The Kimono Prints

A few years back I began a series of collagraph prints based on the Kimono. It's such a wonderful shape and great to work within. I felt like a dress designer putting these together and could go on and on thinking up new designs. Now that I have my own press I am able to start making them again and yesterday I was in the studio pulling one for a friend when I thought about posting a few here.

The Kimonos are signed with my name and the Japanese characters for my name. The colors are vibrant and the image is impressed into the paper by the press embossing it which unfortunately doesn't show up in photographs. I have added a detail picture so that you can see a close up.

There are a couple of beautiful Kimonos framed up at the

Heaven Blue Rose Gallery

in Roswell north of Atlanta however if you are interested in this one you can contact me or the gallery. I will post more in coming days. You can also check out my web site http://www.susanneclark.com/ and look on the gallery page for collagraph prints.

"Signs of Life"

Here is the latest piece I have been working on. It's a collagraph for an exhibition with the theme "Evolve" starting soon at Heaven Blue Rose Gallery in Roswell, north of Atlanta.

Five basic shapes occur in the art of all cultures; the circle, the cross, the triangle, the square and the spiral. According to a twenty year study by anthropologist Angeles Arrien people in different cultures give similar meanings to these shapes. The circle symbolizes wholeness, the square stability, the triangle dreams and goals, the cross relationship and the spiral means growth and evolution.

According to the study, the order of preference in which a person places the symbols, shows which of the five universal processes of change and growth is being experienced most intensely by that person at that time.

The spiral symbolizes the process of growth and evolution. It is a process of coming to the same point again and again, but at a different level, so that everything is seen in a new light.

Art of Music Exhibition

Well I have gone and done it again! Every time I start a new work I intend to take photos of the process to post on my blog but once again I got into the studio, started working and forgot all about it.

Because I am excited about finally having my own press I am focusing on printmaking and trying out a lot of different ideas and techniques. There is an exhibition coming up soon at the gallery in Atlanta where I show my work and the theme is "Evolve" so I am working on a piece with that in mind however I have a friend visiting this week and so I've been busy going out and not doing any work.

Last week I had notification that I have had two pieces accepted for the "Art of Music" exhibition at Mills Pond House Gallery in Smithtown in NY state. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend the exhibition which is a pity as I would love to see the other musical works being shown. This would be of special interest to me as musical instruments have been my main theme over the past few years. The two pieces being shown are posted below. They are "Dynamic Duo" and "Well Conducted"

Later in the week I will be back in the studio.

Experimental Paintings

Yesterday I went to my weekly life drawing group at the Atlanta Artists Center. I really enjoy it especially when the model is interesting as she was yesterday. I like to either just do a charcoal drawing or if I am painting I want to try something different and work in a way I don't usually do. These are my experimental paintings and I am not really interested in trying to make a pretty painting. Yesterday I worked in oil pastels on a board that I had painted with the left over acrylic on my pallet. The board was very textured and the paint very random and messy. Most of the colors were primaries so it was very bright. The oil pastels sat up on the textured surface leaving much of the underlying pattern showing. It's certainly not a neat finished looking painting but it was a fun experiment. I will add a couple of pictures showing the detail so you can see the effect. I called it "Looking to the Future"

Collagraph Landscape called "Mystery Mountain"

Yesterday I spent in the studio here in Atlanta making a new plate for a collagraph. It was really nice to have the door to my studio/garage open and the sun shining in.while I worked.

In case you don't know anything about printmaking, a plate is what you print the image from, and for a collagraph, it is usually a thin piece of board, metal or cardboard that you have collaged or stuck various pieces of paper or other stuff on. You can see some examples at my web site.

I spent a long time working on it and was quite pleased at the end of the day, however, when I sat down and reviewed what I had done later that evening, it didn't look good at all! It's so frustrating. I won't give up on it though as there are some really nice parts. I was trying to have some large clear areas instead of all over pattern, but in the end there was just too much space where nothing was happening. I will have to add some more complexity in those areas to make it work better.

Above is the photo of "Mystery Mountain" that I did a few weeks back before I went to Toronto. I am quite happy with it but I am not sure about the dark area at the bottom and I am wondering about cropping that part off when I frame it. If you have an opinion please let me know. There are some wonderful color combinations in it when you see it up close. Click on the image to have a look. Oh the joy of printmaking, I love it!

Where Does All My Time Go?

This weekend, seems to me, to have been completely wasted. I spent hours on the computer updating things on my web site and trying to set up a paypal system so that I can sell reproductions of some of my paintings online. The web site building program I use is called Homestead and it's really good and easy to use however the thing I find most problematic is sorting out the shipping and taxes. Unfortunately at the level I have in Homestead they don't offer a shipping and taxes option so I have to build all those into the pricing. Entering all the info and pictures in just takes time. Perhaps I was just procrastinating about starting another painting or print!

I have run out of steam and enthusiasm for doing a small print to enter in BIMPE. I find small really hard to do. I think I will go back to bigger things!

One thing I did achieve this week was making a submission to an exhibition coming up that is focused on Music, and I donated a couple of paintings for a charity fundraiser here in Dunwoody.

