I made a Treasury List!

For any of my readers who know about Etsy or have shops on Etsy, you know a bit about how tricky it can be to get a Treasury list published. Well, tonight I was able to do it! I was very excited! My list is titled, "Mad about the vintage." And you can see it here. It celebrates my love for everything vintage or vintage-inspired.

It felt good to be able to make one since I have been on other people's treasury lists and haven't been able to do any payback yet. So here is my payback to the world for this week. A nice way to start it off.

Treasury list does not expire until Tuesday night at 11pm. So there's plenty of time to shop. Just sayin'. Here's one item from the list to whet your appetite.

Photo Shoot: 9/25/09

Today was the day I needed a break. I needed to get some mojo back; work on new ideas and get some new work going. Even though I have production work to do, I needed to stop thinking about that today and release a little tension by doing something creative. I have been cranking out the same things for the past couple months now, recycling old photos, old patterns, and it is getting really old to me. I feel like my products are getting stale. My kids were both off of school today, so I asked my older son who loves photography, if he wanted to come with me on a little adventure to look for something to take a picture of. And we found plenty.

We live in Northern Franklin county, pretty close to the beginning of Delaware County which is much more rural than our neighborhood. We pretty much live in suburbia thanks to good schools, safe streets and affordable homes, so it's fun to venture outside of it whenever I can because frankly, if I didn't have kids, I just wouldn't be living here.

So when we reached Delaware County, we pulled off the busy highway of Route 23 and got some great shots of the old Circle L Motel. And then a little ways down the road we pulled off onto what may have been private property due to what the sign read:


Warning: Crooks and thieves will be shot on the spot. Alarm will sound

It was starting to freak my son out a bit, but I just said, "Hey that's what an adventure is!"

After the barn and the motel, we headed back to an old cemetery that we've both been wanting to see, and got a little sad over the amount of small children buried there from the 1800s. CJ shot a video of that. He wanted to take all of his still pictures today with our old Pentax analog. I remind him constantly how to use it, and he's getting better with focusing, but the concept of adjusting the aperture and the shutter speeds seems to trip him up, so I have no idea until we get the film back how well his shots will be. He prefers film over digital. Can you imagine... an 8 year old preferring film over digital?

Anyway, it felt good to get out and get the shutter going. Here's a couple of my faves from today's photo shoot:

VendArt

My submission for VendArt at Wild Goose Creative!



Wild Goose bought this vintage cigarette machine that is now dispensing art! My little boxes contain a "photo puzzle." Six little cards have a small photograph and its description on one side, and the other is a puzzle piece to a large photograph. When all six cards are flipped over in the right order, you have yourself a 6x6 print that you can glue together and frame! The prints contain selected images from my website here. Because of my love of packaging I had so much fun doing these.

The studio has a big event coming up this weekend, so if you're there, get yourself a lil box o' art. It only costs $3.

Only Kids May Enter Here

One of the things I've enjoyed most about working from home since the spring is the flexibility. I really love being able to get in my car and go when I need to, or just stop and take a break to be with the kids if I feel like it. While that means longer work hours into the evening when they are asleep, it affords me the luxury that I didn't have before when I was cooped up in an office: face time.

So one of the luxuries I had missed out on in the past, is experiencing the joys of the first day of school. And I mean the very first day of preschool. Today Andrew started his first day of preschool, and I was so glad to have been there to experience it with him.

Here's the photo shoot:









Decked out in his "aloha" shirt, he confidently walked through the curtains and into his first day of preschool without trepidation.

Another milestone accomplished.

TTV

As someone who loves photography , both old and new, I've always been fascinated with the effect given to some of the more recent prints people are selling that has that vintage, ethereal look to them. At first, I assumed it was a photoshop technique. Which is something that can be done. But then recently what I learned, is that these photographs are all part of a whole movement that employs a technique called "through the viewfinder" or TTV. The process is taking a photograph of something with your digital camera through the viewfinder of another old camera. No photoshopping necesary because you get that instant vintage look: scratches, blurs and all. Colorizing the photograph can take it one step further, or whatever else you want to do with it in photoshop.

