No 8 – Dec 11, 2017
It’s been kind of like a roller-coaster with all the shows this year. It was more the distances that we, my husband who always assists me, and I had to go, than the shows themselves.
I did 2 shows in San Diego and 1 in Ruidoso, New Mexico.
The last shows of the year were around here: the Moab Studio Tour, my “Red Rocks & Blue Birds” show at the Museum of Moab, and the MARC Holiday Arts & Crafts Fair in Moab. One of the 3 walls with my work at Museum of Moab
I enjoy them all, but the show at my studio, as part of the Moab Studio Tour,
is always one of the highlights. Not only do I not have to travel, I have it all here. I can show the visitors the mediums I works with, the sketches, portfolio and more art related things they happen to have questions about. Among the visitors are friends, neighbors, folks from Moab, visitors of the Moab Music Festival that starts that same weekend and tourists that happen to come upon one of our signs along the road and want to check it out.
I am always looking forward to meet the new people and hear about their travels.
Questions
The questions I get from visitors to my shows vary from “How long did it take you to make that?” to “How did you come up with this?”
The first question is a hard one to answer and every artist has had this question more than once. Artists I talked to share my thoughts about his. I don’t count the hours that go into one piece. Do I also count my research, the time to get inspired, to sketch, drying time of the paint………..
Sometimes a painting stands aside for a long time because I lost interest or did not know which way to go with it anymore.
Also, I work on more pieces at the same time (photo left). When one dries, I work on the other. Often 3 works are in the making. So it is hard to answer that question.
The “How did you come up with this?” is a question I love to answer. A young woman said to me after we talked about one of my paintings at a show in San Diego, that it made her love the painting even more. She said I should write about this and show it with each painting. Well, I am no writer and I can’t hang all my stories with my paintings without disrupting the display, but I love the idea. I will come up with something that works and does not clutter the display of paintings.
Latest Work
Not much to show yet. I did start two new paintings with flowers and hummingbirds.
Not decided what direction they will go yet. Often I do have a vision of some end result, but not always. The latter makes the process even more interesting.
To just paint a flower with a little bird is not my goal. We’ll see what happens.
Last but not least: Older Work
I still have my old sketch books, very old. From the time I was about 6 and later.
At art school we were encouraged to keep a sketch journal so I do have a pile of those as well. I still try to keep it going, but skip more and more time; too bad, because I enjoy going through the old ones. Good times, sad times, ideas for paintings or clothing to sew, it’s all there.
I will see if I can find some nice pages to scan and share with you later on.
One of my old paintings is a watercolor I made at the Burger’s Zoo in Arnhem.
We would go there in the evening with our art class to paint animals.
Here my fresh water turtle:
Well, this is enough for now.