I was delighted to receive an email yesterday that let me know my submission to their ‘Seasons’ online show was included. I love the online shows as I’m able to enter some of my larger pieces that would otherwise not be shippable to a distant gallery.
I was pleased to be accepted into the Grey Cube Gallery Skies show recently, with my refractured watercolor ‘Crimson Thread’. One of the things I’m enjoying about so many online shows is that it’s really practical for me to enter them! Enjoy the show!
The title of this painting is ‘And Never Leave…’ I’m glad to say that it has found its forever home with one of my favorite collectors!
Dawn off my back porch (there’s a new one every day but few look as good as this one). The poem written for this painting and painted into it is:
To step into a place and just belong
to stand within a sky and to believe
to raise your head, look up and to behold
and never leave, and never leave, and never leave.
I love seeing paintings in their ‘Foreverhome’ – brings closure to having sent your children out into the void, to see where they landed. One of my recent sales goes to a collector who now has a brood of five of my little ones, and he graced me with pictures of their new residence. His face really isn’t like that but as he ended up in one of the photos too, I gave him a little more anonymity!
Of course I’m going to create a painting involving meteorites when there’s a meteorite shower in the offing, and of course as a poet I’m going to romanticize it.
Here’s the second painting that was created for the Joshua Tree competition.
I have a tree painted on the back of my garage with leaves made from pieces of soda cans, stapled loosely so that they rustle delightfully in the breeze. Against the trunk is painted ‘The wind of change may not blow you someplace different but it might shape you into something more beautiful’.
I write this on the cusp between the Covid shutdowns and the George Floyd riots. Many businesses have been shuttered so long they may not survive. Some have been so impacted by the new health restrictions imposed on reopening, they have given up. Now we see others burned or looted out of existence and yet others may be unwilling to continue in some neighborhoods.
I have a friend who has been through several careers. She describes the changes as getting to a point where she needed to reinvent herself. This year it seems many will need to reinvent themselves or make adjustments to how they live or work.
One of the adjustments I’ve been considering is to make some work more easily shippable, so it is less prohibitive to sell online. I decided to experiment a little with refractured acrylics on canvas; lighter weight than panels, but also a different medium for the refractured part. The first experiment (above) was relatively successful.
Another couple items that came out of spending time at home was an update to ‘Busting the Bard’. This is now available in paperback and kindle from Amazon. And the fourth poetry and painting book ‘My Next Breath’ is close to being complete. (Click here for links.) It is available as a paperback but my proofreader and the person writing an intro on the back have yet to have time to do this, so there will be an update hopefully by the end of this week and I’ll create the kindle version then. I’ll order hard copies once art fairs restart or other outlets need restocking, but if you’d like to get a signed copy let me know.
I will have work in two online shows:
Jun 6-Jul 12: 6x6x2020 Online fundraiser for Rochester Contemporary Art Center
Jun 2nd-Aug 30th (approx) The Planet of Joy at Lark Gallery Online. This may develop into a physical gallery show next month and I should be on a Q&A Virtual Art Talk on Zoom soon. I’ll send another email when this is set.
