Posted on by — Leave a comment

Hanging art and poll watching

>Make for an exhausting day! 

Happily, I breezed into Nashville with no traffic and got started hanging my art at Paige Simmon’s Salon in Nashville promptly at 9:30.  With great optimism, I brought nearly all of my inventory, including the 48 x 72 triptych that I wasn’t sure we’d find a space for.  Thankfully, seasoned artist and hanging veteran Lynne Pilkerton met me there and immediately restored order and sanity to my day by grouping paintings and finding just the right spot for nearly all of them.  And I mean all! 

In the end, we found a perfect spot for the triptych and hung it — which can be a real bitch — with very little difficulty, again, thanks to Lynne’s quick thinking.  We also found room for my other largest paintings, and the smaller ones too.  In the end, I left with fewer than five of the 46 paintings I’d started with!   I’ve posted a few photos of the site and apologize for the poor quality images.  My flash battery was dead and these are with the great local light only.  It really is an exquisite space and hopefully, in some small way, my paintings are making it even more appealing. 


We didn’t finish until 2 p.m. and though I’d not eaten anything all day, I had to report to a polling place at three to serve as a poll watcher.  Grabbed a quick bite and reported to the election site just in time and made it through the next four hours, at first bored to tears, then grabbing a pen and paper and sketching all sorts of people that were in line, then handbags, shoes and what-have-you, and finally, after mind-numbingly watching the poll captain try to call the election headquarters and wait on hold for so many minutes, grabbed my Iphone, got the voter verification lookup website, and must’ve looked up 100 voters registration info by poll closing time.  I felt good that I could help and the poll captain was amazed at the great new technology. It was probably against the rules and I suggested to him that we need to start a campaign now to get the Major Cell Phone companies to donate smartphones to all polling places across america for free for that day.  Anyone with me? 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Crazy Busy! Two installations tomorrow and more!

>Hanging art and poll watching

Out of the blue about six weeks ago, my sister-in-law (she of the golden voice, brilliant lyrics, and luscious music, grammy-nominated Gretchen Peters) mentioned me to her hair and makeup girl, Paige Simmons, who has her salon in the old Tennessee Art League building on Poston near Centennial Park in Nashville.  Its a lovely old Craftsman style home that’s been converted.  It has wonderful light, and great style since Paige and her mother did all the furniture, etc.

Anyhoo…  Paige does hair and makeup for a lot of Nashville’s big names (well, for instance, Gretchen!) and she shows and sells art there too of several artists, including Kirk Seufert and others whose names I was too excited to capture because … I’ll be hanging my stuff there as well, come Tuesday.  Was there Saturday scoping the place out and another major singer walked in to have her hair done.  I was cool about it and the two fellow artists with me didn’t even recognize her at all!  But Kirk’s work is just gorgeous and I’m honored to have mine showing along with his at the same space.

The other installation is another upscale hair salon in Smyrna where I live called the Hair Doctor.  It was a spur of the moment thing months ago when I offered to hang some of my work in their lovely but bare-walled space.  Well, it’s approaching Christmas time and I have a lot of paintings, so I know I can spruce up their walls, hopefully sell some as gifts, and earn some cash for our upcoming trip to the U.K.

Then there are a pair of group shows I’m participating in starting Friday.  Centennial Arts Center Gallery is having its annual holiday show running from Friday through Dec. 14, with the opening Friday night.  Hubby David’s even coming with me and a bunch of us are going out after for dinner at a great Italian place that is Lucilla approved (so it must be great)…

The last is at Springhouse Gallery in Smyrna.  It’s a one night gala fundraiser show being held Nov. 19 but we submit Friday night or Saturday and I’m not sure I’ll have energy/work to submit… We’ll see.

For now, I’m just painting away!  The three paintings posted here were started recently and aren’t finished, but close… the Nashville Skyline one is like the other Nashville Skyline I, did but the star of this show, no pun intended, is the night sky rather than the lights of the buildings…

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Painting on the porch in the rain

There’s something about porches, don’t you think?  When you are able to let go of the critical “I should be elsewhere” mindset and just hang on a porch doing whatever.  If you’re like me, you find it liberating and reinvigorating.  To me it’s the ultimate “Hominid’s revenge” where we who stand on two feet and have opposible thumbs and think and plan and scheme, can come in close contact with the great outdoors without … you know … really being out there!  Where mother nature can rain down in all her splendor but we stay dry.  Where mosquitos and other bugs of all kinds swarm around hoping to feast on our fleshy skin and red blood.

God bless Lucilla!  That’s all I can say… Despite her cosmopolitan ways she had the foresight to add on a splendid and expansive porch to her Sylvan Park home, complete with screening, high-end ceiling fans and a bug-proof flooring barrier too.  So outside on the porch we of the Collaborative Artists Network (Nashville) who were in town painted. Judi has commenced her journey back to Geneve, Switzerland where we are hoping she’ll establish a CAN Chapter.  Margot is in the xenophobic state of Arizona babysitting children this week and recuperating from what sounds like a huge cold and laryngitis.  Lynne was recuperating closer to home after two exhausting weeks of setting up and arranging her show at the Gas Lamp in Nashville.

