Right in front of your nose landscapes



Dancing in the Shallows of Lac Beauvert



Jasper area is one of the most beautiful places on the face of the earth. I love to sketch and paint there surrounded by majestic and interesting mountains. A few years back, sketching on the edge of Lac Beauvert, I happened to look at the shallows right in front of me and realized that I had been missing one of the most beautiful scenes. I did some preliminary sketches and photos and finally got around to painting it just recently. Just goes to show that you always need to look for unexpected surprises.

This Maple Lace painting is one of a series. It is a 5X3 ft acrylic painted primarily with a pallet knife - definitely a challenge to control because of the quick drying properties of the paint but a lot of fun and outside of the box for me.

Needle felting is fun but time consuming

Needle felting is very time consuming! The down-side is that it takes a long time to make each guy, but the plus side is that you get to know each one very personally. From the get-go, as each one evolved, so did their personality and story. I include a name and story with each beastie. I have to admit that I am shocked at how corny my imagination can get at times - it is not about thinking, just free association goofiness. Thankfully this seems to resonate with most folks.

This is a fella from my 2005 collection. Lucky Frogarotti aspires to be a world class tenor but is reluctant to give up his privacy for fame. His favorite pastime is researching ways to eliminate West Nile disease.
Lucky has found a good home with a very dear friend.

Some of my first beasties

Chicklet, Charlie, and Chelsie -sold

Just thought I'd put up some photos of some of my first needle felts - all have gone to good homes.

COME ON - you can't have just one chick! Along came a flock in a flap over the sky falling.

Morris - sold

Morris was a bit of a challenge. Getting the felt tight enough to stand on is no small accomplishment - I cheated in the end with starch for Morris, but more recent long legged guys usually have armatures to support them.

Bunjamen - sold

Ralph - sold

It is a lot of fun (and sometimes challenging) to get everyone into comfortable, stable positions.

Carmen - sold

Isaac - sold

Ella - sold

Percy-sold

Billy - Sold

Sid- sold

Lloyd- sold

Lloyd came about from a personal challenge to use up some bits of different colours.






Bye for now - got to get back to felting!

Bart - Sold

Upcoming Art Sale - Needle-felting

I'm really pleased to be involved with the Calyx Show in Calgary for the first time.
http://www.calyxart.com/photo_gallery.html

I'll be there on Sunday. It is exciting for me to focus on needle-felting for a show. It has also been very motivating (and a little painful - the needles are very sharp!). Needle felting is very time consuming, so I usually just do them whenever and bring along a few with other art. I am up to 25 and counting.

Hope to see you there!

Needle-Felting: Pins and Needles OCD

Painting is my primary thing, but more on that another time. Right now I am up to my eyeballs in wool ... brings a whole new meaning to "pulling the wool over my eyes."

In 2003, I naively attended a needle-felting workshop with the Bragg Creek Artisans. Much to my surprise, I churned out several furry friends. I have been addicted every since (concerned friends have suggested that I look for a Needle-felters Anonymous support group). Thus came to be a growing population of Bragg Creektures - which I have been selling over the years. I have an upcoming show for these beasties at the end of April so I am busy felting away.

Needle felting is like sculpting in wool. Starting with unspun wool, you "sculpt" with a barbed pin. Wool fibers have microscopic scales that cause them to hook together. Repeated piercing with the barbed pin cases the fibers to matt much like what happens when a favourite wool sweater mistakenly goes into the dryer.

It isn't long before glimpses of faces, toes, and tails start appearing. Then it is just a matter of helping them emerge. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out who is emerging.

Lambert - Sold

Lambert, the friendly lion, one of my first beasties, started out as a mountain sheep, but refused to be sheepish. We have both come to terms with him being a sheep in lion's clothing.

While totally different than painting, the creative experience is surprisingly similar albeit with a lot more "cuteness" in the equation.

To Blog or Not to Blog, that is the question

Don't get me wrong - I'm not a technophobe, but I'm not sure I get this whole concept. I like working with computers, but "working" is the operative word - the social part escapes me - at least so far.

I've been working with computers since it took an entire building to house one. My first computer course was mostly about how to use a key-punch machine (it also brought out the artist in me because I spent a good deal of the year doodling - sorry Mr Riley). For you youngsters, back in the Pleistocene we used key-punch machines to punch holes in cardboard cards that were carefully stacked in a box, carried to the computer building, and loaded into a card reader (which nine times out of ten bent one card necessitating starting the process again). Then we waited anxiously for at least three hours before hiking back to the computer building to check out the printout to see if the program actually ran.

Maybe my hesitation is a "can't teach an old dog new tricks" thing but I don't think so. It's not that I mind learning new tricks, its just that I don't like learning to do the same trick in the guise of a new trick, or learning a new trick while knowing that it is going to become old news real soon, or spending so much time learning tricks to make you efficient that you don't have time to get your work done. Unfortunately all of these problems are realities of technological development - annoying, but the way it goes.

Social networking does seem to be a really new and different trick - one that I don't fully understand and is a bit edgy for me. The really scary stuff is ... who is driving the bus - does anybody really know where all of this is taking us and is it in the right direction? Okay ... maybe I'm ranting. And, you might ask, what has this got to do with art which is supposed to be the focus of this blog. Good question - not much - but it does illustrate my tangential brain which features prominently in how I approach art.

Last spring I decided to leave my day job so that I could focus on art and travelling for a while (most of my time at work was spent in front of a computer which, honestly, I loved at least on most days). Since then, aside from working in my studio and taking some great trips, I've been trying to learn more in my areas of artistic interest and to figure out how to get my art work "out there" more. This has led me back in front of a computer - it's a perverse world. But ... after talking to lots of folks, looking at web-sites, reading blogs, I am seeing the benefits and (frighteningly) I am now convinced that I need to jump in and give it a try in the simplest form possible - a hosted blog site. We'll see where it goes from there.

Now that I've become convinced to try it, there are still disturbing questions.

Is this just another sad form of talking to myself and, if not, who the heck am I talking to? Will I fall prey to the seduction of looking at just one more art site at 1 pm? Will I avoid being sucked into the black whole of internet addiction!!??  Stay tuned.