Thanks to everyone who made it out to the opening reception for my show “Cloud Girl Accidentally Eats Rainbow” and a big thank you to the entire Sawtooth School for Visual Art team for believing in me and for all the work they put into helping bring this exhibit to life. I’m grateful.
I was delighted to see people excited to take a paper crane and children using them as shadow puppets with my video projections – and gleefully playing on my fabric boulders. The exhibit features 2 large series of works on paper, which I displayed unframed for the first time. That kind of vulnerability was appropriate for the show, and I was happy to be able to share less precious – and touchable! – work in contrast to these.
What’s next? I’m not sure yet, but we have such a rich history of textiles in NC…. I’m dreaming of more and bigger reclaimed fabric boulders – again made in community – and shown in an unused textile factory… If anyone knows of such a place, please let me know!
I’ve always had a thing for maps – trail maps in particular. They are full of possibilities and tiny meticulously drawn details. The hand-drawn maps of imaginary worlds in Tolkien’s TheHobbit were some of my favorites when I was a kid.
To this day, I still prefer to carry with me a printed map when I go backpacking or when I’m exploring a new route that has many connecting trails and chances for getting lost. In more tricky spots, I frequently have the chance to share a map with other hikers who are unsure of where they are or where to go, and to help them find their way. Even folks using mapping apps will often take a picture of my paper map to guide them.
For a few years I’ve been making drawings and paintings of crumpled paper and plastic bags, and while I could tell something interesting was going on, I couldn’t figure out what direction to take them. Recently while following a thread of ideas, I started making imaginary topographical drawings/trail maps using plastic bags as a reference for the land. Now I’m making a series of them for a solo exhibit in the spring.
Here’s a look at my sketchbook showing the progression of drawings I made to figure out how to make it work (that link goes to Instagram by the way) along with images of other drawings I made along the way.
Also if you’re in or near Winston-Salem, you can see some of my work, including my painting Of Stones and Earth and Air at The Gallery at Stimmel. The work there is available through Artfolios.
The drawing of paper that started it all almost 10 years ago.a drawing of plastic bagsCold Water, oil on canvas, 30×40 inches The big thing in the foreground is actually crumpled up paper.
Happy New Year! I just got back from a walk with my kitten Luna in a cat backpack. Yes, I am now that person who walks their cat in the neighborhood.
I’ve been on winter break and I’ve got a few days ’til the start of spring semester in the School of Film at UNCSA. It’s been nice to have the time and mental bandwidth to retool the classes I’m teaching and to work in the studio, where I’ve got several projects going on.
As we speak, I’m soaking River Birch bark (foraged with a friend) to extract some color and dye the last few hankies I kept aside. You may notice an open container of gesso, a sort of acrylic primer to prepare a birch wood panel for a painting. To get the surface ready to paint on, I applied four thin coats of gesso, sanding in between each one to make a bright white, opaque, smooth surface to work on. I’m looking forward to making this painting. It was commissioned at the end of the year by North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) Winston-Salem, specifically for the Hanes House.
In the last image, you’ll see a screenshot of an in-progress edit of a video piece I’m working on for my upcoming show in the spring. Some of my students were kind enough to help me out for this project and let me shoot their hands while they made an ink drawing of a landscape in Todd, a small community outside of Boone, NC, that saw a lot of damage during Hurricane Helene.
The previous two images are of ink drawing experiments I’m doing to figure out a series of works hopefully for the spring show. In the last few years I’ve made some drawings and paintings of plastic bags and crumpled up paper, but nothing I really dug into. Now I’m making drawings of plastic bags again, this time imagining a large group of them hanging together in a series as sort of imaginary topographies. We’ll see where it goes.
Hi everyone! Here’s your little mindfulness break – this time with a botanical drawing! Follow along with me as I draw a violet just picked from my garden. I’ll start in pencil, then move into pen. I’ll talk you through my thought process for making a drawing from life or representational drawing. These are tools you can use to draw anything you want. You’ll also see how drawing can be a mindfulness practice.
Share this freely!
If you like this, you’ll love my botanical watercolor prints. These feature my botanical drawings of North Carolina plants. Find them HERE.
Looking for the follow up video where I add watercolor to this drawing? Find it HERE.
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For the paintings in my exhibit at SECCA, “I must love you very much” I did a bit more planning than I normally do. To be honest, I don’t typically plan my paintings, but for these paintings I did have a specific feeling that I wanted. I liked the idea of making a group of paintings big enough to surround viewers such as Monet’s “Water-Lilies.” Some of his water lily paintings were mural sized works that filled specially made rooms at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.
I’ve been obsessed with Pilot Mountain for a couple of years, and have made a lot of paintings inspired by the place, but they were smaller works. For this project, I wanted to make paintings so big that a person looking at them would have the feeling of being transported to Pilot Mountain. While I’m not interested in creating a photo-realistic image of the place, I am interested in evoking the myriad sensations we feel when we are there.
To determine the size of the paintings, I measured the space I had available for my exhibit at the museum. I planned to make the paintings as large as I could make them while still leaving a bit of white space – or breathing room – around each one. I made four paintings, one for each wall.
After determining their size and taking reference photos on some hikes, I made preliminary watercolor drawings to loosely plan out the composition for each of the four paintings. I used a photo as the first point of reference, then reinterpreted the image by looking for the essential shapes that I would use in my paintings. As I worked on the large paintings, I referred to these drawings as a sort of map to give structure to my paintings. These are those drawings:
Want to see how I made these paintings? Check out this time-lapse video I made documenting the process.
Around the holiday season, I make a series of small works on paper to send to collectors of my paintings as a way of saying thank you. This time-lapse film documents the process of making the mixed media drawings I sent this year. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that I started working on light blue paper, but eventually switched to a white paper. The blue paper felt too flimsy, so I used a heavier-weight watercolor paper instead. You’ll also notice in the upper left corner when I cut the new watercolor paper. I think my favorite part of the video is seeing all the tools move around as I used them.
This was shot over the course of two days, with a photo once every 10 seconds. I used watercolor, graphite, ink, wax pastels, colored pencil, and gouache (opaque watercolor). Enjoy!
I’ve been using torn bits of my drawings as collage material in my new mixed media pieces. After brushing the back of the paper with acrylic gel medium and placing the paper where I want it, I flatten it with a piece of wood and weigh it down with something heavy – in this case, gallon paint cans. I typically let it sit overnight so that it’s ready to go in the morning. Once dry, I can work on the paper and panel with paint, ink, pastel, or whatever other medium I choose to use on it. With these particular pieces I am not using oil paint. This allows me to keep the paper exposed because I don’t have to prime the paper to protect it from the oil paint.
I haven’t blogged in a while. We bought a house this spring/summer, have been settling in, and getting the studio (in my case) and darkroom (in Tim’s case) going. The studio feels good. We insulated it, put up homasote, and I recently prepared a bunch of new panels to work on a series. I’m working on mixed media collage pieces using some drawings I made last week. Mix of Sumi ink, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, pastel, graphite, and markers. I’m trying to keep the works on panel pared down – which is hard for me because I have a tendency to want to bury layers of paint and drawing and build up the surface. We’ll see what happens…