And so it was that Barbara, Lucilla and I found ourselves enjoying the splendor of her porch, some great food she prepared (but wasn’t supposed to), and one another’s company.  We didn’t so much paint as talk and learn and plan for the future of our group and more.  In the end, I set about playing.  One of my paintings took on a “Georgia O’Keefe-ish” style, according to Lucilla and Lynne who showed up late to grace us with her presence.  They claim it was because I had today’s afternoon gynecological appointment on my mind.  I put dots to represent cave dwellings on the hillside, but it definitely needs more work before I post it here.

I’m exhausted now, having gone to the doctor (just an annual checkup and all is well, in case you’re wondering) and gotten stuck in commuter traffic.  My BFF from New Jersey claims we could never live there, given the amount of commuter traffic they endure daily. Even though it took me a full hour to get home from downtown, Nashville’s nowhere among the worst cities for traffic. Well, the microwave’s buzzing and my chicken chili’s done. The dog’s pouting and hoping for a walk too, so signing off.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Arts and the left-brain: high school edition

>I think I’ve mentioned to y’all that I never had any substantial arts education before college beyond flunking out of piano lessons in pre-school and the plastic, generic recorder in fourth grade at St. Henry’s School. Seriously, there was none until my college music appreciation class which I got absolutely nothing out of since I’m still musically illiterate. I did okay academically and in fact began my collegiate studies with the intention of majoring in engineering. Thankfully, I changed my major to Mass Communications and while focused on journalism, did put in a hefty number of hours in visual communications. 

I got to thinking about the value of arts education when I recently found studies that show that four years of art and or music in high school equate to higher performance on SAT’s as this chart shows.

In addition, students who take four years of some form of arts are far less likely to drop out of school. Seems to me Tennessee and federal lawmakers need to take heed of this when factoring in funding for the arts.

Need more than just a couple of charts?

The findings are consistant according to this 1999 article by AP writer Carl Hartman.  But a 1998 in-depth Harvard statistical study roundly disputes this broader claim and identified strong correlations in only three areas: 
     Listening to Music and Spatial-Temporal Reasoning
     Learning to Play Music and Spatial Reasoning
     Classroom Drama and Verbal Skills

The Harvard study makes one assertion that I think all educators and parents and policy makers should completely stand by, though: 

“Let’s stop requiring more of the arts than of other subjects. The arts are the only school subjects that 
have been challenged to demonstrate transfer as a justification for their usefulness. If we required 
physical education to demonstrate transfer to science, the results might be no better, and 
probably would be worse. So, it is notable that the arts can demonstrate any transfer at all.”
I’m not telling you what to do but I plan to write my legislators – state and federal – and make sure they keep funding for arts education off the budget chopping block.  Personally and ideally, I see investing more heavily in the arts (globally) equating to lower costs for defense.  Hmmm.  Another good future blog study methinks! 

Tune in in the next few days for “Arts and the left-brain: corporate success edition.”

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Of Weddings and Music

>

This past weekend, my brother Barry Walsh, a fabulous keyboard player in his own right (who has a wonderful instrumental CD that’s great inspiration BTW), married his love of many years, Gretchen Peters.  That the two have always made incredible, beautiful music together is a given within Nashville and the Folk and Country Music Communities.  Gretchen has an amazing voice, crafts songs of such intelligence and power, and as importantly, Barry doesn’t just play along.  He listens, adds his interpretation, and accents each song perfectly.  I’m what you might call musically illiterate but even I get that when watching them.

And it’s not just on the auditory level that these two relate.  They are wonderfully matched in so many ways … both very smart and intellectually curious, quirky, and fun, and it is so great to see them together and obviously, this happy together. It’s been a bit of a journey for them but I can proudly say I knew from the very first that this day would come.

And this was a wedding noone that was there will ever forget, if only for the perfection of it.  The night before, a whole slew of us were bused out to Green’s Grocery in Leiper’s Fork.  It’s a lovely intimate venue that harkens back to the 30s and 40s in its simplicity. There, Barry played for Gretchen (and the lucky audience) a song he wrote for her and she answered with her song about him “The Way You Move Me.” As if that wasn’t enough, others played, including the dynamic Marshall Chapman, Gretchen’s fellow “Wine, Women & Song” partners Matraca Berg and Suzy Bogguss, Rodney Crowell and Jeff Hanna of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.  Supporting them all night was Christine Bougie, a wonderful steel guitar player from Toronto.  I love that instrument anyway and her style was just wonderful.  We went home happy, full and sure they couldn’t ever top that night.

But they did.

