sunday reminiscing.....

so .... i taught an artsy class today .... 

but .... i did no art in my studio today ....

i had loads of time for art.... but kind of puttered around instead .... i was actually kind of being domestic ...not my usual state .... at all .... 

as i was doing extra tidying in my kitchen, i was dusting this corner: 

dog biscuits, plate of apples, bananas, empty huge mason jar that last had jelly beans in it .... and a platter ... that i made ..... i threw that on a pottery wheel....with white clay .... and then used groovy underglazes to make this folkarty scene .... of my family ..... i made it a LONG time ago ..... and i love it ..... it's maybe one of my favorite things i've ever made for myself .... making things for yourself is different than making something not for yourself ..... it's harder! ..... so...... i was dusting it .... and read the back .... i don't think i'd read the back in years:

OH! i said to myself ... i made this while i was pregnant with littlest.e.beck.artist.......more than 7 years ago ....i think i gave it to mr.e.beck.artist for christmas before the littlest one was born........ it has withstood the test of time so far ... i still love it .... it makes me miss the pottery wheel....... 

ok, artsy bloggy people..... show me something that you made a long time ago.... and tell me if you still love it! 

happy saturday!

hey!

i did art today!

not only that... but i did art with my entire family in the basement studio WITH me .... 

and i still did art ....

mr.e.beck.artist was working on the computer ...on our taxes...oh my!

sweet.boy.beck.artist was working on writing a school project .... and wanted to be by my side for my fine editing skills......

j.beck.artist was painting a journal for a school project

tiny.beck.artist was painting a fairy on a canvas .... and being obsessive compulsive about washing paint brushes ...no, honey, that's nine year old paint in those bristles, i'm sure it won't come out ... no, not even with alcohol ...... 

and i worked on my commission piece ...that is coming right along ....  

even the dog hung out with us .... and the basement is NOT that big .... it was a six of us all over each other kind of thing ... happy, happy, happy ...... busy, busy, busy.....

and that doesn't even include the parts of today that were rained out soccer games that weren't called soon enough,  me teaching a class this morning, lunch with lovely relatives, and me cooking a big ole dinner (pork tenderloin, sauteed parmesan zucchini, steamed asparagus, rice pilaf, strawberries....and j.beck.artist made choc.chip cookies for dessert.....oh, and have i mentioned lately that i'm not much of a cook ..... i was today!)

oh no! a picture free blog!

the tragedy of it ..... 

instead i'll give you the links of some blogs i've been digging lately.....

they aren't all artists and art blogs .... most are artsy .... some are just fun ...... 

try these: 

happy shack

mice and moonbeams

3rd eye muse

darla

heidi

i am bossy

jeannie

it is what it is

all norah's art

vallen

very mary

yogurt

hope you are having a happy weekend .....

42 and 43

i've just finished two more canvases ....

numbers forty two and forty three for the year .... 

i'm kind of in a happy rut .... exploring themes i've been doing in excess ...

....i have some other notions swimming around in my head ... and i'm working on a commission piece .... and i just painted vast amounts of orange papers today ..... so .... there's a large orange canvas in my immediate future, i suppose .... 

i adore orange ..... it's right up thee with green .... and turquoise .... ok.... and yellow .... 

what's your favorite color ... and is it a color you tend to use a lot in your art? in your life? 

let's nest.....

hooray for thursdays .... i had a morning of tennis and an afternoon of painting .... that's pretty close to a perfect day ..... now an afternoon with children, a bit more painting, studying for spelling, and (even as i type) i am getting my hair done my the youngest e.beck.artist ..... lots of squirting and brushing and pulling and poking and (did i say) pulling ..... i'm sure i look gorgeous .... basically, this very moment, i am nesting .... my three little birds are all within arms distance of me ..... have i started painting so many nests because i spend so much time nesting .... or am i more aware of the nesting i do because i've been painting so many nests...... that might be a chicken or the egg question ..... and maybe i should be painting coops ..... 

hope your nest is happy too ..... 

p.s. my two older birds are in the chorus in a play tonight ..... 

p.p.s. you can read more about this  wee nest painting on my flickr site ......

the blues ..... and then not the blues .....