But here's my first attempt. Apparently you are supposed to use a Duaflex camera, and I only have a Graflex, a polaroid and old 35mm Bolsey. The Graflex has a circular lens so I wasn't sure about using that one. The Bolsey is a twin lens reflex, so I took the shot through the viewfinder of that and here was the result:



A little unremarkable, but I think with some practice, a better subject and maybe getting my hands on a Duaflex may bring it all together. I ran across the technique while browsing for something else while eating my lunch and I just had to do it. I have no time for this since my workload is huge, but I couldn't resist running out to my front porch and doing it right away. If you have any old cameras lying around, you should give it a try! Very fun to see the results.

Bring along a CNote

When I wrote about the Yummy! Art show that I participated in a few weeks back, I mentioned that it was my first art show. Well, that’s not entirely true. Maybe it’s like my first adult art show, you could say.

My first actual art show was on Broad Street in Red Bank, NJ in 1982:

(And how about that preppy look, huh? Was I on the cutting edge of fashion or what?)

It was all about furry animals and sea creatures, and a couple of hamsters playing “stick-up” with Davey Crockett hats. All the pictures were drawn with either watercolor or pastel. And I won an honorable mention. My short life as an artist faded away a few years after that when I became more interested in teenage stuff.

My art has always come and gone throughout my life. I attribute my early artistic endeavors to my encouraging parents who paid for art lessons with a private teacher in her home. Her name was Evelyn Leavens. She’s still a professional artist in Red Bank. You can see her work here. She’s really amazing. She was a single woman who lived in an old tudor style home not far from ours, and she painted on extremely large canvases. Like I remember a few in her dining room that was not used as a dining room. While it had a nice table and chairs in the middle, it mostly housed some of her enormous paintings. As then she had her studio upstairs, that I only saw once because she was pretty apprehensive about letting us kids see her studio. Something else I remember vividly about her is that she loved to feed the squirrels who would come up to her sunroom, where she instructed us. She even had names for the squirrels. A quirky lady. But a great inspiration.

Anyway, I probably didn’t appreciate the exposure to someone like her like I should have. And like I said, art definitely fell by the wayside through high school, emerged again in college and then took another back seat while I pursued my career in New York. Then came marriage, then came the suburbs, then came kids. And mothers out there know the rest of that story.

So after a long journey, I am doing art shows again. No more watercolors and pastels, but with my photography and other mixed media. Fresh off the last art show written about here, I’m doing another one! I’m participating in the CNote Art Show at Junctionview Studios. My piece even made it on the flyer! I circled it…



So this is not like a gallery opening or anything, and I won’t be getting an honorable mention or definitely not a blue ribbon. I’m hoping to make somewhere around a CNote! Because everything at this art show is for sale and is $100. Easy to remember, right? Just bring a cool CNote or two with you to the show and you’ll make all of us artists very happy. It happens the weekend of Sept 25th - 27th. Hey, Christmas is right around the corner, right?

The art show reception

Ruminating.

I think this may have been the first art show that CJ was genuinely pleased with his participation. He really enjoyed Kidz Artz, but there seemed to be something about the process of working on this piece and how difficult it was to muster up the idea and then how to carry out the execution and all the procrastinating, and all the self-doubt and all the... well you know what I mean. I think he began to appreciate the process of making something. Or maybe not. It's hard to tell. He's not quite 8 years old.

All I know is that once he decided what he was going to do his focus was stellar. It was all the warming up that seemed the most difficult. It didn't take much cajoling, cheering, or mothering to get him to work on his piece, and in the end I think he was pleased with the end result. And then came the questions. And the introspection. And a little self-admiration with what he had accomplished.

"People are asking me about my artwork!" he says.

"Well what did they ask?" I say.

"Oh I don't know," he shrugs. "Just like, what does the story mean and things like that."

"And what did you say?"

"I don't know. I didn't know what to say. I just walked away."

What can we all say about our own art anyway. We just do it.