The plight of the unfinshed project.

Often I will begin examples of lessons to teach to students. You start these examples then get busy helping students complete theirs. You show this unfinished example to the students and then tell them what else you would like them to do in order to complete theirs.

After several years of teaching art you end up with this pile of unfinished projects. I also make another example that is posted in stages on a poster.
I was talking with another art teacher about this and we thought....Why don't they create and art teachers art show of all the unfinished projects.....

the gift of giving

For me the most exciting thing about the holidays are not the gifts I get but the ones I give.I love to see peoples reactions to their personalized and often hand crafted gifts.Each one of my friends have these unique hobbies and interests.


My mother collects school buses. I by the ones that I can find afford ably and then often make them.This year I gave her four. I found this plain wooden bus at Micheal's and painted and decorated it.Then while sitting at the crafting table among my wood burning projects I saw the left over pieces for my painting canvas and got a good idea/saw out a notch and you get a bus. At first ti thought earrings but they are a little large for that. So I mounted them on wood scraps and made small standing versions instead.












My friends mom who is also a dear friend to me collects angels. I found this one at the Dollar tree(my favorite store) and gave it a wood burn treatment and a acrylic paint job.





My friend Sue and Reyna collect wolfs. I drew this one(actually on Christmas day) at my aunts.



My boyfriend Ed got personalized t- shirts. I will have to have him model those and post pics.

I have this group of girlfriends that I often see in a group and that I met out at the nightclub. I have all these pictures of us having fun so I gave them collages printed on magnetic sheets with all their pictures from my myspace page.I also made some feathered hair clips.

Solstice gifts

I received a bunch of mail yesterday. Christmas cards, Ed's mom sent some cookies. Then I got this envelope from Arts And cultural council....I guessed what was in it: event invitation, a request for donations, My member ship should be fine, a grant rejections letter... I opened it up. It was a grant acceptance letter!

I also contacted someone from the Flying Squirrel community center
about hanging up an art show last week. I was surprised by the response I got. Why don't you hang it up for Solstice? So I prepped work on Sunday and hung it up Monday. The show is up and will run through Jan.

This is one of the images in the show. The show is all based on images from a Tarot deck. This is "4 of Pents". They are currently 13 works present and others will follow soon.

This is also the building that we will be painting the mural on starting in March. Meetings of the mural comittee will start on Thursday nights. Here's the link for their Facebook page.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?id=100000140036866

holiday crafting

So I now have a new kitchen to cook in and realized that I like frosting cookies. I treat each one like an miniature edible art work.

To the left are the cupcakes I made for my friend "The cupcake queen." She loves gourmet cupcakes and makes them for everyones birthdays.





I made ginger bread men and personalized them to give to certain friends. I made several "belly dancer" cookies with my ginger bread girl cutter.I had fun trying to put coins of the belts with white frosting...that was a challenge.



I also made, brownies, candy can mint cookies,and sugar cookies with ornament shaped cookie cutters and solstice suns cookies as well.

I have posted pictures with people holding their cookies below.

some of my work

This is an oil painting on canvas and is part of a series I have been working on since summer 2008. All the canvases are different sizes and are following suits of cards and major Arcana cards from Tarot.
This is from another smaller series called "Out to Eat" They are small drawing simply of what was on the table when I went out to eat. Several are ink and are smaller then a postcard.

To see more of my work go to myartprofile.com

Fall semester classes at the museum

I teach Saturdays children's classes at the museum. The students range in age from 7-10 ,so they are 1-5 grade. This fall I was teaching "Drawing and Painting with the galleries" Which enhanced the use of an artwork within the gallery's collection each week along with artwork students create based around a work of art each week.

We completed collages based on Juane Quick to See smiths work.
http://mag.rochester.edu/seeingAmerica/essays/72.swf
to see the image of the panting we looked at follow the above link

The example above is by Zoe.
we focused on layering images and collaging then used gloss medium varnish along with acrylic paints to layer and adhere the images.For subject matter we discussed that the images and the stytle of clothing shown in the painting represent a native american women. I encouraged students to find and collage images that represented themselves.

Public art project applications

I am waiting on a decision on the grant proposal I put in for painting a mural on the side of the Historic ELKS lodge in the Corn Hill building. I want to incorporate local area youth in the PLEX, Corn hill and surrounding neighborhoods along with the Artist's of the Flying Squirrel to create a mural which reflects the neighborhoods history and future.





I had previously finished some sketches for the Nazareth Benches on parade project.I worked very hard on my submissions and several other artists did as well.I will say I was disappointed by the inconsistency of how the submissions were displayed for the opening for sponsors to choose bench's. The food was great, it was a good way to showcase the new Nazareth arts center.There was in consistency however in when resume's and descriptions were shown or not shown.In my case my two submissions were not grouped together either.



I feel like all of the descriptions should either be posted or not posted.


Either the images should have spoken for themselves or the artists background and experience should have been the vessel of communication with the audiences.
Several of the images were made by high school or college students. Some were to be painted by groups of students.This would have been helpful information for the sponsor viewers to know and may have changed some people's minds about the work.




The last thing I will say is. The guidelines of the the submission was that hey were to be made on the offical submission form. Yet artist's did not follow this guideline still had there works displayed. I found this very unfair for those of us who had adhered to the project guidelines.


Some were created in different formats and were displayed on large foam boards, they were not on the offical form.



I am now working on a thrird grant proposal and finding this one to be equally as challenging.
Wish me luck!