Yesterday!

Yesterday was quite exciting for me. After several months in preparation I finally recieved a box of CDs on which my musical painting, Fractured Cello, is the cover artwork. The 'Strauss and Rachmaninoff Sonatas for Cello and Piano' feature Ruth Sommers, cello, and David Oei on piano. Both are musicians with Festival Chamber Music (FCM) in New York city.

The other thing that happened was that I picked up a copy of Access Atlanta a weekly arts insert in the Atlanta Journal where my large wacky collagraph 'All You Need is Love' was printed very large in color! I was away when the paper came out but Cathy at Heaven Blue Rose Gallery in Roswell where my prints are exhibited had kept me a copy. Last night when I went up to the gallery to pick up the paper the amazing 'Alive After Five' event was on. Canton St has a group of galleries and lots of restaurants who all get together to make the monthly events a real swinging affair. There were two bands playing and the street was filled with people eating, walking and shopping. Very impressive and worth visiting if you live in the Atlanta area. Just make sure to get there early if you want a place to park and eat. Details of dates are on the Gallery website.

In the Studio Again. New Collagraph Print called "Purse and Pumps"

We have just spent the past two weeks on holiday in Toronto helping to build a kitchen and doing lots of painting and cleaning. for our middle son and his partner. His Dad and I along with his partner's step Dad worked non stop for the two weeks and I have to say that it is going to be fantastic. It's a great feeling to see something come together so well after all the work. We now need another holiday to recover.

It's good to be back and in the studio again and creating some new collagraph prints. My printing press arrived just a few days before I left and I only had time to play with it a bit before going to Toronto. I had been looking forward to using all the fabulous ink colours and experimenting!

Today I started work on some small, 4 x 6 inch collagraphs to enter in BIMPE, the Biennial International Print Exhibition held in Vancouver. It is a real challenge for me to work so small but challenges are good and can lead to exciting new work, well that is what I am hoping happens. I will post pictures of the results, meanwhile here is a picture of my first attempt done prior to going away. It's a pretty girly artwork called 'Purse and Pumps'.

Printmaking Update!

As I promised, here is the finished result. It was great fun playing with this method and I think the result is quite effective. I am eager to try incorporating this technique into some of my paintings on canvas.

I based this print on a painting I did a year or so ago. It was one of three very large works featuring women from different cultures. The Flamenco dancer would be interesting to do too and I could add drawings around her based on photographs I took during a trip to Spain in 2006. So many exciting things to try!

A Little Diversion Into Simple Printmaking

So my printing press has arrived and now sits ready for action in my studio. I'm waiting for the inks to arrive from the UK. I also have lots of new canvas's ready for painting on but I have been eager to get started on the printmaking. I happened upon an article about making simple prints using styrofoam as a printing plate so I thought I would give that a try using the one tin of ink that I already have. Because I am a vegetarian I don't buy meat and so I don't have a ready supply of styrofoam containers so I went out and bought some disposable plates and cut the centers out of them. This gave me small 4inch squares to use. The idea is that you draw into the styrofoam with a pencil or pen, ink it up and then press it firmly onto paper. Where the lines are impressed the ink doesn't print and the original colour of the paper shows through. Very simple to do and in fact children do it at pre school. The only ink I have is gold so I had great fun printing with this on different coloured paper but I loved it on black. Then I got very excited about the possibilities and had to rush off to the art store to buy some decent black watercolour/printing paper.

By making a picture using many of the small plates you have more options.I made several prints of a multi plate print based on a painting I did a while back. The first one, pictured above, was a bit messy as the registration of the plates wasn't very good so with the next one I was more careful, however, it was too perfect and lacked the more print quality that I was after. I also ran one through the press under very gentle pressure using the plate I had already printed from but that still had some ink on it. This gave a very soft print that I thought I could use as part of a collage however I decided to paint part of it to see how that would turn look. You will have to check back for my next post to see how that has turned out.

Heaven Blue Rose Gallery and "Art at Peachtree" Show

This was a very artsy weekend for me. Prior to my trip to Toronto I submitted some work to the Heaven Blue Rose Contemporary Gallery in Roswell. This is the first gallery I have applied to since moving to Atlanta and they will now be showing my printmaking and collage works. I spent several hours up at the gallery on Friday sorting out the details and organizing the framing of several pieces including the wacky print in my last post. I am always horrified by the cost of framing but the frame on this print will be great and really enhance the whole look.

I also exhibited at the "Art at Peachtree Show" an event put on by the Peachtree Presbyterian Church and the Atlantic Artists Center and sold one of my pieces there.

My life has been interesting with all the moves we have done however it is a problem for my art career. I just start to get my work known and build up a clientele and then we move. It will be the same this time too as we are only in Atlanta for a three year period and then we will move to Toronto.

House renovation, music and collagraph printmaking!

The past few weeks have been very busy for me. I just spent ten days up in Toronto. It's a great city but it isn't the best time of year to visit. The snow is mounded up everywhere and the place looks dirty. Once spring comes it will clean up and regain it's charm. What really upsets me is the way smokers stand outside the front door of buildings while they have a smoke and then drop their butts on the ground and go inside. There are butts lying everywhere. Why can't smokers clean up their act.

