Amaterasu Shrine

Amaterasu: Japanese Sun Goddess

(mixed media with found objects: 8" x 10" $180.00)
SOLD!

It all started with a friend (Leighanna Light) giving me the rusty wrought iron finial and the pointy cog wheel thing (I have no idea what it should be called). It sat on my work table for months. I knew that she was a goddess. I just needed a lot of gestation time and the right things to put it all together with to come into my hands.

I cast her face with paper clay and 'rusticated' it. The rusticating part feels a lot like doing chemistry experiments (except you always use the same ingredients to cause the rust). Definitely a, 'stinky, take it outside' project!

When I completed her, I needed to see which goddess fit her description. It didn't take me long to figure that out when I saw the name Amaterasu and realized that she was a Shinto Sun Goddess, that this was who she was all along. She knew who she was all along. It was I who had to figure that out!

She will be at The Wooden Cow Gallery during the month of October and yes, she is for sale! The opening reception will be Friday, Oct. 1 from 5-8. This is the first time I've submitted something to The Wooden Cow Gallery. The call for art for this show came to my email in box a few weeks after I completed her. The call for art is called, "The Divine Feminine". Happily, I got juried in to the show. The icing on the cake is that a friend of mine (Regina Portsheller) whom I haven't seen in a year is the featured artist at this show. Way to go, Regina!

Life can be full of wonderful surprises like this. That's what makes the journey so interesting.

Broken Skateboard Art

So, what do YOU do with broken skateboards? I'd venture that if you do a lot of skateboarding, you either have a 'broken board grave', or they perhaps ended up in a landfill.

I'll admit I'm too damned old to be skateboarding. But, my 17 year old son does. And, if you're serious about it, you go a lot and you end up with a lot of broken boards. That's just the way it goes!

The inspiration for this came from Jesse Reno. He has done the graphics on some boards for a company in California (amongst a million other projects and a kazillion awesome paintings). My son and I thought it was pretty darned cool. It was my son's idea to use his broken boards to do artwork on.

So, you know who (that would be me) embarked on a new adventure of recycling his boards and using them as a substrate for art. You have to put a lot of stuff behind the board in order for it to hang on the walls properly (otherwise the bow shape of the board makes it sit cattawonkers on the wall). I used pieces of scrap lumber and a bunch of corks from wine bottles and a couple of eye screws and wire and you're good to go!

These are all mixed media pieces. I haven't officially named them. I guess I should. No matter, I can't sell them as they are going on the wall of my son's room (he claims them as his since they are, after all, on HIS boards!).

Maybe I should call this one, "Stop Looking At Me!"

"Two Crows". How unimaginative a name!

This one does have a name. It's the "Jesse-fied Fish". Kind of a collaborative work between Jesse and I. I did most of it and Jesse added his marks to it when I was done.

Solstice I

Solstice I

Mixed media 4" x 6" $35.00

A friend of mine and I kept talking about playing around with a plaster technique (inspired by Stephanie Lee) nearly all of year last year. Y'know, one of those, "let's do a play day" kind of thing. Between being sick, being out of town, teaching, shows, family obligations and so forth, it took us nearly a year to sit down and do that play day! It's not as though we couldn't have experimented with this technique on our own.

But, the energy and flow is indeed different when you sit down with a friend to try out something new to both of you. We 'winged it' as far as what we thought we were supposed to do and had a great time. We had no expectations, no judgment, no worry about the outcome.

We sat there and mixed up our plaster and used all our so called 'tools' (one of our favs was a potato masher). Things got mushed around, objects were embedded. Lots of funny stories and laughter. The art was more of a secondary thing next to enjoying each others company.

Plaster on canvas with acrylic and oil.

You can see what my friend did here.

Seafaring Goddess

I started this encaustic about a year ago and let it lay around, unable to finish it. Mostly due to lack of directional inspiration.

Sometimes (sometimes? ok, maybe often for me) you just have to pick it up and give yourself permission to do whatever (use the 'Valley girl' accent here) to it without concern about the outcome. And to do something that wasn't in the original gameplan.

Such is the case here. I thought it was just going to be an encaustic piece. The 'whatever' that I ended up doing to it was combining acrylic medium over the wax. That gave me more freedom to continue tweaking the image until I was satisfied and could call it 'done'.

Mixed media; image is 5" x 7", wax, paper, acrylic and transfer methods were used.

Art Gallery 66

I now have completely new work hanging at the Art Gallery 66 in Bernallilo; if you get a chance, stop by and see it! The top image is the section of wall that my work is hanging on. The two images below it are close ups of work I just completed. The one with the butterfly is 11" x 14" and is titled, "Homeward Bound", the one below it is 9" x 6" and is titled, "Kiss Me!". It is a mixed media piece with found objects.

Click here to see four other pieces that are in this exhibit (more mixed media done primarily in acrylic).