Thanks to all who came to my open studio event. We had a great turnout, in fact it was pretty crowded, and Chuck and Andrew put on a great performance. Thank you guys! I also had help from a couple of my other friends, Sarah and Katherine. Thanks to Sarah for helping me hang the show and for hand-making the title tags for my work, and thanks to Katherine for helping me make the food selections and setting up the food and wine. I really had a wonderful time, and it was great to get so much positive feedback on the new work, especially as I prepare to send out graduate school applications. I also sold some t-shirts, prints, drawings, and a wood panel, and now have the opportunity to hang my panels in a gallery in Bluffton while Brian and I are sailing to Central America. 
I really couldn’t be happier. I will be posting high quality pictures of the panels in my gallery over the course of the next couple days. My friend Ben Williams of Ben Williams Photography was nice enough to photograph them before the show. For now, here are a few photos that Brian took during the show.
If you bought something at the show, I will be calling each of you to set up a time to pick it up over the course of the next few days. Thanks again for all of the support!
If you head on over to Syrup and Honey, you might notice something new….I was delighted to design the new banner for my friend Sarah a couple weeks ago. Sarah and her husband Ben went to grade school with me in Virginia and write a great food blog. Sarah is constantly experimenting with recipes, perfecting them, and posting the results on her blog so that you can try them for yourself. She also reviews restaurants in the Hampton Roads area and participates in the Daring Bakers monthly Recipe Challenges…mmm macarons. Thanks Sarah!
P.S. I am getting excited for my open studio on Friday. Hope some of you all can make it!
My Open Studio! Friday Nov. 6th from 6:30 – 9:30 pm at Sparks Gallery (12 Hagood Street, Charleston, SC). This is a free event with live music by Chuck Taylor and Andrew Hanson of Mad Cat in the Coffee House (check out a few of Chuck’s songs on his facebook page, my favorite is White Picket Prison). There will be wine and snacks, and possibly some of Daniel McSweeney’s ceramic sculptures on exhibit as well. If you are in the area please stop by, tell or bring your friends, and enjoy; it will be an informal affair with prices ranging from as low as $15 to $500. I will be selling paintings, drawings, screen-prints, and t-shirts (including the wood panels I have been working on, which have not been posted yet). All sales will help fund my sailing trip to Central America in December and hopefully art school next year. Exciting.
So now you know why I have been absent from the blog. Here are some projects I have been working on for the show and a sneak peek of one of my wood panels in progress.
Figure drawing and portraiture are areas that I need to spend more time focusing on. Luckily, I love drawing people, so as challenging as it may be, the outcome is always quite rewarding. Although I have a number of drawings in my sketchbook, I wanted to have a few drawings created on high quality paper that would look polished and well crafted for my portfolio. With that in mind, I decided to focus this week on images of people with animals.
I referenced pictures in some magazines I had laying around the studio and a few images I printed out of myself and some of my friends. I tried to choose images of people in interesting positions that were large enough to include detail, in order to practice different angles and perspectives. After I had the model down on paper, I incorporated some of the animal images that have been showing up in my other work recently. I am pleased with the end product, which is a series of four pen drawings on toned paper that I colored with washes of acrylic paint.
I am beginning to really enjoy the illustrative qualities that go along with drawing people. I think that often they are more intriguing than some of my straight animal drawings. The qualities of the animal that I pair with each model seems to add to the character of the person. What do you think?
Last week I spent a great deal of time in the studio, which is why I haven’t been posting as often as I’d like. To be honest, I am starting to feel a bit pressed for time. Brian and I have a month and a half before we set out on our sailing trip (if you are unaware, in November we are sailing down to the Caribbean and, if things go well, Central America). If I am going to send out some grad school applications, then I need to get on it. I have made a couple of interesting breakthroughs in my work in the last week and am eager to share them with you, but I am not quite ready. I will do a post about my new projects soon. For now, here are a few more sketchbook pages, and I apologize in advance if I seem absent from the blog over the coming weeks. Hopefully I will have quite a bit to show from it, and of course there will be plenty of boat news soon enough and a small art show to plan before we leave.
