Plaster Possibilities

Plaster is not simply for fixing or applying a faux finish to walls. It can be used, to wonderful effect, in your art. The history of plaster is quite fascinating, and lest you think that using plaster is not really fine art, the likes of Verrocchio (Italian, 1435-1488), Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917), and George Segal (American, 1924-2000) are “especially known for their use of plaster.”

I love crows, and Leighanna Light really caught my attention with these plaster crow pieces. Leighanna calls herself a Thingmaker, a title that it is so simple and totally inclusive. With it, she gives herself permission to make a thing out of anything and in any way she pleases.

Then I popped over to contemplating the moon, where Bridgette Guerzon Mills displays a sweet spot for crows as well. The plaster comes into play, along with encaustic,  in her book of trees. More of her work, including handmade journals, satisfies the eye at amanobooks.

Donna J Hall includes plaster in many of her paintings. She describes her art process as follows:

I’ll often start my paintings with a complex surface of marks and collaged materials. Then layering with paint, underlying colour and patterns are buried. Scraping away the surface re-exposes them. The painting becomes a history of confused and compressed time written in space. I continue, trying to balance randomness and chance against the compelling need to organize and resolve. Works evolve that are both elusive, yet suggestive, of the connection between our environment and our human nature.

Gallery I and II include such visually compelling works as Quiet Spring, Supporting Evidence, The Near Far Far, and Intermission. All of these pieces are “acrylic plaster collages.”

Lori Austill discovered that:

painting on plaster was a marvelous medium to combine my excitement for color and texture, with similar qualities to clay. These plaster works are made of poured plaster that is reinforced with burlap and backed with foam core. I create the texture as the plaster dries. The plaster is dried completely before they are painted with acrylic paint. Painting on plaster has given me limitless opportunities for the last twenty-two years.

Judy Wise says she has been “experimenting with plaster for some time now and every time I meet another artist who is also interested in this versatile material my eyes light up.” She is teaching a mixed-media painting on plaster workshop in July of 2009.

I am becoming excited about plaster possibilities, and it crossed my mind that Golden, being the paint company it is, must have an acrylic product related to plaster. Sure enough! Golden carries an acrylic modifier for plaster:

Acrylic Modifier for Plaster is a 100% acrylic polymer emulsion designed to be added to gypsum (plaster) in the mixing stage to increase the chip-resistance of the casting. This increase in chip-resistance does not affect the high tensile strength of the gypsum.

Acrylic Modifier also increases scratch resistance, and provides an overall toughening of the cast gypsum product. Acrylic Modifier does not shorten setting time, and should not have any detrimental effects on the working time or workability of the plaster slurry.

One more plaster note, and this is quite remarkable if it is actually true. CafeTerra informs us that Chinese scientists have developed a “supramolecular” plaster which has a “very broad” antibacterial spectrum, killing five types of disease-causing bacteria. The self-sanitizing plaster, boasting “more powerful antibacterial effects than penicillin, could be used in wall coatings, paints, art works and other products.”

That would be a great selling feature: works of art that cleaned themselves. I think I just noticed the eyes of Judy Wise lighting up again!

Double X

A Couple of Collage Paintings

I completed two small collage paintings this weekend. They are on 10″ (l) x 8″ (w) birch panels. I find these to be very workable surfaces. I purchase mine from Currys in Toronto.

Birch Solid Wood Panels

Convergence

Break Through

A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one’s thoughts change. (Pablo Picasso)

Painting Six Canvases At Once Helps You Stay Loose!

These photos, from a March 2009 workshop with Robert Burridge, caught my eye, especially the one where he is working on multiple canvases.

Bob painting multiple canvases. (Used with permission)

Burridge teaches what he calls Loosen Up Workshops and part of loosening up is having quite a number of things going on at once. As he says on A Painting a Day Blog,

In my studio and workshops, I create the challenge of staying loose by painting quickly, yet purposefully .  .  .  .   I work on six [canvases] at a time. After two “passes” of laying down color and shapes, I will come back in and add sketchy detail.

I am especially enamored with his abstract figurative paintings. His Artsy Fartsy News is vintage Burridge: fun and informative. Make sure and peruse the News Article Archive as well.

