Illustration Friday

This is an image from earlier this year - With Sturdy Shoes: Tippy-Toe Prayer - it's my contribution to Illustration Friday's latest theme: Smoke

My Home and Native Land

I collected this piece and other Memory & Narrative works from Place des Arts today as the month-long show is now over - it's the first day in several months that I have every piece of my artwork home again and egads! I don't know where I'm going to store it all. Here's a photo of the cover of My Home and Native Land and the table top papier mached using the paper cut from the pages of the book.

Taking a break from painting

This is the time of year when I take a break from from my regular art practice and focus on making beaded jewellery - I find working with these beautiful globules of colour, arranging and rearranging them into pleasing patterns is a form of meditation for me. This year I've enjoyed collecting beads on my European travels and my daughter in Thailand has sent some lovely beads my way as well. After a couple of months of beading I feel refreshed and ready to start painting again with renewed vigour, and the beads lie dormant for the next 10 months or so, with their lovely colours sparkling and winking at me from a corner in my studio.

Open Studio on Friday

I've cleaned up my studio and it is now presentable for visitors. I'm featuring works from three series: Community; With Sturdy Shoes; and Vessel. I've hung paintings on every available surface, positioned a few sculptures here and there, and have a table laid out with beaded jewellery works. Hope to see you Friday!

Memory & Narrative

This is a detail from "My Home and Native Land", the altered book component of my contribution to this exhibition with Leap Visual Artist Collective. I carved through 2500 pages of Canada's history and Canadian definitions in The Canadian Encyclopedia to create and define my "home" as truly Canadian.

The show has been hung and is ready to be viewed during the month of October in the Atrium Gallery at Place des Arts, 1120 Brunette Avenue, Coquitlam, BC. The opening reception is Thursday, October 5th, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m.

I have been involved with this collective of talented thought provoking artists for 7 years or so and am very excited to be once again participating in one of our yearly theme-related shows.

Woman Before A Mirror, mixed media on 3 canvases, 66" x 54"

These panels are one component of the Woman Before A Mirror work. "Slip", explained below earlier in the month, is the second component.

www.placedesarts.ca

It's been a busy 10 hour/day paintfest every day this week...

This is a detail shot of the harlequin pattern.








I took a break from the studio this afternoon to hang the With Sturdy Shoes show at Gallery North in Delta.

Thank goodness I'm not serving dinner tonight or tomorrow

because there's no way I'm moving these canvases until I finish adhering text clipped from magazines to every pale diamond. I've been cutting up magazines over the past several years and filing away letters and words for future undertakings - this work has seriously diminished my collection of adjectives. If you have any old magazines - I can put them to good use (eventually).

Layer 2 completed

Today I finished the second layer of paint in nearly all areas and now I'm working on the third layer (white). I painted for 12 hours yesterday and today I'm feeling it in my arm and shoulder, but I'm on a roll and don't want to stop!






Here's a detail photo - the numbers in the "white" diamonds acknowledge the 28-day cycle that is one of the patterns that inform a woman's life.

The underpainting is finished

I finished the underpainting and worked on the second layer yesterday, adding black and white numbers cut from magazines.

The underpainting

Last night I continued to work on the underpainting for the 3-way-mirror-like canvas for Girl Before A Mirror. It's been my experience that the uglier the underpainting the better the finished painting: as you can see, this one's shaping up to be a real beauty.

It's begun

Those big canvases are filling up quickly with images larger than life ...

On the art of recycling ...

I am a staunch supporter of recycling and have created many works of art incorporating recycled elements. I have even recycled my own recycled-object-filled artworks and here I am doing it once again.