As you have probably noticed, I’ve gotten a little behind on my studio updates, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been productive. I’ve been managing my schedule well and have been spending about six hours a day in there. The big news is that I finished my bee painting. It came along much faster than expected. I actually finished it last week and am already in the midst of a new one that is focusing on ants. I am pushing myself a little bit farther on this new one, spending a great deal more time on the background of the painting. My goal is to work on my perspective and draw the viewer into the painting. We will see how it turns out. I like the concept and layout, but it is proving to be challenging. I’ll take it as a good sign, but expect that it will take a little bit longer than the bees.
Also, over the past few weeks, I finally modified some curtains for the boat (just in time for the weather to turn cooler) and worked on several more pages of my sketchbook. I experimented with watercolor and also worked on some portraiture. I also included some design elements, playing with patterns and shapes within my drawings. In the beginning, I wasn’t sure how these experiments would turn out at all; it had been a very long time since I worked on the human form. Generally I am pleased with the results and had a lot of fun creating them. Expect to see more in the future.
Also, I signed up for a profile on Society6, which is an online artist community that I stumbled upon recently. If you are an artist or illustrator, you should check it out. The site offers a great number of art grants, all of which sound pretty awesome (designing cd cover art, magazine spreads, art zines, etc. for companies as big as Vans and MTV, or other smaller art magazines and publishing companies). Anyway, my webpage is: www.society6.com/laraneeceart/. Most of what you’ll find on my Society6 page has already been posted at some point on the blog.
In about two weeks, I will be starting a five week batik-painting class at Redux Studios. The class only meets once a week, but I think it will be a great way for me to facilitate some creative interactions with some other people and learn a cool new skill. I figured that compared to a college course, this was pretty cheap ($160, all materials included), and I think it will compliment my screen-printing endeavors in the future. If you don’t know what batik painting is, it is a process of dying cloth using wax to create a design. It’s kind of an advanced version of tie dye. A number of saris and beach wraps have been dyed according to the batik process.
Brian and I are hopping a plane to the west coast this afternoon, so I wanted to post my studio update early this week. It’s been a short, but productive week. I spent about eight hours in the studio on Monday, five hours on Tuesday, and four hours yesterday. I worked on my sketchbook a little bit more, but more importantly, I started a new painting—and am nearly finished. This is a great sign, and I feel that all the extra time in my studio is paying off. Because I am sketching and color mixing everyday, I’m getting pretty fast at both of these tasks. I feel as though I am gaining confidence and precision. This may even prompt me to make a new studio goal: one painting a week. Judging from this week, I think it is a perfectly obtainable goal. Anyway, I’m off to the studio right now for an hour, to screen-print a tank top to wear on the trip. Hopefully I will get a post in during the trip, if not, then stay tuned for a big update when I get back. Ciao!
My artist inspiration for this week is Tiffany Bozic. About a year ago a friend of mine from Lorenzo de’Medici (the art school I attended in Italy), told me to check out this artist. I had been working on my animal portrait series, and she thought I might be interested. Bozic uses nature and animal imagery in a fresh way. You can read her bio here. I think her paintings are beautiful and full of emotion. Her titles allude to deeper metaphorical meanings such as No One’s Fault But My Own, Do What You Have To Do, or Sustenance. She works with washes of colors so her paintings have a soft, almost magical look and feel. I think they are brilliant and would love to bring more metaphor into my own work. There is an old interview with her on My Love for You’s blog if you are interested in learning more. I highly recommend checking her out.
Also, I guess I should tell you, this week is going to be a short one for me, as Brian and I are flying to Seattle on Thursday. Hopefully I will manage a few posts during our trip, but we have really packed in the plans. We will be spending a little bit of time in Seattle, then heading to the Gorge to see two nights of Phish, then driving down to Yosemite for a couple of days to see a former Americorps teammate (haven’t seen her in four years!!), and then to San Francisco for our last few days. I can’t wait to escape the heat and humidity we’ve been having here in South Carolina and to revisit the Pacific Northwest.