Early to Rise by Robert Burridge. (Used with permission.)

Thanks to YouTube, we can watch him in action!

I have heard tell that Bob is a real Party Animal, and he has produced a print that is worth a few guffaws! You may want to purchase one for your own celebratory beast–we both know who I am talking about.

Bob’s description of experimenting with mixed media (he calls it combined media) is like a mini workshop on a post:

I started out just goofing around on 300 lb watercolor paper with gesso – building up thick layers, then scratching, scraping and imprinting shapes and patterns in the gesso before it dried. Then I painted with acrylics – building up layers of patina and also rubbing out areas, scratching thru the layers to reveal color “surprises.” All the while, imbedding collage graphics and drawing back in with Derwent watersoluable pencils (my favorite is Black, 8B) while the painting was still wet.

After I was satisfied with the result, I glued the paper to a 12 x 12 canvas. The paper is slightly smaller so there is a 1/4″ border all the way around the paper.

Before I adhered the paper to the canvas, I painted the outside edges of the canvas purple – also painted a 1/4″ border. The glue I used to adhere paper to canvas was Gel Medium. After letting dry (with weight on top) for a day or two, I varnished the entire piece.

It makes you want to sign up for one of his workshops right now, doesn’t it? You can download PDF descriptions of his workshops, including an inquiry form for arranging a workshop in your area.

Some of Burridge’s workshop attendees demonstrate wonderful results: Nancy Standlee is a case in point. I enjoyed my morning tea while exploring Nancy’s blog, and her website, where I discovered her wonderful LYLAS paintings.

If Nancy recommends Robert Burridge, you can count on it being a statistically good choice. After all, Nancy was a librarian (Kellie, I’ve found another one for our club!) and she is trained to research her subjects well.

I Cannot Contain Myself . . . (and why would I want to?)

Time is so very fluid now. Let me rephrase that: our perception of time has become more fluid. I just added a comment to a January 29th post on the Quilting Arts blog, and then realized it was for January 29th, 2008! (An image popped into my mind of the melting clocks by Salvador Dali.)

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

Here is that comment:

Thank goodness you call Katie Pasquini-Masopust “Katie P-M” and NOT “Katie P-M-S.” I am SO looking forward to taking a course with this “founding Rock Star” at Quilting By the Lake in July 20-24, 2009. I am even more excited now that I have it by good authority that she possesses a wicked sense of humor! Laughter goes well with everything. In fact, it improves it!

I am especially thrilled to be taking this class because “Katie PM” now creates “stitched paintings.” In my Against the Grain article in Quilting Arts (issue 33), I demonstrated my own techniques for producing stitched paintings (see more of these on my Flickr site). Obviously, a lot of quilt artists have plucked similar ideas out of the ether!

Autumn Equinox

Let me know if you are attending Quilting By the Lake this summer, especially if you live anywhere near Toronto, or anywhere in the golden horseshoe, for that matter. It would be fun to carpool.

Cobourg Woods

We stayed in a cottage near Cobourg, Ontario. The woods were a quiet refuge. The textures were inspiring.

Pecked Log On Dry Leaves

Host Log

Presence in the Woods

Lake Sunset

Acrylic Products Rock!

I watched one of acrylic artist Tesia Blackburn’s online video demonstrations, live. She is no stranger to fun, and Monoprint Without a Press Using Golden Acrylics “Open” Paint is now available in an edited version for your viewing pleasure.

Tesia also offers a great tip for making an acrylic skin on glass. Apply enough paint so that you can lift it off the glass. You can now lay it down over an area in a painting to “preview” what that color will look like. You can also cut a shape out of the skin and apply it with medium to become part of your painting. Some artists create entire paintings this way!

Tesia has often recommended the work and methods of Patti Brady, whose book Rethinking Acrylic is on my shelf, and should be on yours if you love acrylic products!

