Parts of Art

I am excited to announce that Parts of Art will be showing at: Palmer Park Art Fair Detroit MI June 2 & 3 Talbot Street Art Fair Indianapolis IN June 16 & 17 Please come and see my latest pieces at one of these fine shows.  When you come, mention my blog and you will receive 20% off your purchase.  See you there!

     Earlier this month I made the decision to compete. The competition is for a monetary prize that will be awarded in an upcoming show. This is an art show in which I have participated for the last three years, and, for me, the awards are fairly substantial. I am not usually one to go after awards, but I figure I’m going there anyway, so I might as well compete.      The other motivator for me is that I need a new jury image or two. Somewhere along the line I learned that jury images need to show a constistency; the pieces need to look like they are all from the same DNA, so to speak. I have had a concern that my jury images are too dissimilar, and someday I need to make them more cohesive.         So someday arrived this week. I had three days off work, so I scheduled studio time to design and build a show piece that 1) could possibly win a prize, and 2) be photographed for a jury image for next year’s sh...

      I am a huge fan of words and the many shades of meaning between words. I also love to describe and name my art pieces according to their color group. This is why I was delighted to find a lovely chart called  the color thesaurus  by Ingrid Sandberg.      Seeing the color thesaurus brings up the question “ why would I describe a jewelry piece as white when I could paint a imaginative image in the reader’s mind if  I call it eggshell, porcelain or chiffon? After all, if you’ve ever strolled the aisle of paint colors you know there are a zillion shades of white.      Once a friend asked if I would come help her decide a color to have her living room painted. Being a student of color and an ambitious professional artist, I agreed to meet her in her home. All the way over to her house I was drilling my mind with everything I could remember about colors and their psychological effects. I got to her house and sh...

Harmony, that wonderful balance when there's not too little, not too much, when visually it's just right.  At times it eludes us, and we have to get back to the basics.  So here it is: Harmony 101

  What is it that makes art happen? Does it happen because the preliminary sketch has every painstaking detail? Or does it just flow out of the fingertips of the artist? Or is it somewhere in between? Serendipity: noun.  1. An aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.  2. Good fortune; luck. Plan: noun. 1. a scheme or method of acting, doing, proceeding making, etc, developed in advance: battle plans. Like I always say, there is a balance in there somewhere.         Once I was at an art show which was not very well attended and I had time on my hands. I was showing mixed media collage. It was a beautiful venue in Florida and the weather was spectacular. I don't know where the customers were, but dang it, I needed something to do. I found some white typing paper and a ballpoint pen and starting sketching the palm tree across from my booth. I sketched in a very stylized, doodling kind of way. And since I had nothing else to do and...

So what's the deal with harmony?        Harmony lies between he two extremes of monotony and discord. It combines the character of both.        The dictionary defines it as   "A consistent, orderly, or pleasing arrangement of parts; congruity."     Here's one of my family treasures.           My dad acquired this sign and hung it in his Sigma Chi frat house when he was going to Butler University in the forties. He met my mom on campus at the library and the rest is history. She told me recently that the sign was hung in their first house, as well as every house they lived in during their 20 year marriage.  I remember it hanging in the basement where my dad had his office. When mom and dad split up the sign went with her. (So much for marital harmony!) Years later when my mom remarried the sign appeared over the back door in the garage. A few years ago my brother spoke up and said ...

         Symmetrical balance in visual art is design that has equal areas on both sides of a central line. It may be equal color value, equal amount and kind of ornament, or equal size and shape of components.        Perfect symmetry is a mirror image, where two sides are separated by a central axis and one side is the exact opposite of the other. The best example I know of to show perfect symmetry in an art form is the majestic Taj Mahal.          Here is another example of formal symmetry as an art form, although it is not quite as formal. It is still symmetrical but with variety on each side.  We are symmetrical beings. Our physical bodies are perfectly balanced by the central axis of our spine, with the same components on each side of that axis.  We are designed with symmetrical balance, and so we seek balance in our li...