The work on the far right of the photo is made from a dressmaker's mannequin wearing a paper dress that has been adorned with tiny objects. The piece is entitled 'Slip' and is a self portrait I created a few years ago for a collaborative work created with Leap Visual Artists called 'Circle of Journeys'. The paper I used to create the dress came from my calendar, journal, artist statements, contracts, letters, prescriptions, newspapers, recipe and greeting cards, paintings, sketches, children's homework assignments, etc. and also from photographs of my family, historical images from magazines, books, and postcards, and a few pieces were made from articles of clothing belonging to myself, my children, and my grandmother. The papers and fabrics were cut into diamond shapes and stitched together in a harlequin pattern. The machine stitching was then enhanced with hand stitched embroidery, and where each corner of the diamond shapes meet, I used needle and thread to attach a tiny object from the drawers, floors, cupboards, pickle jars, beautiful but cracked teacups, and other storage areas of my home/life.

I used the harlequin pattern to symbolize myself as the clown in my life story; the patchwork and stitching to symbolize my traditional role as a homemaker/mother/salvager; the embroidery symbolizes my traditional role of the family member responsible for "making nice" and for attempts to improve or "pretty up" the banality of routine household life; the flotsam at intersecting points represents the infinite number of tiny but important decisions mothers make on a daily basis with regards to "do I keep this, toss it, store it for future use/reference or for sentimental reasons, for just in case or just because?"

Needless to say, Slip was created by means of a laborious process and was truly a labour of love/insanity, and as it says a lot about who I am and where I've come from, I am only too delighted to be recycling for forthcoming artistic efforts.

Slip will reappear as an element in a new work I'm creating - 'Girl Before a Mirror' (title and concept borrowed from Picasso). This work will be exhibited in October at Place des Artes in Coquitlam in Leap Visual Artists Collective's Memory & Narrative exhibition, and again in February at the Firehall Centre for the Arts as part of my solo exhibition 'After Picasso'.

I've just finished stretching and priming the three tall panels in the photo - they will be hinged to represent a 3 way mirror and I'm rubbing my hands together with the excitement and challenge of painting upon them a distorted reverse image of Slip.



I'll keep you posted as to the progress I make over the next 3 weeks.

An evolving work of art...

I have been grandly rewarded for my past month of intensive TLC in the garden. The incredibly talented Mother Nature and I (of much lesser talent) have been collaborating on the evolving work of art that is my garden. Yesterday my heart sang when I saw these tiny exquisite blooms in all their delicate finery and amazing detail and the original meaning of that now sadly diminished word rang true - AWESOME!

Preparing my altered book for the upcoming Memory & Narrative show with Leap Visual Artists Collective

Here I've made it to page 998 of 2500 of the book I'm altering for a show in October (my hand hurts!). There are 9 artists in the group: me, Roxsanne, Frances, Liz, Anne, Laurel, Jeannine, Marcia, and Andrea (our newest member - wooo-hooo Andrea!) Most of us have been exhibiting work together for several years. We usually embark upon one major project a year where we agree upon a theme and each create a few works for it or together create a gallery installation. It's an exciting group to work with as we're all game for a challenge - and challenge ourselves we do! - and we each bring something fresh to the collective with our varying backgrounds, interests, mediums, and art practices.

For Memory & Narrative, each artist is altering an existing book to make it her own and is also creating two to three other works. The show will run for the entire month of October at Place des Artes in Coquitlam.

A sign ...

I received a sign from the powers that be to inform me I've been absent from my studio for far too long - it was a spider web stretched across my easel! In the meantime my garden is looking lovely, however, clearly it is time for me to get back to work in the studio.

Detail Photos - With Sturdy Shoes: Hope

The figure's tresses form robins (new beginnings, experience, wisdom,) - 7 to the left (the past) and 7 to the right (the future); in her arms she cradles 7 houses (her community) while a fence holds an unsettled world at bay.


Upon the figure's apron a bluebird offers a berry (sustenance, advice) from its nest of 21 leaves (the days of the female cycle ripe with the possibilities of new life/beginnings).

New Sturdy Shoes work for my September show

Click on the link to Beadworks by Barbara (below on the right) to see my latest beadwork creations

Ta-Da!

I finished it at 7:00 p.m. tonight. The lower leaves will be completed one at a time as donors to Semiahmoo Family Place have their names and logos added to them.