i had a mildly hard day today .... i ended up in a sad, crabby mood ....i let other people's crabbiness really get me down ..... now that doesn't happen too often .....and with a little perspective, even the things making us crabby are such small potatoes in the grand scheme of life .....  so i just puttered around ... stewing .... and well, puttering .... and i got to the pile of mail that stacked up while i was away ... it was sizeable .... and i was procrastinating going through it ..... and TA DUM .... i got a present .... really, a prize ... from very mary ..... all kinds of papery goodness to put in my collages .... look: a very mary design's mary sent me this groovy package .... i won a contest on her fun blog ..... so that's one way to perk up : good mail! .... rah for that ..... 

so i took it down to the art room ... and once there, did some productive puttering .... i'll certainly have something to show you soon ..... 

and then .... after all that puttering my way out of my bad mood? 

i got fab news .... kool krysti at lola's gallery sent me a draft of the invitation for my first solo show..... ooooooohhhhhhhhhhh...... aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh..... and we went back and forth and changed up this and that .... and ta dum .... the blues be gone ... bad mood vanquished ..... sweetness and light and sunshine ..... and things are good .... and the hard things are easier to put in perspective, huh? 

here's my invitation ....i'm not sure if it is the last draft or not .... but it might be ..... 

..... groovy cool, huh? 

big yellow art day...with some raw umber

i finally unpacked my mess in my studio ... away at an art workshop all last week, home since friday, but didn't get to it til today .... it was well organized in the bags and boxes and bins ....so not too hard to put away ..... wish i could say the same about the suitcase that appears to have thrown up on my closet floor ..... and remains there still ..... soon..... i'll do that soon .... maybe .....

once i got my studio back in some semblence of order, i worked on a 30 inch square commission .... 30 inches is a pretty big canvas! i papered it.....

i did a transparent glaze on it .... three different colors of yellow and a bit of raw umber to tone it down ...... 

i stamped it ..... using a green with white to gray it ....and a titch of turquoise to brighten  it...

i also worked on these five canvases .... the larger, 12 by 12 one, was mostly done ...but i used some raw umber on it to tone down some of the brightness..... and the other four are six by six, papered, then raw umbered as well ..... no ideas on what these will be .... i'll just keep adding background texture, depth and color til i have a notion of what they are to become.....

that picture above is a little glimmer of my studio self .... i work on a six foot square table .... piles of paints and mediums in the middle in clementine crates .....there's my diet coke..... arguably my biggest vice ... i ADORE diet coke ... really, i know i like it too much ... and periodically cut back ... but bad habits die hard! ..... you can see my nasty brayer on a red tool box.... that tool box was littleboy.e.beck.artist's when he was tiny .... he carried around his long gone plastic hammer and such ..... cool, happy memory tool box, so i kept it .... i LOVE containers .... more little spots to stuff things .... like that little elecrasol tin .....i bought it solely because of the jetson character .... couldn't wait til the detergent was gone ....in fact, months ago, i shuffled through the shelf at the store to get one of everyone, george, jane, judy, elroy ...... they are way groovy tins that now hold my this and thats .....

so that's my day....my canvases... my junk .... my diet soda ..... what did you do today? 

and what are you going to do tomorrow? i have a nagging suitcase in my closet .... don't know if i'll get to it! .... i have tennis ... can't wait for that .... and some more work on this big ole canvas i'm working on ..... i have a notion to stain some papers for it ..... we'll see if that's still my notion tomorrow .... 

39 and 40 for the year

these are the last two paintings that i did last week .... the class was an abstract collage class .... so, the last eight, all done in the class, weren't abstract .... i have trouble with abstract, actually.... so i always put a bit of representational in ...but with these two, i made thick, thick, thick gesso backgrounds and pressed my large alphabet stamp into them ..... so there is VERY thick lettering...raised ....rough..... highly textured .....

so once i got the thick luscious backs, i used a variety of golden's fluid acrylics to play in and out of the texture .... i painted and buffed and painted and roughed and painted some more .... and this is what i got ....with all that lettering they have a resemblance, a thematic thread comparable to my usual art style .... but are more abstract ...though no where near as traditionally abstract as most of the artists in my class......

 i think they are lovely ... but they aren't very "me" ..... whaddaya think? me or no? 

and if you were me and you made something not "me" meaning not "you" would you, being me, put it in your gallery show that's happening in about a month? 

and if you understand that question? you could be me...... how weird is that? 

