Missouri Art Now

 This year, 2021, is Missouri's bicentennial.  As a native of Kansas, I learned next to nothing about the Show Me State growing up, and I continued that ignorance for the fourteen years I've lived here. (Sorry!) However, I do know that we have a plethora of talented artists and the Missouri Art Now exhibit is showcasing a few of us.  My work from 2019, "How Soft the Hazy Summer Night" was selected as one of sixty pieces to celebrate the bicentenary in a traveling exhibition from March to November.  

How Soft the Hazy Summer Night
36" diameter
aluminum, vinyl, acrylic

From the call for art:

On the occasion of its bicentennial, it is important to recognize that Missouri has and remains a significant site for visual artistic production. The Arts Council of Southeast Missouri in Cape Girardeau, Hannibal Arts Council, Post Art Library and Spiva Center for the Arts in Joplin, and the Albrecht-Kemper Museum in Saint Joseph are collaborating to create Missouri Art Now, an exhibition featuring sixty works from artists throughout the State of Missouri, together demonstrating the vibrant visual arts culture in the state.

You can see it hanging at the opening March 5th in Cape Girardeau.
photo credit: @Missouri2021 on Instagram

And now some detail shots...

I slathered on the paint really thick and scraped an old mop brush through it before drying, adding texture.  Then I sanded and did it again with a different color.

   

After all that was done I went to town with the vinyl orzos.

 

The title comes from the fourth stanza in a poem by Ellen P. Allerton called "On The Farm,"

How soft the hazy summer night!
On dewy grass the moon's pale light
Rests dreamily. It falls in town
On smoky roofs and pavements brown.
How tenderly when night is gone,
Breaks o'er the fields the summer dawn!
How sweet and pure the scented morn.
(Get up! Old Molly's in the corn!)

And, as it is a traveling show, here's where it can be found throughout the year:

March 5-27, 2021

Arts Council of Southeast Missouri in Cape Girardeau

April 9-May 15, 2021

The State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia 

May 29-July 17, 2021

Post Art Library and Spiva Center for the Arts in Joplin

July 23-September 6, 2021

Hannibal Arts Council in Hannibal 

September 17-November 7, 2021

Albrecht-Kemper Museum in Saint Joseph

More info at www.missouri2021.org 

Orzos on Metal

Early in the year I was still making Orzo pieces and working on backgrounds for future orzo-ing.

I cannibalized a less-than-satisfactory piece to make a new thing.
I picked off most of the first draft of the re-do anyway.

I decided to stick with one color of vinyl for this one after a few starts with more.

Atmospheric Splendor
vinyl on painted aluminum
30 inch diameter

I globbed on many layers and colors, scraping, sanding, and watering down as I went, and using whatever I had on the brush from one piece to start work on the next.  This is how you can tell they're related.  We had a few nice enough days in February for me to spread out in the backyard and fling color safely.

The lineup.

Finished backgrounds...

36" diameter

24 x 24" cannibalized

Remember how I cannibalize my pieces?  This is one.

36" diameter

Super thick paint, sanded and watered down, and done again a few times...nice and dimensional.

After prepping several surfaces, I didn't do anything with them...or I haven't so far.  It's not abandonment, it's waiting for the right time.  For this artist, that could be years from now.  If you've seen my collection of things (not a hoard), you can understand how I can work like this.

It's 2021 I guess

 So, okay, I basically skipped 2020.  As I'm sure most of us can say, having a lot of time in a new way does not always give us the motivation to do all those things you've always wanted to do.  So, I'm going to share what happened in my creative life over the last year here in the new year.

Mostly I rediscovered drawing, took six months off ceramics, biked, and looked at flowers.  I also ate a lot of ice cream and frozen custard.  Oh, and I opened an online ceramics (for now) store in December.

We're all playing catch up and looking back at a weird time...and looking forward to a new, better normal.

I had a few pieces in a show at Inter Urban Art House.

Worked on some orzo pieces early in the year.

Started incising and adding flowers to ceramics.

Grew many flowers, like this cosmo, in my yard.

Collected flowers on my bike

Arranged Bathroom Flowers TM

Drew flowers on ceramics.

Drew some very big flowers on paper.

I'm going to try to have a new post up every Tuesday, because that's when the internet said people are most likely to read and share...Looks like I have myself a New Year's Resolution. 

Back on the Wagon

It's been A WHILE since I've put paint or vinyl to aluminum.  There are a few reasons for this, but this post is about DOING not NOT DOING.

I took my least favorite small piece and decided to cannibalize it...it just never brought me joy.

Meh. I tried.
24 inch diameter

I put some paint on it.  Then more paint and dragged through the paint while wet to make a texture.

