Floor Cloth

Saturday my friend Cathy Dorris offered a wonderful Floor Cloth workshop in her studio in Talent, Oregon which is only a half hour from my home. Seven of us spent the day turning pieces of duck cloth (a canvas like cotton fabric) into rugs.
I did my homework but I bought too flimsy a fabric and the roll of carpet tape was funky and the design I'd planned on didn't grab me in the same way that day as it did before so the colors of most of the paints I brought didn't go with the aboriginal design that evolved.
I was in the right place but had the wrong stuff. Sound familiar?
Luckily Cathy operates like me, she has every color of paint in every consistency from powdered to fluid to thick body. And she was prepared for those of us who needed the right stuff and had cloth and tape we could purchase.
She also had many, many photos of carpets from around the world on her computer so we spent time looking at them and printing out people's favorites. That's when the seduction into a more organic expression took place. That translates as: not following a plan or pattern. I could just do whatever felt right in the moment. How freeing!
It was a wonderful day, I carved a potato stamp and borrowed others, used my brushes and their handle ends to make dots til my eyes crossed and actually finished my rug in a day. Okay so I was there from 9am until about 6:30 and we didn't even break for lunch and it was a long day but oh, so worth it.

You can check out Cathy's art at http://cathydorris.com

And look at the class she is teaching at Art & Soul in Portland in the fall. http://www.artandsoulretreat.com/portland2010-art-workshops/1651/index.htm

I have taken the workshop she is teaching there and recommend it highly. You will learn about color, texture and embellishment, have a great time with a very skilled instructor, and leave with a great piece of art.

My Kind of People

My daughter, Christine, had a birthday at the end of March so for a gift I gave her a membership and tickets to the Ashland Independent Film Festival. This was one of the best ideas I have ever had because she loved seeing 12 films over a period of 4 days and I got to be with her and share the experience. Our film festival is just wonderful. Ashland is a lovely town, not too big, with lots of culture. The theaters are small, so it is very intimate and easy to navigate. We got to spend a little time with some of my friends and ate some good food and talked and talked and talked about the films we saw. I loved it. Yesterday we saw several short animation films. Animation has never thrilled me so I mostly went to be with Christine. Oh, and also I am trying to move through my mind sets that say I won't like things. I want to expand my horizons. I really did enjoy some of the films but what I totally got off on was seeing and listening to some of the film makers who traveled to the festival and were there for questions and answers after the showing. What inspiring artists! They are so passionate and they love what they do. They can't not do it! They have to create. My kind of people.
I saw a film about a famous American tattoo artist . It is Ed Hardy: Tattoo the World. This is worth seeing for a couple of reasons. First, he loved tattoo art as a 12 year old and then he moved away from it when he went to the art institute but went back to it and has been an amazing success as an artist. His images are licensed and Ed Hardy stores made over $700,000,000 dollars last year. Who says you can't make a living being an artist! Another reason to see the film is to get a glimpse of the 2000 square foot piece of art he painted on tyvek, and to watch him doing some of it. He spoke after the film and he was so available and confident and humble. Just a regular guy who, okay, has amazing talent but mostly it seems he's where he is because he followed his heart and worked real hard at his art. Oh, and the other thing about Ed Hardy is that he taught other artists what he knew. More of my kind of people.

I've been having a blast playing in the studio!
I'm preparing my classes for Art & Soul in Hampton in May including making some sample books. The three classes I'm teaching there are A Bevy of Books, The Episodic Journal, and Paste Paper Extravaganza! Just listing the names gets me excited to teach and excited to see what my students come up with. I am always amazed at the beauty and creativity of my student's work.
Lately I've been sifting through boxes of art papers, the "this and that" I've created and I decide to chop a bunch of stuff up and create a montage of all kinds of things I have made over the years. Experiments with plaster on paper, gesso for texture, of course paste paper, and crystal paper...those wonderful effects you can get on sandwich paper by taking prints off originals, marbled papers, the list goes on and on. I can't seem to get enough of playing and experimenting with paper, color and texture. But my stash is getting out of hand, something had to be done.
I tucked a variety of about 40 pieces in bags to offer when I vend at various art retreats and on my Etsy site. On Etsy they are called Fabulous Paper Variety Packs.

I can hardly believe it, but it's already time to start working on proposals for teaching next year. I am going to apply to Art Unraveled for the first time. So I need a lot of ideas, a lot of classes.
Playing with these creations of mine inspires me to do a new surface design workshop. I'll let you know what I come up with.