35,36,37,38,39,40.... and some nice news ....

ah..... joy .... it just feels so nice to have joy ... and i have boatloads of it at the moment ..... so....you gotta love it while you have it to get you through when you don't have it so much ...... so right now .... i'm just flat out happy ..... for all sorts of reasons ......i'm not sure how to tell you all my stuff in a coherent, organized, nice flow kind of way .... so i'm just gonna spit it out ..... ok? 

10

that's the answer to yesterday's question ..... how many canvases did i make last week at art camp? ten ... TEN .... i could shout it from the roof top .... i felt so accomplished ..... i worked hard .... i learned a lot .... they are all over in flickr .... the last ten in my 100 set .... that 100 set is my new year's resolution in action ..... the 100 canvases i'm doing this year are all going there .... and i'm up to 40 .... and i'm only days into the fourth month!! i'm way ahead of schedule, huh? 

so the four on this blog are a pear series .... all done from a cool set of dyed and stained papers i made at the workshop ..... 12 inches square ...i've been doing a lot of these small canvases this year .... it's weird, that's what i've been comfortable with lately ..... especially peculiar since i used to only want to do huge canvases ...... tomorrow? a big canvas ... but..... not by choice, actually .... working on a commissioned piece .... rah for commissions!

so on to the joy bits ..... 

while i was away i got an email from the lovely patti, at this blog ..... she has a book coming out ... life is a verb ..... and a piece of my art is in it ..... as an illustration for one of her essays ... how groovy cool is that, huh?  if you go look at the piece that is going in the book, why don't you read what i wrote about it.... i just read it and really liked it .... it is funny to read something i know i wrote... but to not really remember writing it ..... i'm glad i wrote down some of those feelings cause it is nice to be able to read them since i don't actually recall them ..... maybe that's like the whole joy thing ... when you aren't having and feeling joy, it is hard to remember when you were and what it was like ..... it's a seize the day ...or seize the joy kind of thing, i suppose .....

and the last bit of my joy to write about (i have loads of other joys, but i'm mostly just giving you the art ones for now) is that my pal al sent me an email .... it said, check out this gallery ...you'd be a good fit there .... and whadaya know ... i emailed and now the gallery owner has said, yes, she's interested in carrying my art ..... rah for that!  ..... and serendipitously, i was just talking to some people last week at art camp, talking about how i'm working really hard at this "being an artist" job ....but that it's really easy to get bogged down by things that aren't art ... like marketing and sales and what shows to do and finding appropriate galleries ..... and that i REALLY needed to try harder to find a few more galleries for the art i'm making so that i won't have to do many fairs, since they are a little bit hard on my family (being away on the weekend) ..... so .... while i was having that conversation , allison was doing my hard work for me..... double rah for that .... 

so there's my art joy....

a quick synopsis....

10 canvases completed at kanuga

1 piece of art in a book

1 gallery that looks like it might carry my work ......

so what's your joy? 

31,32,33,34.....

hi honeys .... did anyone out there in blogland miss me whilst i was away? 
i was away at kanuga at an art workshop .... left sunday .... met up with my mom and her best pal, taylor ..... and WOW did i have a fabulous time .....it was non stop art and joy and fun ...... i feel like i was always painting ....or washing paint off my messy self ..... 

this nest series happened after two days of learning different texturing techniques, staining, stamping, printing ..... and generally ideas about making groovy, cool papers ...... we also had a color family lesson that was great for me ..... so all the papers we made were in a color family and went together perfectly ....nice how that worked out! 

the class was an abstract collage class .... and i'm not much of an abstract girl ... so while the rest of the class was doing similar work to mine, theirs turned out as abstract ....i'm the only one who put nests on mine ... and most people didn't have anything representational at all ...... so even though the class i took wasn't quite me, i learned a ton ..... and kind of got refreshed on some things that i knew how to do but hadn't done much of lately ..... PLUS, i got to sit at the table right next to my mom ..... it was perfect ..... 

well.... it wasn't all perfect ... the weather was cold and wet .... not good for drying the 9 kabillion papers and canvases we had painted and spread about ..... 

