Red-on-Red

Vacation is coming to an end. Paints are being put away. Walls sanded and re-painted to turn the place back into a gallery. I have painted, assembled, woven, and spun and driven over 3000 miles to visit friends and family. I guess it's time to get back to gallery work. For those of you who are local, these are also hung in the window of the gallery for a few days. They will need to come down on Monday, July 6 to make way for the next show.

White-on-White

Boy these are hard to photograph! 3 are now complete. Perhaps I will have the energy to break out the photo lights and get better images.

Progress

Orange Grave finished....I think. White on White stage 2, not finished, but I got the shoe on it. White on White #2 in the layout stage

Making the cut

From this to this

A Painting Holiday

It is vacation time around here. So I have been gardening, doing minor repairs and playing with art materials. The painting on the left could not be more different than the other! I do not know why I did it, but I had to. It has been stretched at several sizes. Now I think I will cut it up and reassemble it. Stay tuned! The white one, well it is as yet unassembled (Ignore the paint can. It is simply holding up the shoe for now.) I think there are several of these coming up. They need to be unframed, unstretched...but then how do I manage to affix the shoe? Stay tuned.

Cowhearted Woman #4 is started

Cowheart #3 is finished

Cow Hearted Woman #3

She began the day like this. She proceeded to this. Now I am about to spray the living daylights out of it so I can do the last little bit without undue smudging.

Cow hearted Woman series

I'm working on #3. I guess I can now call the cow-hearted woman a series. The hearts wind up looking like a cross between a pepper and an eggplant...kinda cool, actually. I've been dreaming of planting a vegetable garden.

Masked woman completed

cow hearted woman wears a mask

Yje cow hearted woman is now wearing a mask. I think I will crop it to the smaller image.

Cow Hearted Woman

Not the work I planned to do

I really like drawing rib cages and pelvises. Bones fascinate me. But this was not the work I was planning on doing. The asthma's acting up...can you tell? So it goes.

A small note about Ophelia

The Ophelia Project, whose title may change, will probably be presented in 2010 sometime. I spoke with the artist, Laura Lewis this past week and she has agreed to collaborate with me on the performative aspects of the show. You can see a small YouTube of Laura performing in my yard.

Shall we begin again?

I have to ask myself, "When will I begin again?" Certainly I will begin again by Thursday! It has been a long, grinding haul since I came back from Ragdale Foundation. Reader's Art, in the Susan Hensel Gallery right now, is my favorite show of the year. It is dear to my heart. I love showing the world the bookish side of the arts. But it is the hardest show to pull together, taking hours upon hours of administrative time...lots of databasing, writing of publicity, emailing, photographing, painting of walls, catalog design and printing, arguments with shipping agencies and installation design. But, it is here, it is up ( more than 80 tiny books) and it is beautiful. So, NOW, I can reconsider the work of being an artist! I went to hear a talk by Betsy Dollar this morning at Susan St. John's Private Art in St. Paul. I showed her Wedding Party in my gallery last summer ( You can find it in the gallery archives) The show she was talking about today was a group of photo collages using her torso embedded in photos of the natural world, reminiscent of Ana Mendieta. Beautiful stuff that reminded me of work I have left to do. SOOOOOO....STAY TUNED!

A night in the Tropics

It was a night in the tropics at Gallery 406 last night. It may have been foggy and cool, but the parrots were hanging out and the ukuleles were playing.

Ragdale let-down

The drive home was rather lovely and uneventful. I went north to Shebygen to pick up my repaired electronic spinner (electric spinning wheel) and went across Wisconsin on WI29. Little traffic, much sun, wind polished fields, sculpted windbanks of snow, listening to Louise Erdrich read her book the Master Butcher's Club. But now gallery work overwhelms. I wish I could have stayed at Ragdale longer.

2 new drawings

After a bad night's sleep, 2 new drawings are well under way.

The Ophelia Project

I accomplished a lot today on the OPhelia Project. It is now a 2 person performance and Installation. It began the day looking like this. And ended the day as below. They are not done yet, but are getting close.

grounds at Ragdale

It was a beautiful day for a walk around the grounds. The first photo is Ragdale House where most of the writers are housed. The second is the new Meadow Studio, which has glorious light and difficult heat(now fixed we all hope). The red is the back of the Friends Studio which houses the composer in one side and, this time, a dancer/performance artist in the other. The rest are just phots on the walk around the prairie.

wall solution

It took some doing. I drove to Waukegan to find a JoAnn Fabric store. I needed iron on interfacing (and an iron) so the paper would not rip in this process and a cheap glue gun. Where JoAnn's was supposed to be was now an Off Track Betting Facility. Back to Ragdale. Back to the internet with my Rand McNally Atlas by my side. I drove to Vernon Hills, and could not find it in the maze of malls. This time I had brought the phone #. It was next to the Home Depot, deep into the maze. When it was time to glue this afternoon, I realized I had bought the wrong size glue sticks. So, back to the internet to find a local hardware store and make the call. Sucess. So, I think this is the solution. The question is, should I spend the rest of my time painting striped paper yardage? Or work on something else? There are still issues to solve that might best be solved at home.

The sentinels

It seems to methat there will be sentinels...but how they will appear will depend on the environment I secure. If the walls are dark...as in black..the dark suits would work. If the wall color cannot be changed, something white. Hmmm. I may not be able to decide yet. But the picture of the three options together pleases me, even if the beige one on the right looks like an old fishermen's oilcloth coat and the one in the middle got super pooped on by seagulls! And these are still too fabricy. The sentinels must be very clearly sculptural. It just seems to me that the sentinels must not compete. They either must be exactly like the triptychs or blend into the wall. Maybe I need to paint some paper, cut into suit pieces and assemble. Hmmm. I see sripes in my future tonight!

In Suit

Installation set-up

Today I did a test set-up of the installation. You can see the final state of the final triptych. It was a lot of painful crawling around on the floor to clip and tape the parts together. I hung the back to back triptychs from the ceiling. and ranged the suit coats around the room. I will be working on them next...see how it goes. I envision them as sentinels. I'm thinking they will need to blend into the wall pretty much. So, I will get out the modeling paste and give it a try. I was able to set up 2 rows of Triptych. In the end there will be a total of at least 5. I envision a video inset in one. None of the images seem right to me to hold the video screen, so I may have to do another set or a replacement set. The daisy-chain of the sleeves will likely not be in the final piece.