Golden’s Jodi O’Dell sums up the book as follows:

In Patti Brady’s book, Rethinking Acrylic, Radical Solutions for Exploiting the World’s Most Versatile Medium, she explores the versatility of the acrylic medium and its ability to mimic oil paint, watercolor, gouache and encaustic. She demonstrates how it can be applied in subtle transparent washes or troweled on as a heavy thick impasto as well as making the medium as transparent as glass or as dense and black as tar. Because of its ever-changing state, Patti Brady covers the most popular techniques for acrylic, making them accessible to the contemporary artist through a variety of mini demonstrations followed by full demonstrations that show how to transform those techniques into finished paintings.

There are quite a number of offerings by Patti Brady on the Golden Paints site, because Patti is a Golden Director, and has been in their employ for about two decades!

I really appreciate her philosophy of teaching, part of which states:

I am not interested in teaching anyone “how to paint.” There are so many great teachers that have that particular skill. I’m interested in opening doors for exploration, for the artist to get a peek inside the options and for that artist to take these discoveries home, and make paintings.

Her gallery reveals a painter who loves to play, and is adept at finding a different “twist” for using any given material.

It would be a huge oversight if I did not mention Acrylic Revolution, by Nancy Reyner, as well. That book is another must-have for acrylic lovers. Her work knocks my socks off. A few glimpses, and you will likely be compelled to find out more about how she creates. The Energy Field paintings are a marvelous case in point.

I must go grab a paintbrush and begin playing with acrylics while my energy field is reverberating!

A Class Act

I always enjoy perusing the many classes that are offered to those of us who pursue the art muse. There are teachers who are gifted facilitators. It’s as if they are tied in to each student’s soul: they pull a string here, tug a string there, and the work that pours forth now amplifies whatever that particular artist was doing before.

I would compare it to being in the presence of a person who has achieved a certain stage of enlightenment. Your consciousness level rises to meet theirs. With them, you experience what you have the capacity to become.

I had a taste of this amplification when I attended a Fran Skiles workshop. I was so ready for it: I had dreamed about it and prepared for it. My spirit was willing and my flesh co-operated. I had an amazing week of creating work that took me to a new level~I could feel it in my entire being.

Once you have a class like that under your wing, you are not satisfied with lying low, with an approach that only skims the surface. You want more than accumulating another new technique or two for your toolbox, as useful as they may be. You are eager to extend yourself.  You want to soar with other inspired artists!

Picasso suggested that an artist could find inspiration, something worth communicating, everywhere he or she looked:

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.

I agree, and apply to art the same dictum seasoned writers are fond of quoting: “write what you know.” I look around me, and cull images from my own life, my own house, my own heart. These are images that I truly know, that mean something to me. I can represent them with authenticity.

My emotions are intimately connected with art making, so I do things that will deliberately heighten my emotions. I read poetry, a potent fire starter for my imagination. A single line can evoke such emotion that I enter another zone and merely have to allow my hand to grasp a brush and some paint to start producing images that feel very powerful. A novel can actually have the same effect: a metaphor in a descriptive paragraph burns into my consciousness and my emotions start rising in temperature.

It is also exhilarating to look at images other artists have created, until a spark lights that emotional fire again, and my own images pour forth. Music is another emotion stimulator (although QUIET is my preferred state for “listening” to inner cues as I make art). And then there are the BIG EVENTS that come into every person’s life; if an amazing joy arises in my life, or something heart-wrenching threatens to break me apart, as an artist I can tap the accompanying emotions to produce art images.

All that said, when I study a class description, I search for indicators that inspiration is going to be an intentional part of the menu. (It can always arrive in the form of grace). For example:

Katie Kendrick is teaching a workshop at Art & Soul. Here is part of the description of her workshop:

She finds art making to be one of the most powerful ways to connect with her innermost essence while at the same time discovering her authentic voice. She enjoys the experimental and intuitive layers of creating, where she can explore inner and outer worlds simultaneously. She has a passion for sharing her love of creating with others,

LK Ludwig’s bio includes the following:

With a strong belief in creating around what she knows, nature, parenting, love and life seep deeply into LK’s artwork, making it content rich and personally meaningful

Stephanie Lee and Misty Mawn are teaching a class together, called Two Heads are Better than One:  Collaboration as Creative Fuel:

In a world full of creative genius from the amateur and the accomplished, it is not uncommon for a little fear to creep in every now and then. Fear of not being original, of not being creative enough, of appearing self-important, of having your hard won success be swooped up by another with apparent ease. But there is another side to the phenomenon of creativity. There is the side that hungers for collaboration and knows that the results can be mind-expanding magic and exponentially more than it could have ever been had the fear won out.