and guess what? these four paintings? weren't the only ones i finished .... i'll show you the rest next blog...any guesses how many if did? 

happy weekend! 

no more missing me....i'm back in blogland for a good long time .... 

turquoise dog noses and fond fare-thee-wells ....

i am so fortunate! i rarely get to paint on a saturday .... but the smallest e.beck.artist went to a birthday party instead of a soccer game ..... so i was freed up .... then mr.e.beck.artist took the twins out for the morning ..... leaving me home alone ..... well ...with the dog, who dutifully followed me around and nuzzled this turquoise paint:

so, i finished this painting .... it is similar to others i have done ... but all those other tall, thin, turqoisey heart string paintings have sold .... so it seems sensible to make another .... particularly considering i have a show in may .... and in fact, i've done this one for the gallery owner, kristy, to consider for the postcard invitation .... i mostly do squares ... but wanted her to have a non-square alternative ..... it is on flickr .... with a titch of a story that you might like to read .... 

then, you also must know, that i am a blog hopper .... surfing the net, artsy blog to artsy blog .... i was surfing by very mary design and left a comment on a contest .... best comment wins! and i won .... teeheeeee .... so she will be sending me groovy this and thats to include in my art ... you know i'm all into that...... so, go visit very mary ...... 

and last, and maybe least, i'm off .... again .... this time i can tell you before my long blog absence! ..... because i am not leaving an empty home for you to come and burgle ...... (burglars burgle, right? ) .... anyhoo .... i am leaving mr.e.beck.artist at home to tend the three e.beck.artist progeny and dixie the wonder dog ....... where am i going? oh, you remember from when i wrote about it here? perfect ... i won't repeat myself ... i leave tomorrow, sunday ... and return friday, early ...... so expect a post friday, since i'll be arting away all week long in the lovely mountains ..... what could be cooler than art camp ... um ... i mean professional development classes ..... 

tata and tra la la ..... 

miss me! 

happy wednesday ....

whew.... it's been a busy day and i'm still running .... so a short blog today ... only because yesterday i PROMISED art today ..... and if any of you are keeping track, i'd hate to not keep a promise ..... 

today i did everything on my list of things to do .... all sorts of little this and that chores ... and i had a great tennis practice.....and  finished two paintings ..... and so's soccer practice ....and, any minute now, book club .....

in the meanwhile, my art......

as you can see i'm still on my nest kick ..... 

and this piece is for my deadline painting group for flickr ... i wrote a ton about it for flickr .. read about it here ......it's called "figure eight: pear love" ..... 

and here's how my family room is looking after a week of doing all these twelve by twelve canvases .... 

i have one more to do ... but, i've left it for last because it seems hard!! why did i make the background so hard to work with? hmmmmmm ...

it is full on spring here .... it was cold when i woke up but i wore shorts all day ...... hope it is beautiful where you are ... tell me something fabulous you did today ....

just this and that ......

yippee zippy hooray ....

do you remember my happy 100 blog post? of course you do .... 

and i couldn't remember where i got the idea from? well....i re-found it ... i found the clever blogger that had a fun and fab list .... read soul glo's happy list here ......

and just a titch of an update .... i had more tennis than art today ..... but i've finished this piece with its personalization ..... to be picked up by the happy customer tomorrow ....  

i've been to binder's , the brick and mortar version, and bought a dozen small six by six canvases ..... so expect a dozen small ones soon! 

i am going to this place .....and i am going there for this groovy toovy conference ...... and here's the actual class that i am taking .... the best part is that i am going with my mom ..... raise your hand if your mom has an art website? yup.... i've got the coolest mom ..... 

that art workshop is next week ... my children will be in the capable hands of mr.e.beck.artist whilst i'm away ..... so i need to stop arting long enough to pack up my very long supply list of things ......but, that's not til next week that i am away ..... so, tomorrow, i'll now promise you art .... the accountability of declaring it really does work for me!! besides, i'm at 27 canvases for the year .... so i still need to do three more this month..... whew ... better get going ..... 

well... who'm i kidding? i 'm going to go watch american idol with all the little.e.beck.artists..... but tomorrow, i'll definitely make a painting for you to look at .... what would you like it to be?