Now that I have voiced my anger at the disrespect of the environment I will move on to something about creativity. While in Toronto I was helping my son, who has just bought a house, to decide on some basic renovations. It's an old house right downtown in an area called Little Italy. We decided on the style for a kitchen, some modular wardrobes and paint colour for the main living area. It's pretty exciting, but challenging, trying to create some oomph and visual excitement for the house on a fairly small budget. However it's all coming together and we have enjoyed doing it. My son is a full time musician and parallel to all this renovation activity he is busy writing material for his next CD. In a future posting I want to write about his creative process and how similar it is to a visual artists.

My big thing this week has been the purchase of a printing press so that I can get back into printmaking. More on this next time. Just for fun I have added a very wacky print I did a year or so ago.

The Conductor's Hands

So I thought I would post the painting that was supposed to be done in soft greys so that you can see how it got totally out of control and ended up full of colour. I had been wanting to do some works with hands in them and the idea of a conductor's hands in front of instruments came to mind. I think I can take this idea and make more of it in future paintings. If you have any comments I would love to hear them.

I saw a great movie last night and I keep thinking about it. I thought the story was very creative and it totally transported me into it's world. Creativity is an amazing human attribute and we see wonderful examples of it all around us every day. I watched a man walking down the street a day or so ago and he looked as if he was talking to himself but of course he had one of those headsets and was talking on his cellphone. I started thinking of just how amazing all the technology we take for granted actually is. Years ago when people travelled by horse and stagecoach, if you had told them that in the future the coaches would be horseless, that they would be heated or cooled depending on the weather, that you would be able listen to music, talk to people who weren't there and even watch pictures on a little box, they would have laughed and yet through human creativity we do all of these things.

To get back to the movie I was impressed with, it was called 'The Lives of Others'. You can read a review of it on Rotten Tomatoes. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_lives_of_others/

I started a new painting a couple of days ago. I had this idea that I wanted a very muted, high key painting with a lot of different greys in it. I had been admiring some wonderful work with a palette like this and I thought I would like to try and do something similar in coloring. Well I don't quite know what happened but what I ended up with was a painting that is far removed from that initial idea.

I always start a painting by flowing lots of color onto the canvas in a very watery manner to make the underpainting. I build the image up with successive layers of paint calming down the colors and defining the imagery as I go. The problem is that the colors look so wonderful, glowing and delicious that I can't bear to lose them and cover them over with more opaque layers of muted color, so my work always seems to end up being very colorful. I don't think I have ever been a very muted person anyway. I tend to love dramatic art with a lot of style.

I will try again with my next painting and perhaps bit by bit I will be able to incorporate some of these beautiful shades into my work. Art is so reflective of who we are personally and in trying to change the way we paint we are actually changing part of ourselves. No wonder it is so difficult.

Just a few words now on spelling. I have lived in NZ and Canada, where they spell the same way as the British, and several times in the US where things are spelt differently. I am trying to decide which way I should be spelling here in my blog and on my web site.

Most English words have an internationally-accepted spelling, but there are a few that, spelt one way are correct to some readers, and spelled another way look right to others. Embracing the universality of the Internet, I have adopted a blend of UK and US English. This also makes it easier for me so that I don't have to choose each time I write. Hopefully, you'll be only mildly irritated when the other correct version appears.

I have been putting it off for months. Procrastinating and filling my time instead by hanging out online and watching quite tedious interior design shows on TV, but the time has finally come to confront the blog.

Deciding what to write is an interesting exercise. What could I possibly write, I thought, that would be of interest to other artists and people who visit my website. Somehow though, I knew from past experience, getting started is the hardest part. Once one commits to a project and starts to work, things fall into line and start to happen, and so I am hoping that this is the case as I start with my first blog entry

I recently moved to Atlanta from York, in the UK, where I lived from late 2001 until March 2007. It was a very disruptive move as there was a long delay between packing up and finally moving into a permanent home here in Atlanta and during that time I really wasn't able to paint. Now I have my studio set up again and have completed quite a few new paintings.

I have been working for some time now on a series based on musical instruments. I started doing these a few years back because my middle son Todd, who is a musician, wanted a painting to give as a gift of appreciation to the producer he had just finished making a CD with. He suggested a cello or violin because they have a nice curvy shape. Being a good mother I immediately went to work on the suggested subject and found I really enjoyed doing it. That was the start of a whole series of cello works and then I got interested in saxophones. These paintings have been very popular with music lovers and musicians and I have sold most of them. They have also been used as posters for musical events in countries as far away as Australia and Switzerland, with my permission of course, and as the cover on an internet music society cookbook, a Christmas card for the Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera House, and on a soon to be released cover of a classical music CD.

My most recent piece "Variation on a Musical Theme 2" is a large dramatic painting of saxophones overlaying a cello and is full of bold colors as is most of my work. Now I want to continue that theme but perhaps take it in a new and more abstract direction However I have the canvas out and some ideas so I just need to start.