Cloud Appreciating Society

As some clouds are turning from gray to pink to orange over the Salton Sea, I thought I would pass along this recent Cloud Appreciation Society newsletter.

 

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Indio Chalk Festival, Day 4 – the results

It didn’t rain at my house overnight on Saturday. However when I got to Indio, I found that there had been two hours of steady good rain there. Ugh. The city people had gotten there a little earlier and removed all the tarps to let the paintings dry. They needed to be dry before we could start on repair work, so we had a little time to commiserate between each other before we could start. Rafael’s painting – Lincoln, and Bijan’s painting (we think we read each others’ minds when we came up with such similar design ideas) had the most damage.

Some damage to the right hand corners and both hands that required a little rework. The throat dried out fine. The wash marks on the ocean wrist I just incorporated.

There were still puddles around 9:30am

Lincoln needed a nose job.

Bijan’s tarp leaked, causing a lot of damage on the neck and into the clouds.

Repair work done, just in time for the judging. Except that about 2 minutes before Kathy came by, a woman let her 3 year old run through the painting. Then yelled at me for chiding him!

The last competitor finished later in the day.

Amateur entries continued throughout the day, to the extent that there was so much judging for Kathy Dunham to do that the awards ceremony was about 40 minutes late. Here were the results in the professional category. The prizes were $2,500, $1,500 and $1,000.

1. Bijan Masoumpaneh
2. Rafael Valencia
3. Jeni Bate

The artist as part of the environment. 8’x8′, chalk on blacktop. (Photoshopped to be vertical, though you can possibly now see some of the foot damage.)

 

Indio Chalk Festival, Day 2.

I’ll just post the pics to show the progress.  It’s hard to type, my fingers are so sore and rough!

About 11am 350 fellow chalkers arrived from local schools. These are just a few of them.

One of the city photographers was kind enough to take a pic of me working on my phone.

The trees/fingers and veins/rivers are now complete.

Underpainting for the ocean.

Ocean/hand complete with waves rushing to shore/shoulder. I used one crack in the blacktop as the area behind a wave in order to minimize the impact. Couldn’t think of how to do anything with the others.

I started adding the hair/sky/space at the bottom, but then clouds came and I decided to take advantage and work on the top of the painting, as I can’t shade that part with the canopy.

Yellow on top, black/blue under and sore underneath that.

An inspector came by.

I decided to end the day by blocking in the transitions of the sunrise part of the hair as a guide for tomorrow.

More texture

One of my students who enjoyed my watercolor collage workshop also mentioned that she has a Sizzix machine.  This is a hand-run press with embossing templates.  Immediately we both saw the possibility of adding this texture to my refractured watercolor work.  Last week I created a new painting for a refracture:

… and yesterday when she was at sm’Art studio for a follow-on lesson to my Absolute Beginner’s class. she loaned it to me again to emboss the pieces I had cut.  This is what they look like so far!

The two on the left are our original test to see if the watercolor paper would emboss nicely.  The rest are the refractured watercolor.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this works out when I assemble them.  Watch this space!

Poetry about my paintings.

Although I write poetry for my own paintings and have written poetry for the artwork of others, I had a first last month when one of the attendees at the reception at my joint show in the Glass Outhouse Gallery wrote a poem for one of my paintings.  George Howell wrote the following poem for my painting ‘Dark Mist Arising‘:

Smoke Tree

For Jeni Bate

Our eyes align

Along the horizon,

Prisoners of our feet,

Firmly anchored to the earth.

 

And the sky is a sigh

Of promise and release,

The free range of cloud

And soul.

 

You cut the skyscape

Into a stack of cards,

And rearranged the clouds

“Dark Mist Arising”. Mixed Media on panel 48×24″.

Street level

Although I love watching the clouds, sometimes the structures that the atmosphere comes up with are just too astonishing for anything.  I just love the cloud streets shown in this Cloud Appreciation Society newsletter.

Monthly newsletter for February

Here’s what’s happened and happening at Skyscapes in February.