Wishing you a Joyful Christmas (whether or not you celebrate it)!

Christmas in Barbados, 40 x 30. Dyes on silk

Whatever you are celebrating this season, be it Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or just life, may you find fellowship with family and friends this holiday season!

My husband and I are driving to S. Carolina on Sunday, to spend 10 days with my mom and cousins gathering from various parts of the country. We always have a great time together.

I thought I'd leave you with a tropical Christmas scene to warm your toes a bit! This is a painting I did several years ago. The poinsettas in the Caribbean are now in their full glory. Down there, they don't grow in pots, they grow in massive hedges, like the ones shown here! The only snow we see is the snow-on-the-mountain shrubs (upper left), covered in zillions of tiny white blossoms. Our windows and doors remain open, so the tantalizing aroma of ham, roast pork are everywhere. And the beach is never far away!

Merry Christmas everyone! Will resume posting in the new year.

Fall at the Lake

Fall at the Lake, 10 x 10. Dyes on silk, mounted on gallery wrap canvas.

Available for purchase here on my website.

I decided to go with a somewhat muter palette this time....

Abstract Landscape #4

Untitled, 6 x 6. Dyes on silk, mounted on stretched canvas.

Here is the last (for now) of this series. This one, plus the four others shown in the preceding posts, were shipped off to the Small Works Invitational at Elon College, NC. I hope they'll find homes over there!

Abstract Landscape #3

Untitled, 6 x 6. Dyes on silk, mounted on stretched canvas.

Abstract Landscape #2

Untitled, 6 x 6. Dyes on silk, mounted on gallery wrap canvas.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! We had a most enjoyable visit from my cousin and her husband, and my mom. The latter two being handicapped really wasn't the problem we thought it would be in our non-handicap-friendly house, and it was great to be able to include everyone in things to do/places to go. They left this morning for their 5-hr drive home, so it's back to the studio for me.

I appreciate the comments on Landscape #1. I enjoy manipulating the dyes and developing the layers. This is such a different process from when I do representational work - where I'm controlling the dyes to make them into someTHING. Here, it's a more interactive process, where I may coax the dyes this way or that, but I give them the control. The end result is always something of a surprise.

Here's my second little 'landscape'. I love how the sky turned out in this one. As it moved, the orange dye released quite a bit of yellow, which did some interesting stuff as it interacted with the blue.

Abstract Landscape #1

Untitled, 6x6. Dyes on silk, mounted on gallery wrap canvas.

After all the sewing in my last piece, it's time to get back to some freeform painting! A couple of days ago I saw the call for artists for the Annual Small Works Invitational at Elon University, NC, in which you can enter up to 5 pieces. I only had one suitable piece - the 6 x 6 painting shown below, so I decided to paint 4 more to go along with it, to make a series of abstract landscapes. I'm to using the same palette and applying the dyes in pretty much the same way in all of them, just to see how different they will turn out even they're painted in very similar ways. The first one is above, 3 more to go!

"Purple Hills", 6x6. Dyes on silk, mounted on gallery wrap canvas.

Rescued Silk Painting

"Seaside Breakfast", 16 x 20. Dyes on Silk, mounted on stretched canvas and ready to hang.

Purchase info here on my website.

This is a scene from Barbados, of  the indigenous Barbados black belly sheep, grazing on a cliff overlooking the ocean. I wanted to convey the intense brightness of the scene, so I chose a not-quite-realistic palette of yellow-green and red-purple for maximum contrast.

This is a painting I did some time ago that through a freak accident, got a tear right in the middle of it. Originally it was stretched over a piece of foamboard and framed. I don't use glass so it was quite light. I was in a parking lot, loading work into the trunk of my car, and rested the painting on the ground, leaning it up against the car. In that moment there was a sudden, strong gust of wind, that lifted the painting up and sent it sailing over the car! En route, it caught the edge of the open trunk and got a small but obvious (to me) tear. It's been languishing in my studio  ever since, but I finally got around to fixing it. I took it off the foamboard and re-mounted it on stretched canvas, using acrylic medium as an adhesive. Now, with the silk adhered to the canvas, there's absolutely  no trace of the tear and it's ready again to go out into the world .... whew!

After Midnight - Silk Art Quilt

After Midnight, 16 x 20. Dyes and acrylic paint on silk,
hand and machine embellished, mounted on silk-covered stretched canvas.
Purchase info here on my website.

She's done! A fairy blowing fairy blowing fairy dust into the cosmos to become stars. I did some more hand stitching, including lots of tiny French knots with silver thread for the fairy dust. The stars are a mix of splattered silver paint and white/silvery glass beads. I finished the edges of the painted piece with a layer of black, then silver, then purple zigzag. The purple doesn't cover the silver completely, so some sparkle shows through. For the background I dyed another piece of silk black, blue and purple, and splattered it with a darker silver paint than what I used for the main piece - so it still gives the impression of stars but remains in the background. Click on the image to enlarge and see the stitching and beading better.

Fall Foliage

Well I haven't got much further with "After Midnight", since I went to visit my cousins and Mum in South Carolina this past weekend. I took the piece with me, thinking I'd have lots of free time to work on it... . I like to to keep my hand busy while I'm chatting.... but I'll give you 3 guesses how much of it got done!

We went up into the mountains to see the fall colors and they were just beautiful.... the colors seem more intense than ever this year. That's Mum and me in the photo at Caesar's Head Sate Park.

After Midnight- Progress

So what good is a moon without a fairy sitting in it?  :)  I drew my moon and fairy on tracing paper and tried several different positions for them - for some reason I find this coveys a sense of her smallness amid vast, swirling galaxies. And there was a light area in just the right spot to highlight her face. This wasn't necessarily my original intent (or at least I didn't know that it was) until I rotated the piece this way and it hit me!

The moon is plain white jacquard silk - it has a special weave of shiny and dull patterns, which change as you move your head so it looks sort of iridescent - perfect for a moon! She is a piece of dyed black silk, and her wings are sheer and shimmery. All are raw-edge appliqued on. She'll be blowing fairy dust (naturally!) into stars, and I've just started painting the path of the dust in pearlescent paint. It's not showing up much in the photo but is quite shimmery on the actual piece...  I'll have to play with my lighting some more. The stars will be next....

Don, is this anything like what you envisioned for the placement of the moon? I'd love to know what your idea was!