Photo Friday

During the week, I drive by this unique bus bench. I was able to snap a pretty good photo while stopped at a traffic light.

Here is the artwork inspired by this bus bench.

This design was painted using a freezer paper stencil on hand dyed grey fabric. It's one of the techniques I will be sharing in the class I'm teaching at Community Center of La Canada-Flintridge.

Album Art

The theme for this weekend turned out to be album art.

Saturday, my guy and I went to the Annenberg Space For Photography and saw the "Who Shot Rock and Roll" exhibit. It felt nostalgic to see the old album covers hanging at the entrance to the exhibit. The main part of the exhibit is the candid photographs of rock and roll artists starting from the 1960s to present. Also, there is a 30 minute documentary that interviewed some of the photographers whose work was displayed in the exhibit. I highly recommend this exhibit if you're in the Los Angeles area.

The other part of this album art weekend was inspired by Jenny Cochran Lee's blog, texterial and her August 20th blogpost about using old album covers for notebooks. It was so inspiring to me. I had fun browsing through the old albums at a local thrift store.

This weekend I made 5 album cover notebooks. I don't have a binding machine so, I used colored binding rings. The edges were finished using colored duct tape. The notebooks are a mixed of funny and cool album artwork. Please excuse the poor quality photos. For some reason I couldn't get the lighting quite right. 



Close up showing the self-adhesive rhinestones that I added.



I'm teaching!

Well, I finally did it.....I'm dipping my foot into the teaching pond. For a few years I played around with the idea of teaching a class but the right opportunity hadn’t presented itself until now.

When I heard that the Executive Director at the Community Center of La Canada-Flintridge  was looking for new teachers/classes, I jumped at the chance to present my class proposal. She liked my idea of a 6 part class teaching various surface design techniques on fabric. Starting with dyeing and painting fabric to simple monoprinting and screen printing to making stamps and stencils. The catalogues are mailing out and the class schedule is on the website.

Photo Friday

The subject for Photo Friday is the "Community" sculputure in front of the Burbank Water and Power building. 

Here is my artwork inspired by this sculpture.



Long Beach Museum of Art

Yesterday, I went to the Surface Art Association meeting at the Long Beach Museum of Art. It was so nice to get out of the heat of the valley and see incredible art.

After a short SAA meeting, Sue Ann Robinson (the museum's Director of Collections) showed us the exhibits. First was the Small Expressions 2012 exhibit that was part of the Handweavers Guild of America's Convergence 2012 Convention. We were allowed to take pictures of this exhibit. Here are three works that were made an impression on me.

This first piece is called Hydrangea by artist Lisa Hart. It's made with real Hydrangea petals.



This woven piece is called Dialogue II by artist Marcia Weiss. She used cotton and linen thread to weave this intricate design.

Artist Jenine Shereos piece is called Leaves. She used human hair to make this delicate leaves.

On the same floor as the Small Expressions exhibit is the permanent collections which included California Modernism and Contemporary Art of California. Amazing pieces.

The other current exhibit is called Buena Vista: California Painters in Mexico. Another inspiring exhibit. If you are in the Long Beach area, I highly recommend visiting the Long Beach Museum of Art.

Photo Friday

The theme for this Friday is flowers and flower-like plants.

The burgundy cactus above was the inspiration for the artwork below

Artistic Expressions

I'm so excited to announce that I was invited to join Artistic Expressions. It's a wonderful group of artists whose mission statement is to "support one another on our artistic journeys, provide a comfortable place to show our work for critiquing, and to enter exhibits as a group." What a cool mission statement!  I want to thank them for the invitation. I look forward to many years of creative growth with this group.