the art of yes (kes)

At the Mansfield Music & Art Society's Morini Gallery, 377 N. Main Street, Mansfield, MA from 9/3/15 through 10/16/15. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday 10 to 4 pm, or by appointment with MMAS. The gallery is also open (1) hour before all scheduled theater performances.

The show unveils the artistic process, inviting visitors to both witness and touch the work. Select activities are presented to pursue self-expression upon interaction with the exhibit. Consider that creativity exists as an essential organ in everyone. Each inspired effort that falls within the spectrum of building a sandcastle to painting the ceiling of a great cathedral matters. Creative endeavors mirror human responses to internal imaginative forces and external life experiences. Art is simply the tangible by-product of these acts.

Nothing New in The Mirror (skf)

 Hello Friends and Countrymen ( Lend me your eyes),

While visiting in Chicago, I was fortunate enough to visit and photograph The Chicago Botanical Gardens. It's an amazing place, filled with horticultural delights. The extensive rose gardens create a sensual landscape of colors, textures, and aromas that would inspire any perfume designer. Wonderful vignettes of pathways, trellies and decorative walls. I highly recommend a visit.

 However, I was glad to get back to the wilds of the DW Field in Brockton. After making a comparison between the two by exploring the differences through my painting of small intimate scenes , I was surprised that I found myself more inspired by the natural, i.e. weedy areas of the park.



                   It dawned on me that the benign neglect in the untended areas allowed me to discover something not calculated by the sophisticated designs.
                                                                                 Please don't misunderstand, I love gardens, to me they represent one of the many creative expressions
of cultural attainment. After watching the astronauts eating oak leaf lettuce on the space station, one begins to imagine great floating crystal palaces filled with Earth's most beautiful flowers and shrubs. I think of the long history of man's relationship to cultivation designs.


  Let's imagine the first garden, the Garden of Eden. How does this make us feel? What does it represent?

Now create in your mind The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Can you imagine the wonder of entering this lush space in the middle of a desert? Or can you envision the gardens at Samarkand? Or maybe the gardens at the Chateau de Versailles?

    And this is the crux of  my explanation,
gardens are a reflection of the human mind except perhaps for Eden, which in it's original intent still excludes the chaos of nature.The unruliness is novelty.
It's a chance to see new perceptions that are formed by relationships we're still trying to understand. These last four paintings are from DW Field. I'm profoundly excited by spaces and lines that might have been seen by other artists but I am seeing them for the first time and it is not designed by a human hand. It seems as if I'm peeling away veils to sneak a peek at something beyond us and there's a gratefulness for the chance.
The Hudson River School saw the Divine in the vast landscapes of the wilderness and I see the Sublime in the smallest of worlds. They seem to open for an instance and I hope I can capture the feeling of having witnessed something extraordinarily precious.
And every time I revisit a scene, there is a revealing of a grace not manipulated for a hurriedly copied blueprint. My fear is that someday we'll only be left with a miniaturization of the natural world for that's all we will believe that we're worthy of experiencing.
Can we truly calculate the loss when we've been reduced
 to a world that is only our reflection?

Kalendar Project - Part V (az)

This is part five and the final segment of this project. 

The Skeptic.

Would you believe her hair is made from a Martha Stewart punch? One of the punched pieces fell on her head and I thought it would be interesting to do her hair with it and so I did.  I thrifted the bottom glitter border. It was a girl's belt. 

The Healer

 Stars, moons, and made up moths were cut out of paper, with a generous dollop of opalescent paint for shimmery effect. 

                                                                      The Familiar

This piece honors the specials animals in our lives. In proper society we call them pets. But in our homes, they are the familiars, the companions who create magic in our lives. 

The Princess

I found a bag a of foil candy wrappers that I had been saving for a project and for some reason felt the compulsion to fold them in various sized squares as the border for this piece. I then painted the foil with gold paint. It was a little insane to do, but the effect is interesting. 

The Observer

All about the eyes. I made use of the Mediterranean evil eye design into a necklace/chest plate piece. Peacock feathers reiterate the eye theme.

The Fire Starter

This one did not have a preliminary sketch. I drew her on watercolor paper and placed her on the canvas. The others had a sketch that was photocopied on thin watercolor paper. Usually, 

if I draw a picture, I sometimes have to fix it many times and I ruin the paper. This was success from the get go. 

The Guardian 

This piece was inspired by while Karin was telling me about her Hive project. My hive details consist of wire ribbon and printed ribbon. A Toffifay candy holder gives dimension to the honeycomb. On the  honeycomb side is a little mesh ribbon tubing made to look like honey. The Guardian had a  preliminary drawing but it was 'Frankenstein-ed' on three pieces of paper. Basically, I started it on a small scrap of paper and then taped on more paper to finish it.  I then used tracing paper to transfer the image to watercolor paper.