It’s surprising how quickly Friday rolled around this week. I feel like I am busier now, than I was when I was working full time. I managed to put in time at my studio everyday this week (and will head over there after this post), although I didn’t quite stick to my schedule. All told, I spent about 20 hours there this week. I am really hoping to increase that number to 25 or 30, but this is the most time I’ve spent in there consecutively so I am not disappointed. Also, there were a couple of design projects, writing projects, and some research that I completed on the boat.
I think the most important project that I worked on this week was my artist statement. To begin, I was nervous about writing it because, to be honest, I didn’t really know where I wanted to push my artwork, and I didn’t really understand what my art was telling me. Writing the artist statement was probably the best thing I could have done for myself, to give me focus and direction and also some great motivation. I spent several days writing notes to myself about why I enjoyed making art, why I chose to use certain materials, what I wanted to explore, and how my work was a reflection of me. I also looked at several Web articles (this one was probably the most helpful) on the topic and read about the topic in The Artist’s Guide by Jackie Battenfield. Battenfield’s guide was actually quite helpful because it included some strong examples of successful artist statements. After generating about two full pages of notes, I sat down at my computer and tried to make sense of it all. I am pleased with the outcome (which you can read on one of my About pages), and I feel confident about it even though it is still a work in progress.
In addition to the artist statement, I stretched and prepared a canvas for a new painting, sketched some studies of my subject, worked on a couple pages of my sketchbook, printed a shirt for a friend, emulsified a clean screen to burn today, created a t-shirt design for my first commissioned project, printed out some photographs to use for various studies, and hung a bunch of inspirational images in my studio. Not too bad for my first week.
Today marks the beginning of my full commitment to my self as an artist. Although it may seem to the outside observer that, since I’ve quit my job, I am just going to kick it for the rest of the summer and live a life of leisure, this is not the case. In fact, last week I wrote out a very detailed schedule to help me stay on track and attain the goals I have set for myself. I actually have quite a few projects and areas to focus on for the next three months (so many that I am not sure that I will be able to get them all done). The idea is to stay busy, inspired, keep aiming high, and, most importantly, keep building on my skills as an artist. You can see the transformation of our little pepper plant above; I hope, with a small amount of daily nurturing, to achieve similar growth and development as an artist (hot-pepper status ).
So here are the types of goals have I set for myself. The first major goal is to spend six hours in the studio every weekday. That means about 30 hours a week and more than double the amount of time I’ve been spending on my artwork over the past year and a half. I have also decided to develop and market a small screen-print t-shirt line. Just the art portfolio and screen-print line are enough to keep me quite busy, but I am also hoping to get into a more regular exercise routine, cook dinner about five nights a week, write on my blog three times a week, and work on a few sewing projects for the boat (and for me). As for this blog, I am hoping it will keep me on track this summer. I will be browsing the internet regularly for inspiration and information to help me in the studio, and I think writing about it will help me take a deeper look at my own work. I hope to inspire, not only myself, but my readers as well, and provide access to information that I find useful.
So let’s jump right in. Today I found some inspiring screen-printed posters on a site called Brainstorm (I found the site through OK Great’s blog). Here is the direct link to Brainstorm’s work: Brainstorm – Print – Silkscreen – Graphic Design – Posters. I really enjoy the colors and concepts of their work. Printing with multiple colors is one of my screen-printing goals and a skill I have been meaning to work on. Up to now, I have only dabbled with it, but since I now have the time to spend on it, I am hoping to tackle it this week. I think that printing in multiple colors and layers adds a complexity to the images and builds connections between the subjects in ways that can be quite insightful.
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Welcome Welcome to Forest and Fin, the documentation of an artist's adventures living and traveling on a '37 sailboat. Beginning in early 2009, when I moved onto an old Chris Craft sailboat with my boyfriend and I decided to become an artist, this blog chronicles the pursuit of my dreams, exploration, travel, and art.
Thanks for stopping by!
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