The Sausalito Art Festival, San Francisco

San Francisco Harbour enroute to Sausalito Art Festival

 I'm writing this in chilly San Francisco.  You can see how dull it has been from the photo above!   I'm here visiting my son and I planned the visit so I could take in the Sausalito Art Festival.   It's rated as one of the top art fairs in North America and so I was really excited to get there and be impressed and inspired by the high standard of work.  I'm not sure why, but I didn't find it as exciting as I expected.


We had a nice trip over the harbour on the Blue and Gold line which took us directly to the art show right on the edge of the water.  We were there around midday on the Saturday and the crowds were just starting to arrive.  They really get a great turnout and because you have to pay a good fee to get in, you know that the people who come are actually reasonably interested in art and not just our walking their dog.  It's a large show and as I was with other family members I couldn't take all day to go around but I did manage to do the circuit and see most, if not all, of the artists work.

My favorite was enamel work by Judy Stone.  Her work, which I first thought was porcelain, was beautiful!  I loved the wired parts of her bowls and the beautiful colors.  She has a great video on her site showing the process of creating the bowls which was very interesting.  I don't think the photos on her site do justice to the wonderful colors and presence her work has when you see the actual thing. http://www.jstoneenamels.com

I also liked the abstract paintings of Paula Boas.  http://www.paulaboas.com  Alenjandro Martinez-Pena http://www.martinez-pena.com and Sue Cretarolo http://www.suecretarolo.com.

The printmaker Fernado Reyes had some very interesting work and I particularly liked this image. http://www.freyesart.com/Works_on_Paper/Pages/Monoprints.html#0 .
Do check out his other work too. 

There was also a wonderful glass artist and a guy who made a really quirky series of ceramic cars with funny people in them.  His craftsmanship was great.  Unfortunately I don't have photos of his work and I couldn't find his link on the festival page.

The picture below shows one of the most expensive works we saw.  The image was made with silk thread and obviously took many many hours to make.  You can see the image in the left of the picture taken with two smiling family members.  I'm using a different computer and couldn't work out how to crop them out of the photo!

Another favorite was Robert Burridge http://www.robertburridge.com/roadside_attractions/index.html
and http://www.robertburridge.com/Abstracts/wingland/index.html

All in all it was a good day but I wasn't tingling from the experience.

Art in Portugal

I'm very lucky to be in Portugal on holiday.  When I'm away I love to go and see local art so I'm always looking for Galleries however here in the Algarve in Portugal they are almost non existent.  This is my third visit here and I think I have only found five in total but yesterday was very exciting because I actually found a really nice one with some interesting work.  The young lady working there said that people in Portugal don't buy much art.  I'm sure the poor economy has a lot to do with it but it appears that there just isn't much interest.

I bought art materials here with me and intended doing some art each day but it's hard not to be seduced by the beautiful weather outside and the interesting places to visit.  To justify my lack of work I have been taking lots of photos.  Yesterday we went to a totally amazing church called the Sao Lourenco Chapel.  The walls inside were completely covered in blue painted tiles showing the martyrdom of St Lourenco or Lawrence as I guess his name is in English.  It was absolutely amazing and quite beautiful inside despite the awful theme. It is a small chapel or church but one of the most stunning I have seen.  Taking photos inside was not allowed but here are a couple from the outside.

Sao Lourenco Chapel

Blue tile picture on the back of Sao Lourenco Chapel

The beaches are fantastic.  A day or so ago we went to a small town called Luz where we sat in the sun outside and had lunch overlooking the sea.  The scenery was amazing.  We felt very lucky to be here.

Beach at Luz, Algarve, Portugal

View from our lunch spot at Luz

More to come.

In and Out of the Studio

The last few days have been spent applying to upcoming art festivals and planning a new kitchen to replace the very old one in our apartment. It's all very time consuming. One of the festivals required actual printed photographs and after working perfectly for months my printer decided to play up. It took me the better part of six hours and lots of good paper to get the six required photos! Hardly a good use of time.

Today I will be printing up labels and getting organized to hang a show on Monday at a very nice local restaurant called Insomnia here in Toronto. Restaurant shows are very big in this city. I was also contacted yesterday about having a show in Ottawa in March/April 2011 at the Ottawa Folk Center. They have a huge gallery space with ongoing shows and this will be a perfect venue for my musical paintings.

I am posting a photograph, not a very good one unfortunately, of the full sized work on board that I have been working on using printmaking as a basis. The oil inks have finally dried so that I can begin painting in the central area. Now to decide what ccolours to use.......

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.