Artweeks!

I'm going to be exhibiting in Artweeks this year -- Oxford's annual open studios event. If you're in the area, please pop in and say hi! I love to chat.

This is my studio, but actually I will be showing my work at the Headington County Library in Bury Knowle Park (because I don't want to invite you all into my bedroom). I'll be there from May 12 - 20, please check the library website for opening hours.

Lots more info and online galleries at www.artweeks.org 

Hope to see you there!

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show-off

I'm excited to announce the opening of my art show this weekend, in the Churchill Hospital's South Street Gallery!

It is a huge long corridor, so I am throwing every canvas I have into it to fill it up... both portraits and abstracts, large and small. I haven't had a show for years, so I am tripping over my nerves and my self-doubt. But! Proceeding nevertheless, because this is how you learn.

Last month my dad & step-mom were here for a visit, and I tasked them with building frames for all my wonky imperial-sized canvases (custom frames would have been ridiculously expensive) (even standard frames are ridiculously expensive). 

They cranked out more than 10 in a few short days, but I still had a few more to finish after they left.

But the efoort was worth it: they turned out so simple and pretty.

There will be brand new pieces, and some from the vaults:

If you're in Oxford or know someone who is, come see it and spread the word!

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art party

The RISD Art Sale last weekend was my very first, and it was kind of exactly what I expected, plus physical and emotional exhaustion. And trying to look engaging but not over-eager. That's a facial expression I'm going to have to work at for next time. IF there is a next time. I don't know how people do this for a living.

My mantra gearing up for this event was that it was all a learning experience: It doesn't matter if I break even, I'm LEARNING! It doesn't matter if I spend too much money on prints, and varnish my paintings at the eleventh hour, and change my mind a hundred times about what I'm going to hang... I'm LEARNING.

It was overcast all day and a little misty, but it never rained outright, so there was that to be grateful for.

I shared a table with my friend Elizabeth, who is the real RISD alum, and the maker of these great ceramic rhino heads. I decided to show my five remaining kami kami pieces, from the show I did in Kyoto in 2007.

 

I was mainly there to drum up more business for the portrait project, so I made postcards to advertise and created a portfolio of the pieces I've done so far. Maybe a dozen people took a card... not as many as I'd hoped, but better than none. I sold a few prints, and an original mixed media painting, so it was not a total loss.

I think we had some overcrowding issues at the table... Elizabeth's daughter was showing some of her prints, too, and it made our space a little busy. There's too much to look at and no central theme. See? I'm LEARNING.

 

People saw the mints, though. Those were gone by the end of the day.

Now I'm going to go hawk some cheap prints on Etsy...

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we are small

I finished the pieces I'm showing next month at the Cedarburg Cultural Center's You Gotta Have Art group show. It's a good thing the theme is miniatures, because I don't have the elbow room or the time for big projects. (I have all these huge, unfinished, pre-baby paintings and it's just killing me to watch them languish... and to recall that I used to have the wherewithal to experiment on canvases the size of semi-trucks)(Okay, not that big. Motherhood has made me prone to exaggeration).

But anyway! Like I said before, this is a scale I can handle, and I'm quite pleased with how these pieces came out. I sold several pieces like this on Etsy, so I'm guessing people who buy art like this scale, too.

I painted the butterflies directly onto the glass, then, after they were dry, laid them face down on a collaged background.



I love how the paint looks on the reverse side, so smooth and strange and not like paint. But the painted side looks cool, too:



I didn't give much thought to smallness beyond the dimensions of the artwork -- the pieces in the show can be no bigger than 25 square inches -- but I guess I've been fascinated by bugs and birds and other little things for a long time. I like it that they remind me how small I am, too, in comparison.

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Montauk: closing party

Saturday night I hosted a closing party for the kami kami show at Montauk. It was small, but lots of fun. Lots of friends came out, brought their friends, ate, drank, and listened to me wax cultural about Japanese hair and paper.

I got a little repetitive in my description of the work, but I figure this is bound to happen with my limited vocabulary. It would be amusing to hear a direct English transliteration of what, exactly, I said... I think it was something like this:

"I go to used book stores and find? look for? different kinds of paper. If I like the color, or the pattern. Then I put it together. With old maps, and train time-tables, the collages have a travel feeling."

"I don't know why I'm interested in the Japanese hairstyles. There's a museum? in Gion, for the hairstyles. I went there and sketched. You can see Japanese culture and history in these hairstyles, I think."

You try being articulate in another language!



But, people got it. Thank goodness. I sold two of the title pieces, and several of the smaller postcards. Of course the hand pieces were the most popular, and went quickly.

I know Tomomi and her husband, Shohei, especially love the hands... so I made two pieces for them, to thank them for providing such a great space for my art, for and such sincere friendship and support, to boot.



It's remarkable how people instantly gravitate toward such a familiar thing as hands... I fumbled a bit with an explanation of these, as well -- the lay-person's mudra? the language of hands? what? -- but J summed it up simply and gracefully: it's the "ah" and the "om." At the gates in front of many grand temples, there are statues guarding either side; one statue has his mouth and hands open, the other's are closed. Ah, om. Birth and death.



Perfect. Just what I meant.

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the show

At last! Pictures from Kami Kami.



The pieces fit beautifully at Montauk, Tomomi's Atelier, and of course she has an impeccable eye for design touches, like the sweet tamoe-bana branch hanging from the ceiling. (Those are her works to the bottom right, which she's been busy making and selling since she opened last month.)



Despite my limited Japanese, we've managed to have great conversations about inspiration, making art, and the way things always turn out differently than what you originally intented.



I explained that most of the time I can't think too much about the meaning of a piece before I start, otherwise I get too hung up on that and there's no flow. But then sometimes I worry I didn't think enough, and and maybe there's no meaning... That's when it's gratifying to show my work to other people and get their ideas.

Today a friend stopped by to see the art, and offered the kind of articulate reflection I'd been craving. We talked about how it's harder to see your own culture, and sometimes it takes a foreigner to show you the things you take for granted about what's all around you. She was thrilled that I'd taken pages from cast-away books, like old maps and train timetables that Japanese people might have simply overlooked.

She went on about different historic travelers who have come to this island and been influenced by its aesthetics; how art can be like a conversation between countries, and how the maps combined with the kami no ke illustrated this exchange. Perfect! Exactly what I meant.

I also created smaller post-card sized pieces that look like this:



And this:



The brown paper is ever-popular, as are the hand drawings. Let's hope they're a hit!

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