Emerging from distraction

"Emerging," contemporary paper collage on wood panel, 10 x 10 x 1." © 2011, Janice McDonald.

I've been distracted by life lately: experiencing a bit of a letdown from all the show excitement, catching up with work/commitments I'd delayed, busy traveling to southern California and New Orleans... and not adding much to this blog! I think I've almost caught up with myself. The to-do list is still long, but not quite so daunting, this week.

Some exciting news: I was invited to become a member of Spark Gallery, the oldest cooperative gallery in Denver, a presence in the local art scene for 30+ years. Soon I will have a page to represent myself/my work on their website. I'm looking forward to getting to know this community of artists and being involved in the functioning of the gallery, as well as showing there regularly.

I was really pleased to have sold well and have enjoyed delivering collages to their new owners and homes... still a couple more deliveries to coordinate. (You know who you are!) Based on the show, I'm also exploring producing prints of the collages, thinking about the potential of collage imagery for set design, considering sourcing and working with bigger hunks of paper to create larger pieces -- among other big, exciting, and somewhat wild, ideas!

So, in the studio working away this week... nice to be back at it!

Eggstravaganza, wild egg decorating soiree

Last night was our annual night-before-Easter egg-decorating party. Six creative people and five dozen eggs later, here are the favorites! Any tool/technique and combining of colors was fair game. We used Paas® egg colors, rubber bands, string, cello tape, duct tape, china markers, Sharpie® markers, pencils, colored pencils, crayons, etc. Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate it!

Now that I've got most of the colors off my hands, I'm heading to the gallery to take down my show... Rather bittersweet as it has been such a great experience for me with positive comments, sales, good connections made, and an invitation to join the coop gallery. 

Kevin Spacey on the importance of the arts

Worth watching... the entire Nancy Hanks Lecture at The Kennedy Center (April 4th, 2011) which prompted this interview about the role of the arts is here.

Incoming: playing with daily discoveries

Several times a day I find oddball bits and pieces* that I want to play with... and these elements most often don't relate to the larger collages in process. So, I've been experimenting with some free form collage compositions on lined banana paper, which has been coated front and back with acrylic medium, to add heft and some durability. The banana paper has a wonderful random speckled texture, and the brown ruled lines are in opposition to that... there's something quite delightful about working on it.Here's a detail from one in progress that includes a questionable bit of positive thinking. What struck me as unusual about it was the passivity of the comment. It seems there is a lot of encouragement in print, much of it the "shelf-help" variety -- which sounds good at first, but is entirely too trite for my taste.*Doodles, packaging fragments, snippets of text, stamps, junk mail, to-do lists, leftover scraps, fruit labels, receipts, handwritten notes, the photos you always meant to throw away... you get the drift, anything goes!