The Fourth in the Fork in the Road Series

A Fork in the Road no.4

Very busy in the studios these days, trying to keep up with new work for my etsy shop and making the pieces for Awakening Breath, the exhibition my husband and I are collaborating on.  As you can see, we even have a title!

We are fortunate to have plenty of studio space (well, really...is there ever enough!?) so we each have our own spaces and then a large shared space...it's the whole downstairs of the house.  So, things are buzzing in both studios, but we are on a roll and finally truly collaborating, which is quite a different thing than two people making work to have a show together.  It's exciting and we can't wait to see all the pieces together!  In the meantime, I've posted A Fork in the Road no.4 at MissouriBendStudio, which is very much in the spirit of the work we are making collaboratively.  Soon enough, I'll be able to post a few pieces I hope!

Thanks for stopping by and reading my posts!  Cheers!

A Cliffhanger!

Well, it's Sunday, so Johntimothy and I have a little over a week to have the work ready to deliver for our show.  In my last post I mentioned finding my direction for the collaboration...my instincts were right on.  When my husband came home, he loved those drawings of the seeds and it caused us to rethink the whole project.  Yesterday, we basically started over and are now doing triptychs, with my part the central panel, to be informed by those drawings of last week that showed up in the one above, which is A Fork in the Road no.3    Johntimothy will make the panels that go on either side, so the piece will resemble the format of an altarpiece.  We are both excited about the project coming together in this new way and although I speak of it as "starting over" this is really just another step in the collaboration that has been going on over the last couple of months for the show.  It's the creative process at work....just made more complicated by involving two people instead of one!  No time is ever wasted...but it's kind of a cliffhanger still...wondering how the pieces will finally resolve themselves.  I'll let you know!

The One Thing

I'm having a great day in the studio, which isn't always the case!  I'm working to resolve my part of a collaborative exhibition with my husband and the deadline is looming...August 24th.  We've been working on this for most of the summer, but somehow I haven't been able to make anything that feels right.  Now, I understand what I'm to do. This morning I started drawing in white ink onto of the blackboard painted paper and before I knew it...the channel opened and I was right there in the flow, drawing those tiny circles that connect endlessly...like seeds or cells.  I realized that it's always about getting to the essence, the "one" thing, that gets at the core of something.  I knew in the middle of the first drawing, that all 36 drawings would each be an exploration of the one thing...the way the those interlocking little circles in white ink laid on top of the black chalkboard paint and interacted with the pencil.  It was a time of meditation as I connected tiny circle after tiny circle, stopping on each one when the shape declared itself and then moving on to the next piece.  When this kind of thing happens for me, this moment of recognition, I feel it in the pit of my stomach....I am in a flow where my hand is making the thing I am longing to see.  Simplicity, simplicity itself.

There are a couple of images in of the pieces in progress above...more will happen on the black chalkboard paint, but the drawing in the white ink is what the pieces are about....in a way I can't describe in words.

A Fork in the Road

A Fork in the Road...is now finished and this one is posted in my Etsy shop.  This may be the first in a series about the fork in the road.  I definitely have other chalkboard drawings in the works, but I am really interested in this idea of the fork in the road...visually and and metaphorically.   It felt odd to work with no color on this piece.  As you can see, I couldn't quite do it, so the edges of the paper are painted with a copper acrylic and I added some tiny dots of color on those branches.   I do love the way the chalkboard paint surface takes the pencil marks...sort of subtle and shimmery...there is a lot for me to explore with these materials!

Enjoy the weekend!