Yum.

Then I put more paint on!  And the magic happened when the sandpaper met the surface, revealing the ridges...

Magic.
I like that you can see some of the old piece in a ghosty shadow.  It is the foundation of this work, after all.

Time to add orzos.  It took some work to figure out exactly how it needed to terminate.  I added and subtracted several times.

Subtle changes, but it took some walk-aways to think it over.

I think it's finished.  Feels great to have a new piece I like.  In 2020 I'll have a show at the Johnson County (Kansas) library, so I'm going to polish some old pieces.  But, honestly, I don't actually NEED to make more work, because I OVERFLOWITH.

24 inch diameter, as yet unnamed 

I'm looking forward to choosing a title, going through my on-going notes of phrases and poetic bits I find here and there to make a perfect match.

More of the day to day on my Instagram!

Art Shows, or lack thereof

I have participated in only a few art festivals over the last year, and that's by design.  After a third year at Art Westport (but with the Orzo work this year) and finally slaying the dragon that is the Plaza Art Fair, I traveled the farthest ever, to Artclectic, in Nashville.

It rained during set up at Westport.  A real joy.

I spent much of the day like this.  Also, I threw my back out setting up!

Plaza, two weeks later.  Much better weather, although my neighbor from
New Orleans was freezing when it dropped to 65 that night.  I gave her hand warmers.
I was in a sleeveless dress.

Behind the wall.

Artclectic Nashville--INSIDE!!  Very nice.

No tent set up and they fed us A LOT.

Doing shows is exhausting and I am not willing to do enough, or travel enough, to make it economically feasible or sustainable.  I'm really proud of this body of work, but hauling it in and out of my shed, truck, and tent beats it up and beats me up, too.  I couldn't bend down for almost two weeks after set up at Westport.  And I was gone for almost a week traveling to and from Nashville in October (although I'm glad I got to explore the city and the National Quilt Museum on the way there).  I learn every time I take my work on the road, both about the logistics of moving it around and the work itself.

In 2019, I haven't had any tent shows or art fairs, and I don't have any scheduled.  I only applied to one: The Plaza.  And, like the 9/10 times before when I applied, I got rejected outright (I got in off the waitlist last year).  I'll explain more about that process later since many non-exhibitors do not understand the ins and outs of that...

Cannibalized

It sometimes takes a few tries to get a piece right.  And sometimes you have to just start over.

With this one, I started over. 

Six inches tall, 30 inches wide...it actually started out as a clock many years ago.  Then I peeled and sanded the surface design off as best I could, but it still left of a ghost behind (below).  When I was first working on my Orzo series I was using old products to sketch on.  I liked the turquoise and white, but some of the white got marred up, so I added inside pieces.  Then I got sick of looking at it and kind of bored with the plain design, so I finally decided to rip it off and start again.

Peely.

Some of the vinyl left sticky shadows behind.

I saved some of the orzos I ripped off, but they were kind of mangled.

Here's the ghost from the very first life of this piece.

I painted over the turquoise with purple, neon pink, and white, and then sanded.

Painted and sanded again.  You can see the dark scar left by a piece of vinyl from
an earlier version.  

Tiny vinyl time!  I hand-cut most of these for some reason.
Guess I wanted my hand to go numb (it did!).

With the different directions of the paint strokes it kind of looks like weaving.

Finished piece.
Untitled so far...

This really looks great if you bury your nose in it, seeing all the little brush strokes, stamps, scars, and splotches.  I'm going to look in my Sunflowers poetry book for something to strike my fancy for the title.  It feels like a weird Atomic age landscape right now.  Maybe I'll mine some Ray Bradbury, too.

In That Upper Air

I was asked to make a piece reminiscent of "Crooning Cottonwoods" with some layers added in.  I tackled a 48 x 36 inch aluminum blank with that in mind.

Layer of orzos.

Painted over the vinyl.

Peeled.

Sanded, repainted.

 After a hardy amount of sanding I dug right in with some branchy orzo designs.

Getting close.

I'm glad I kept and enhanced that little island of aluminum
near the bottom.

In That Upper Air, 48 x 36 inches, 2018

The title comes from a poem called "The Thrush" by Amanda T. Jones, who, it turns out, is quite the interesting character.

(from the second stanza)
   "Soon was I made aware
Of his small mate that from the Judas-tree
   Dropped softly, flitting here and flitting there,
And would not seem to hear or seem to see.
   He, in that upper air,
All mindful of her wayward wandering,
   (Primrose and creamy-petaled larkspur bending
And yellow blossomed nettle, prone to sting!)"