Well...

Went to the places with the painting. That's a 3 foot by 3 foot painting. Couldn't even get past the front door. BUT, happy side is that I got the name of the owners at both places so will follow up with them. I still think Sun's Energy would go perfectly at these "thinkubators."

Fingers Crossed

I'm going to visit a couple of potential clients tomorrow with Sheva. They are very interesting and creative idea generation places. I think that Sun's Energy would be PERFECT for them. We'll see how it goes...

Cool Show Idea

I have all this great Winter Series art and I have a great idea on a cool show. The operative word being "cool". All the paintings are representations of the cold, snow, ice, etc. I want to show in an open "warm" space - preferably red brick (actually could also have white plaster walls) and serve cold drinks to go with the whole winter theme. Now, where to find such a host gallery? I think my best bet is going to be south or west side of Chicago.

New Venue

I have 5 pieces displayed at HomeCare Assistance in Kenilworth. The address is 430 Green Bay Road and is located on the West side of the street, just to the north of the Kenilworth train station. A great group of women run the organization: Margalit, Ann and Maureen. If you get a chance to stop by, please do so. A great guy named Bill helped place and mount all the paintings on the wall. I am hoping to get over there soon to take some pictures. It will have to be after this unbelievable blizzard! Hope everyone is safe and warm.

It's so exciting that my art is in a corporate space! Another first!

A thoughful alternative

A great alternative to spending loads of money on framing is to paint the sides of a canvas. You can still frame the painting later but in the meantime, it looks so professional. You can have a lot of fun playing with color and even textured patterns on the sides. I just painted the sides of Crisp Autumn Leaves black and it looks SO much more striking and more professional. Ready to hang and be seen!

This has been a great idea for the bamboo series as well as my winter series.

Huh?

I was flipping through Salvador Dali's "Diary of a Genius" - was he crazy? Perhaps. Genius, probably. I came across a short entry: "We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have served for that: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art." What does that mean? How can abstract art serve our thirst for concrete images? Or am I reading it wrong? I do a lot of abstract art. Perhaps he means that like Picasso, sometimes the way to most purely represent a 3-D image on 2-D space is to paint it from many different angles and abstractly, thereby boiling down a thing's essence and capturing it on canvas. Hmmm. Are the two mutually exclusive? Conundrum.

Musings

I promised to talk about using glitter and acrylic paints together to form an impressive and let's face it, downright cool effect on the canvas. Sheva and I had been discussing my doing a seasonal series - depicting Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer. I had several thoughts on how to go about doing such a series as I already started my Autumn Series dedicated to my grandmother. The colors were chosen for me by fate so it seemed and the creative process, once overcome, poured out of me.

Winter has been a much bigger challenge. For how do you depict winter, snow, white, on white? You see, challenge. Amazingly enough, the answer also came through Sheva. We went to the Pearl art store which was having a clearance sale and Sheva insisted on buying all kinds of glitter. Now I get a bit messy when I paint but the idea of glitter getting in the cracks on the floor of my apartment gave me hives. I tried in vain to dissuade her from buying the glitter - to no avail. Once home, Sheva suggested that I might use the glitter in a painting. On the surface. Not thrilled with the idea, I once again objected. But then it occurred to me to combine the white glitter with white acrylic paint and see what happened. I had also bought an iridescent color series called "Interference" which was very glossy and fine and wouldn't show up very well on canvas unless combined with another color. Ah! The combination was there, all I needed to do was experiment. So with a palate knife, I combined the white paint, the glitter and the "Interference" red and went to work. The result is what I call my winter series. Born out of frustration and a total lack of ideas, these paintings ended up as the textured representations of winter scenes that we in Chicago and elsewhere - where snow, wind and cold are the essence of winter - know so well. They are fun to look at, surprising, rough to the touch and a triumph as far as I'm concerned.

They are difficult to photograph and much better to observe in 3D but I will post an example on the blog.