Painted Circles in a Square

Members of  Portland Art Collective share individual projects. Each person creates one piece with the materials and instructions given. Here's my circle in a square for Suzanne. On these icy/snowy home bound days, it was fun to get out the paints and play.

Merry Christmas

Happy Winter Solstice

Let there be light!

Ready to tie weather grams to tree outside my window to blow in the wind, deteriorate with time and send messages of hope into the air.

Inner Outer Landscapes

We created posters for our final project in Carol DuBosch's  calligraphy class for Fall term. I entitled mine Inner Outer Landscapes wanting to reconnect with nature and beauty as a way to deal with all of the chaos in our country and the world.

Below is an outline with color scheme for the 11x17 inch poster.

 

Then, I did tests for background colors and lettering colors of ink, sumi, gouache and pen white.

Here's the poster with the background painted-

The title refers to the landscapes of my heart and mind as I relate to nature and beauty and deal with the stress of change. I selected quotes and parts of poems from John Muir, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, Lynn Unger, Buddha, Kahlil Gibran, and Ilan Shamir.

Poetic Landscape Workshop with Laurie Doctor

 In October, I took a three-day workshop with Laurie Doctor in Basalt CO entitled Poetic Landscape.

The journal/sketchbook of ideas that we painted and lettered is a real treasure. It's fun to continue to work with the techniques we learned and explore new ways to incorporate them in my artwork. The binding weaves three signatures together.

We painted sheets of text wove and then tore them into thirds for the book folios.

Here's the Golden acrylic color palette that we used.

One of my landscapes influenced by the beautiful Basalt country.

Writing with a shell...

William Stafford's poem, The Way It Is, inspired these two pages.

 Here's a grid where I will continue to add the last two sections.

Bits and pieces to add here and there.

Working with Positive and Negative Space

Lively Lettering

A couple of weeks ago, I took a workshop with Julie Wildman. We played with lively letters- ways to add energy to lettering. We experimented with a variety of tools, media and ways to add color. It's all a quest for me to become more expressive in my lettering. The challenge is how to assimilate the lettering with my artwork.