Archives for posts with tag: affordable art

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Suddenly, the signs of spring I have been looking for. Yes, the snow is melting and the days are longer but more importantly, Im feeling the energy that flows when my email starts filling up with show invitations. Today I had my first meeting with the president of the Artists’ Cooperative Gallery of Westerly which I was recently juried into. Their next scheduled show is themed “Views from the Street” so my landscapes will work there.

Meanwhile my daughter, Shelley who is a talented photographer with a studio at a nearby converted velvet mill, has invited me to join her for a pop up show at her studio in two weeks. She has chosen some of my abstract botanials for that.

Finally, I plan to introduce a new series of abstract paintings featuring various sizes of metal washers (no plants) and want to produce enough pieces for a meaningful launch of the series at the spring shows.

That means multi-tasking. This week, these are three of five pieces that are in the middle of the process of soaking up their resin baths. By the time they are cured and ready to show, I hope to have many more of all three series waiting for their resin treatments as well. Somehow I’ll have to make time to produce more plants, but with a good foot or more of snow still on the ground, I’m guessing I have some leeway there.

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This little interpretation of a Florida salt marsh is 4th in line for its first coat of shiny resin. Temperatures in New England have been at record lows so I’m holding back on the finishing steps of my collage series until Mother Nature gets with the program. Resin likes a nice warm room in which to cure. Meanwhile I just got my first aookication for a spring show out in the mail so will keep plenty of work in the pipeline.

This piece measures just 4″ x 6″ Making small pieces is one way of keeping my work affordable but I’m always open to making a bigger version of any miniature.

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I just finished a small custom piece that included a “palm tree” made from simple ferns and sensitive ferns so took the opportunity to take inventory. Fresh out of Mexican Feathergrass but off to Florida in a few weeks where I will hunt and gather them. For ferns I may have to resort to an off-season visit to my favorite nursery. I see Japanese painted ferns in my future.

Meanwhile I received a shiny new photography tent which makes it possible for me to end my long battle with glare when photographing my resin peices. Hopefully this means I’ll be putting more of them into my Etsy shop.

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At the VIRTU Art Festival in Westerly, Rhode Island, last week, my little 4 x 4 landscape was the first to go so I felt emboldened to try my hand at an 8 x 8. The real botanicals in this piece are all in the immediate foreground. I used feathergrass against the white of the reflection in the water, added just the tip of a ginkgo leaf on the lower right, and a few individual sections of a Japanese maple leaf just for some added drama and color. As it turns out, feathergrass tends to lift a little on the first application of resin making it hard to reach a glass-like finish in less than three coats, so I had to wait a full 4 days to see the finished product. I think it was worth it though. Next in line for the resin bath is a farm scene in which I use only my ferns at the edges of a field.

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A few posts ago, I showed the same graphic in different colors. That version was cropped and used dill as a filler to drape over the edges of the base. This time, I centered the full image, changed the color scheme and fashioned some minimalist “flowers” out of Roses, Sweet Woodruff, and Ivy. I have yet a third one in the works in some colors that will jump out of the frame. Can’t wait to design the contents of the vase.

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I’m not sure why these little pairings remind me of daggers today. The last time I arranged ivy in this way, I called it a bow and used it to tie off a pretty double-tipped frond of ferns.