Two Summer Courses at The Art House

The summer course schedule for The Art House is available at last! I have two on the calendar: soap making and stained glass pendants. Someone please sign up so that I feel like a somewhat legitimate art teacher!

Art + Soul

Two of my pieces were selected for the Art + Soul exhibit to benefit the ECHO Center this year. The show opening unfortunately lands on the date of one of my art classes at CCV and I'm already missing one on this coming Thursday. Maybe I could propose a field trip to the opening for just an hour or two. My "Chandelier" was chosen, along with a mixed-media piece called "Yellow Bellied Sapsucker with Birch" which is a photo in a shadow box with birch bark framing it. It's hard to determine the scale of "Chandelier" in this photo, but it measures around three feet tall and is made of driftwood gathered from the lake.

I was honestly pretty surprised that my photo "Lake Champlain in Winter" wasn't chosen since I feel that it is so strong. Perhaps it's too literal an interpretation since it is a photo of the lake, for a lake-related benefit. I'm sure that there were a hundred photos of the lake submitted.

Open Studio in Vermont is this weekend and I plan to check out a number of locations around the county on Saturday. Perhaps I will find a few new opportunities for myself as well.

Beginnings

My residency at the Vermont Studio Center really made me realize that I couldn't let this wait any longer. While in Johnson I produced prolifically and felt a huge weight lifted from my mind. It lasted for a few days after I left, but then the reality of my job set in.

Today I was freed from the constraints of my office cubical. I'm no longer participating in a soul-sucking job, but instead will follow my calling to produce things of beauty.

This is "The Choir" made from 10 reused CPR dummy heads, chicken wire, plaster, paint, broken stained glass, and white LED lights.

 This sculpture is now installed at the Studio Center. "A Harrowing Ride" is made from half of an old bike, a garden implement, horseshoes, old square nails, a wrench, old door hardware, and a pitchfork. The garden tool came from my old house and the bike was acquired by leaving a note in someone's mailbox. I passed by this great rusty bike for years on Route 116 and always thought that it needed to be used for something. Here is the "something".

 

 The "Seed Pod" sculpture is almost like an alien space ship. It happened because I was playing with the shapes that I could make with chicken wire. Then I added paper mache on the top leaving a mouth shaped opening that I covered with red glittery foam. Hand dyed red mohair spills from inside the pod along with four tendrils of green beaded wire. These remind me of tentacles in a way or vines bursting from a seed. Maybe it's a sign of the new growth that I've begun.

I produced fifteen pairs of earrings to stock the Blinking Light Gallery in Plainfield, VT, along with four nuno felted scarves. Today I began marketing in earnest for The Art House Gallery Studio and School in Craftsbury Common, VT, especially for a felted vessel course they have scheduled for September 21 and 22nd, and just generally to get their name out there. I feel like this could develop into something big