And now a note about Stella: Stella has grown up to fully embrace her "Ruler of Our World" role. She is a serious cat. She is content, healthy and beautiful. She is not very silly. I think this summer we will find a little playmate for her to stir it up a bit.

My Pastepaper Using the Stencils

Here are some of the pieces I am playing with, some of which will make their way into books. Maybe.

I start out with a fairly limited palette and as I work the colors get "modified". That's my new way of saying the colors get polluted as I put the blue brush into the red container and the yellow brush into the green container because I am working so fast and having so much fun.

These changes in the original colors are often quite wonderful. As the colors change they become more mine and often lead me to move in a new direction design-wise.

Now these pieces below are interesting to me. I was cleaning up and wanted to use the paint that was leftover on the sponges, brushes and stencils. I was working on papers that had something on them already. The dogs. The rejects you don't know why you saved. I just stenciled over them. I got hooked on one stencil in particular and worked really fast and messy and I absolutely love the rawness of some of these pieces. I couldn't stop and the clean up phase was long gone and I was making yet more mess.

Life is good.

Sensational Stencils

Recently more and more wonderful manufactured stencils have come into my world. This is a good thing because I absolutely thrive on pattern, lots of pattern. And I get tired of using the same thing over and over. And I like to have many choices. But I don't really like cutting my own stencils so what a thrill to have new designs to play with. The best thing is that you can get the same design in various sizes. Maria, who owns the store Collage on Alberta St. in Portland, OR and sets up shop at the Art & Soul events, bless her heart, carries the Crafter's Workshop plastic templates. These stencils are a nice thickness of plastic, which is something I appreciate.For those of you who will be at Art & Soul in Hampton, VA it is possible that Maria will have the Crafter's Workshop plastic templates available for sale. I will be bringing mine for use in my classes.

My friend and super-student, Marcy turned me on to another stencil source which is fabulous, http://www.istencils.com/ . These are not as thick, but oh the choices. You can spend hours on the istencils website, but the categories I really like are: "all over repeats", "backgrounds", and "animal prints".

If you visit my etsy website, http://albiesmith.etsy.com/ , you will be able to see how I used stencils on my paste paper. Notice the mix of large and small stencils of the same design on one piece of paper. And don't just look, try making some yourself. Big fun.

An Artful Journey

Though it has been a week since An Artful Journey ended I am still under it's spell. The opportunity to have this time together exploring whatever held interest for each of us was a wonderful experience for me as an instructor. I had so much fun and loved every moment. It was a big commitment of time and resources for people to come to a retreat of this kind; three days with one instructor. The big surprise for me was how many signed up for my workshop who had never taken classes with me before. How courageous and trusting! One of the things I most enjoyed was how helpful and encouraging everyone was to each other. It felt to me that we were bathed in love, gratitude and appreciation for those days. It's a lovely way to live and I find myself feeling that much of the time now. It's as if I have received a big enough dose that it's boosted me to a new level of well-being in my life.
One of our first projects was a journal. Several people used them immediately to document their journey.

Look at the beautiful work that was created. Our classroom wasn't huge so we took over much of the hallway outside it to dry papers. Lots of folks passing by had a chance to lust over them!
One of the offerings was an "artist's challenge". I gave each person a small piece of my own paste paper and a piece of heavily textured gesso paper and asked them to incorporate them into a piece of their work. The book covers in the above photo are one artist's response. A good deal of experimentation and some innovation went into these sweet little books.Look at the variety below. One of the benefits of working with the same medium for days is the time to explore and find what you really like and get good at it.

Here we all are, a bunch of happy, satisfied and connected women who created not only art, but a safe and nurturing space to take chances and succeed.An Artful Journey is a creation of Cindy O'Leary. She took a chance and shared with us and it was a rich and deep experience. Thanks and love to Cindy.

What's your art?

I was visiting with some long time friends recently and as I looked around the table I thought what a creative group we are, we maker of things. My friend Karina is a maker of relationships. She has an amazing capacity for intimacy. Connections with people are foremost for her and the way she loves and nurtures her friends and family is deep and juicy.

My friend, the incredibly talented artist Ann Georgia, is diving into the art of hanging shows of artist's work. Picture this, several artists with different styles and mediums bring in their paintings, sculptures, drawings, metalwork, woodwork, and so on. Their works of art are now the medium she gets to create with. It is a lot of work and no small feat to hang a bunch of different artist's work and present it all to advantage. To create a conversation between the pieces. To bring all the parts together to create one work of art made up of the many. Thank goodness someone likes to do this. And this artist does it very well indeed.

We are all putting our energy somewhere, hopefully we are making our lives and those of others more satisfying and beautiful. How do you honor your creativity? What is your art?