Then there is the “high quality workshop experience for artists” envisioned by Leslie Avon Miller:

The elements needed for successful employment, so they say, are zest and hope. People also respond to autonomy, the opportunity to use one’s strengths and connection with other people.

I have so much zest and hope I can leap out of bed in the morning when I get a chance to work on my ideas. And since I am doing this myself, I have plenty of autonomy. I think leading a workshop would fit all of the above requirements. So I don’t have to artificially develop or enforce focus, concentration and dedication because it is already built into the goal for me. That’s why it is an activity that calls to me “Leslie, come work on the workshop outline! It is so yummy!” My goal is in alignment with who I am being, not just what I am doing.

I have never taken a workshop with any of the facilitators mentioned above, but they are expressing what I want to hear. If an instructor conceives such goals for her class, it has excellent prospects of being a rich one.

It’s always a privilege to participate in a class act.

Sketch As You Crawl!

Susan, the amazing artist from Susan’s Art and Sketchbook Blog, describes her participation in a SketchCrawl in Freestone, California. SketchCrawling was named after the infamous PubCrawling–a weekend sport that many thirsty athletes participate in.

Freestone sounds quite idyllic:

Freestone is such a lovely little place with not only bread ovens and vegetable gardens to sketch, but cows and barns and goats and houses with white picket fences and flower gardens, and of course lots of people eating ginger pear scones!

I start to salivate as I read the words ginger pear scones, which must be a product of the Wild Flour Bakery (such a clever name!). It would be worth a trip to Freestone just to visit that bakery! Of course, I would visit Susan as well, once I had my fill of whipping crème scones and biscotti. Or maybe Susan and I could meet there, and try to talk with our mouths full!

Wild Flour sketch by Susan Cornelis. Used with permission.

But I digress  . . . SketchCrawl began as the brainchild of Enrico Casarosa, and has turned into a “world wide event.” Here is how Casarosa explains it:

The basic idea: to record nonstop everything I could around me with my pencil and watercolors. A drawn journal filled with details ranging from the all the coffee I drank to the different buses I took. After a whole day of drawing and walking around the city the name seemed quite fitting: “SketchCrawl” – a drawing marathon. The crawl was more tiring than I imagined but also more fun and exciting than I had thought. Giving yourself this kind of mandate for a full day changes the way you look around you. It makes you stop and see things just a tad longer, just a bit deeper … needless to say I loved it.

Enrico also has a blog, and you’ll want to check out the SketchCrawl drawings he displays from January 2009, especially those of his daughter. He has found her very hard to capture because “She’s so ridiculously adorable it’s hard to do it justice.”

How’s that for a tug at the old heartstrings.

If Your Art Is Not Turning Out As You Hoped, Sing About It!

Years ago, I read a book called The Possible Human by Jean Houston.

That book had a profound effect on me. I felt I had found a mentor, someone who revered and trusted their imagination, and embraced creative energy. “[O]ne of the principal founders of the Human Potential Movement,” Jean has “worked intensively in 40 cultures and 100 countries helping to enhance and deepen their own uniqueness while they become part of the global community. Her ability to inspire and invigorate people enables her to readily convey her vision – the finest possible achievement of the individual potential.”

I invite you to explore the many accomplishments of this dynamic woman, including her visionary books. Here’s a taster~in Jump Time she explores:

-How the shift in human nature is moving people to discover and use dormant or little-known capacities.

-How the breakthroughs in technological connection and new ways of being in community in global society are repatterning human consciousness.

