

This quilt happened for a couple of reasons: 
1.  I started collecting old scissors on a trip to Indiana in 2013, after enviously noting my artist aunt Reva's scissor collection.  This forced me to take a class on flash photography, and buy a flash attachment for my camera, in order to accurately photograph my old scissors.  That done, the scissors were photoshopped into a polka dot star pattern I designed.
2.  On a trip to the Galapagos in 2017, a fellow traveler was always sewing and I spent a couple of hours doing a watercolor of her pin cushion, which I liked a lot.  So I printed it onto fabric.
3.  I made the mistake of going into Britex Fabrics in SF (before they moved this year), thinking I would only look, and exited with scissor and pin cushion fabrics plus some complimentary blue and white fabric as well.  I needed to do something with them.
Once all of the above happened, I thought I'd put all the elements together and make a quilt I could enter into a cool quilt contest.  The problem is my craft abilities are inferior to my creative abilities so the finished quilt, being slightly imperfect, would probably never get accepted in a craft quilt contest.  Additionally, after photographing the quilt, I transformed it in Photoshop to neatly fill a unified space and find it now looks slightly more warped than it really is.  So the only place this quilt will be featured for now is here.  It will be live for viewing at my Marin Open Studios this coming May, however.

Art Quilts In Process

I now have so much fabric, I feel obligated to do something with it before it takes over the entire house.  So I am doing a lot of quilting these days.  One of my self imposed guidelines requires each quilt include some original art and/or photograph, which further expands the fabric library.  The top two images are for a giant quilt tentatively called "Birdmen of Marin," because it will ultimately include 80 2x2 photos that I shot in and around Marin County, combined with 4 wooden artist model photos done in an applique rose fabric + some original bird art.  The third image down is for a different quilt of funky birds in primary colors.  The one featured here is blue.  The final in process quilt depicted here is called "Magnolia from Bud to Flower" and includes magnolia photos printed on silk, then cut up, together with some applique magnolia buds and flowers in a mix of cotton and silk that is still being worked on.

Shooting Suburbia at Midnight

The flickering screen of a neighbor's giant wall TV, seen from a distance at night, has always fascinated me.   So when the rain cleared last night I was motivated to capture the scene, then modified it with various color filters.  It spookily reminds me of a scary TV show I watched as a child at my grandparents house (we never had a TV in our house) which gave me nightmares until my mother discovered my secret vice and cut me off.

Some New Winter Seattle Art

Top to Bottom:
1.   Pen & Ink and Watercolor portrait of sulky grandson Cole Taylor.  His nose is too long in the painting, as can be seen from the photo below it.  That might have been because we were reading the book Pinocchio!  Cole was not as willing to pose as his twin brother so this is the only time I had to paint him.
2.  Watercolor painting of Wilson, which doesn't do him justice, as can be seen from the photo of him above the artwork.
3.  Pen & Ink and watercolor and pastel pencil portrait of Wilson in his sport shirt.  He looks a bit like a Nazi youth in this picture, which Wilson said was "creepy."  It does not look much like the photo of Wilson above the art, holding up the world with his dyed red Mohawk hairdo. 
4.  An Abstract, inspired by going to Discovery Park in Seattle, one of my favorite places to hike
5.  A Memory Abstract of my week in Seattle ends the tableau.

Pink Diamond Owl Trees

My first wall hanging quilt! 

Some New Fabric and Paper Art

Top to Bottom:
Paper Art Collage:
"Flamingos and Yellow Roses" Paper Collage 22" w x 19 1/2" h

Fabric Art Quilts:  (photos could show the final work better)
Wild Animal Baby Quilt 49" w x 49 1/2" h
Wild Animal Baby Quilt back with various Minky fabric patches
"Under the Sea" 48 1/2" w x 71 1/2" h (includes batik fabrics bought in India, photos and various other applique art)
"Robin Walking Away From Chaos" 47" w x 68" h.  Tons of hand embroidery and a wool punch bird!

Illustration of a Summer Cold

Getting sick in the summertime has never seemed fair.  But it  recently happened to me.  I decided to try to tackle how it felt by doing another mixed media collage.  The (for now) final version is at the top of the page, an earlier version below it.  So what's the backstory on the elements used in this new creation?  The photo of me in the collage goes back to a Christmas in 1971 when my sister  Susan came to visit me while I was living in Madrid, Spain.  As I was often sick during the two years I lived there, I'm pretty sure I was sick that Christmas.  I was also pretty poor.  I always liked the moody photo Susan shot of me in front of the wall calendar.  To illustrate my sore throat, I used another little piece of my new red Japanese washi paper.  I didn't have any picture of viruses to throw at the image so sampled a few I discovered Tal Danino had created and posted on his twitter account (link here)  I could have used my own bacterial design which I created for a Spoonflower (link here - although they aren't showing all of my designs anymore) fabric design contest - a Paenibacillus done in 2015 because it looked cool, but I didn't because that wasn't what was infecting me.  Finally, I spent too much time trying to create a brain image using various photos (from the ocean in Pt. Reyes to the Botanical Gardens in Berkeley.)  I'm not too happy with the resulting brain but think it is time to move on from this project.

Japanese Popsicles Artwork Backstory

One of the few benefits of being older is there is some personal history now I can pull from when creating new artwork.  My latest craze doing mixed media collage is benefiting from various other expressions on similar subjects done in the past.  Case in point:  In 2004 I did a watercolor of some orange ice cream and multi flavored popsicles (because I used to love to eat them).  In 2009 I turned that painting into a digital composite with some scanned buttons (art using scanned buttons kept me entertained for about a year.)  Now, I used some new Japanese washi origami papers to create the ice cream/popsicles and placed them onto a recent landscape photograph of trees printed on Hiromi kozo-shi paper.

Revisiting an Old quilt

Trying to put my quilts together in one place on my Pinterest page LINK HERE, I found a few that were saved from an old defunct website (redcrowartworks) I closed out years ago.  So, I'm reposting one of my first little quilts titled "Bee World," created in 2014, so the link will be more viable.  The quilt was mainly comprised of a collection of my art printed on fabric, some original fabric designs and a centerpiece of beautiful french silk I bought off of eBay, in a mix of silk fabric remnants, and which had some beautiful little embroidered bees on it.  My sewing skills are not the best, as one can see from the irregularity of the piece.  One of the artworks, a digital rendering of an oil painting of sunflowers, has recently reincarnated itself into a paper collage.

What If ...

there were Greater Flamingos in California?  Wouldn't that be nice.

Sunflowers in Vase

Continuing on with my variations on a theme spree is my newest version of Sunflowers in a Vase. Top:  Photo and paper collage on Arches watercolor paper, including a pattern of local sunflower photos printed on Kozo paper which make up the vase.   18 1/2" x 15".
Bottom:  My 28 x 22 oil on stretched canvas painting done in 2012.

Lotus Pond Mixed Media Photo Collage

Like the previous post, this mixed media collage of cut up photographs, a variety of papers, and pen & ink, glued onto Arches watercolor paper (11x15), includes images from a photo of orange and yellow flowers, shot at the Botanical Gardens in Mendocino in 2015 (below).  Also included here are some cut-outs from a print of a digital composite, comprised of an underwater photo shot in the Galapagos together with a field of Calla Lilies in Mendocino - both shot this year.  The inspiration for the piece is a photo of a Lotus Pond in the beautiful "Extreme Horticulture" book by John Pfahl with an introduction by Rebecca Solnit.