ART and SOUL

I’m off to Portland, Oregon for the Art and Soul Retreat this week.  Yay!  It’s something I’ve wanted to do each year I see it advertised.  And with my daughter living in Portland now, I thought it was time to jump on it.  Over a four-day period, I’ll be taking different collage workshops, two days with artist Donna Watson and two days with artist Jane Davies. They are both favorites of mine, and I’m excited to get a chance to learn from them.

Here are their websites:                                                        http://www.donnawatsonart.com/                                                                                     http://janedaviesstudios.com/

Can’t wait to spend time with my daughter and to dive into creating!

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A NEW YEAR

I’ve just spent the first few days of the new year “cleaning” and trying to organize things in my art room. (Again!)  It’s great going through bins and drawers and shelves and rediscovering things I’d forgotten about.  But I’ve decided that this is the year I am going to have to weed out some of my supplies!  I have collected so many odds and ends – cabinet cards, atlases, maps, dictionaries, wallpaper books, songbooks, letters, postcards, stamps, fabric, paper, paper, paper – with the intention of using it in my collage work, but there is just no way I could possibly use all I have in a lifetime.  I have so many old books that I could never bear to rip apart, so I would scan the pages I wanted to use.  Not quite the same feel, though, as the real aged paper. So rip old books I will!  (Nothing valuable, of course).  And I will use the ephemera I’ve collected and hoarded. Enough of holding onto things!

This is a quick little assemblage I made with some of the scraps I came across.

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VERNIS

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After working on some collage pieces, I had a section of a transparency left over – the top of a woman’s head.  I pasted it to a piece of watercolor paper then painted in a face to complete the head.  The word “vernis” was stamped on using an old metal French stamp I had gotten at a flea market.  Just a silly, but fun, exercise.