Her 1997 book, A Passion For the Possible (which I was drawn to because of its echoing of that earlier reading experience), continues Dr. Houston’s calling as a midwife for human creative capacity:

Over the past 30 years Jean Houston has dedicated her life to helping people unleash their creative and spiritual potential. As a result she has worked with some of the greatest cultural and spiritual visionaries of our time, such as Margaret Meade and Joseph Campbell. In A Passion for the Possible, written as a complement to the PBS series by the same name, Houston explains what helps people become creative geniuses. The trick is to fully commit to the four levels of self (sensory, psychological, mythic, and spiritual). Acting as a guide to the interior world, Houston once again inspires readers to embody their true potential.    ~From Amazon.com

On page 6, she describes a tribe in West Africa that has a unique way of dealing with community issues:

The question~say, improving waste disposal in the village~is presented in a village meeting. Then people dance the problem, sing about it, draw it in the sand, close their eyes and imagine solutions, sleep and dream about it, dance some more, and then suddenly~a solution! And a very good one, too, for people have run the problem through many different modes of knowing and have looked at it from different points of view.

I think I have found the itinerary for my next art workshop, and it’s a very good one, too!

The Three ONLY Things

Leah Piken Kolidas really flipped a switch in my psyche. When I responded to her Robert Moss interview in March, it reawakened an interest in the power of dreams.

I immediately pulled old dream books off my shelf, and put a few new ones on hold at my public library. Soon, I had The Three ‘Only’ Things in my hands, and was avidly devouring it. The subtitle identifies what those three things are:  Tapping the power of Dreams, Coincidence & Imagination.

Amazon offers a summary, but I think this section says it all:

According to Robert Moss, it is ONLY through dreams, coincidence, and the workings of imagination that we begin to remember that there is a world beyond the obvious one, a world where we reawaken to who we are and what we are meant to become. Reawakening to this world, and living fully in it, is like awakening to a world of colour from black and white. The Three “Only” Things offers practical ways to make our dreams, imagination, and coincidences more powerful and active in our lives. The techniques take only a few minutes a day, but have amazing results.

Deanna Joseph, the Inspiration Editor at Bella Online, was so impressed that she said: ” Honestly, if there was an instruction book handed out at our birth, it should be this one!”

You may be wondering just who this Robert Moss is. He is a world authority on dreams, a bestselling novelist, and a former foreign correspondent and professor of ancient history. In The Secret of the Three Only Things, Moss reveals a major flaw in the approach that so many have attempted to adopt (Hint: the title of the book is the first two words of the title of this small essay):

The great secret of fulfilling our heart’s desires and living in joy and abundance is an open secret. It is a power to be claimed as soon as we awaken to its existence and adopt the tools and habits required to bring it through.

The lesser secret involves the law of attraction: whatever we think or feel strongly, the universe says yes. If we carry around feelings of failure or dread, the world will give us lots of reasons to feel those things. If we follow our creative passions and are willing to make a leap of faith, the universe will support us and will bring us resources and opportunities in magical ways.

The greater secret is that to work the law of attraction successfully, we need to be aware of which part of us is doing the willing and choosing, and we need to develop a practice that engages the body and the larger self, not merely the calculating ego.

That calculating ego is superb at tripping up our good intentions. Why would we want to manifest something that is not, in the long run, for our own good? We have all struggled to differentiate between wants and needs. As an artist and poet, I am always seeking to reveal the essence of things. Whatever tools I can utilize to expedite that inner knowing, those intuitive flashes that literally feel like my spirit is vibrating within my flesh and bones, I am willing to give more than a few trial runs.

In order to continue awakening to my own motivations, what excites me, what is worth spending my time and talents pursuing, I believe dreams offer invaluable insights. Sleep is restorative, and we apparently dream at least 5 times a night. It seems ludicrous to me that such an activity, which our whole species spends so much time engaged in, is sometimes dismissed as meaningless.

Dreams emerge from within.They are products (or productions!) of my own mind and spirit. I am grateful to be offered more tools that aid the deciphering of my nightly treasures.

Of further interest:

Robert Moss interviews and reviews with Merryn Jose.

Dreaming the soul’s path: part two of a two-part interview for New Life Journal.

The Secret History of Dreaming #51.

Interview on KRON-TV

Interview on SHAW-TV.

Dreaming True, an interview with Robert Moss by Connie Hill.