Planned beautifully, the ceremony took place right after the 6 p.m. bells rang at Assumption Church in Nashville where we all stood in the churchyard below.  Unplanned but uncannily perfect was the appearance of an old invalid who rode by on his scooter, surveyed the goings-on, waved and went on his way.  My brother Barry waved back as fellow siblings nudged one another just knowing it was the ghost of our father who loved to play pranks on us while riding his own scooter before he passed away four years ago.  I’m sure it was him, giving Barry & Gretchen his blessing. To top off the emotion of them saying their vows, Rodney Crowell performed an acoustic version of a lovely song he written about life and family entitled “I know Love is All I Need.”  I’m told video taken from behind me of his performance shows one of my arms holding the video camera up and the other hand coming to my eyes with a tissue.  Frequently.  It was moving.

Then there was the first dance.  Gretchen has written with Bryan Adams for many years and formed a tight bond of friendship.  He made a promise to her, arranged his schedule, and was able to come in for it.  And he sang their first song.  It’s funny, my hubby and I married to one of his songs (Everything I do), my sister got engaged to that same song, and now, our brother was having Bryan peform their first dance (Heaven), live!  After this, there were more performances by those who’d been there the night before and other great musicians.  Our family got jammin’ when Rodney launched into Elvira accompanied by Jeff Hanna and a flock of singers joined in.  We stayed up there on the dance floor and joined hands to sing along with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and I swear, at that moment, I didn’t think anything could top this weekend.

But then there were the sky lanterns.  Two dozen of these wonderful things were lit by the wedding guests and sent skyward over the Nashville night sky.  Reading through tweets she follows the next day, Gretchen saw some neighbor observed the presence of several UFO’s above Germantown.  I enjoyed seeing the lanterns fly off but even more loved the warm glow that lit peoples faces as they were lighting the lanterns.   Ahhhh.  Just beautiful.  Every last minute of it. 

So with all excitement, I’ve done no painting at all lately.  Just haven’t had it in me.  But I am itching to get back to it.  So stay tuned!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Labor Day = Vacation Time

>

At least this year in our house. We’d planned a road trip to my sister Patty’s weekend place near Berkeley Springs, W.V. with our dog but life happened and we ended up going further up north as well.  We started Thursday with an all-day drive to New Jersey to visit my BFF who was recently diagnosed with a fast growing skin condition/ cancer.  Though I’d seen her not long ago, hearing the “C” word in relation to my BFF is a game changer.  We also planned to very reluctantly relinquish our rights to Baxter, my son’s beautiful and soulful part Lab part who-knows-what-big brindle type dog with the most soulful eyes on four feet.

The drive up was on its way to being fun until some construction/traffic-from-hell in Pennsylvania added 2-1/2 hours to our already 14 hour drive.  The dogs were wonderful though and it broke our hear to say goodbye — for now at least — to Baxter.  Instead of the usual trip to NY, we stayed close to Bindy’s for some great quality time on her deck. The seashore picture above was painted there on a crisp late-Summer morning on the deck, based on a photo of her lovely daughter Jordy.  A surprise birthday reunion dinner party with some very old friends (fellow members of the Cold Ass Ski Club — a story for another day) topped off the brief visit before we headed to the wilderness of West Virginia Sunday morning.   I did feel reassured leaving Bindy, though, confident she is in capable hands and will come out of this relatively unscathed.

The 2008 Ford Escape Hybrid wasn’t eager to cooperate and what should have taken us 4-1/2 hours took more than 8 and meant riding backroads for safety reasons.  A safety switch on the car would shut the engine down once it heated up to a certain temp.  We discovered the backroads were both safer and made the car less prone to shutting down, and by the last 2 hours of the trip, the car didn’t stall once, even when we went back on the highway.  Still, it was an incredibly stressful ride and we were ready for the cool beers handed us when we got there.  And the beautiful nieces my brother Kev and his wife Les brought along to join us for the day.  Great food, glorious vistas from their deck looking outward at the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the purest river in West Virginia meant a wonderful, soul-healing visit.  We forgot all about the car and David fished, I kayaked and swam, Smokey sniffed and paraded around like she owned the mountains, and I broke out my watercolors for an early morning painting session as the fog eased its veil from over the mountains.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Wow! Two weeks since my last post!

>Didya ever find a time in life when things just mush together so tightly you don’t have time to breathe?  That’s been the case the past two weeks for me to wit:

My consulting business (international credit reporting – and if it sounds dry, it totally is, but at least it pays the bills mosta the time) had a huge month last month, like double the regular business volume it normally has – good in some ways, really lousy for my sense of balance though.

During all that mayhem and scrambling to meet deadlines and demands of customers on four continents, hubby’s shift at work changed from early morning to mid-afternoon start after many years on that early schedule, we had to figure out how to change eating habits, awake times, and what have you.

On top of that, there was the replacement (finally!) of the full air conditioning unit – $8600 and change but we’ll see a $1500 income tax break, and are getting an additional $250 state rebate on top of that.  It meant a couple of days with workers in and out, but lots of filing papers (for the financing), and moving stuff out of the attic so they could work in there.  In the end, it’s a good thing though, so we can deal with it.  Plus, we have a 10 year full warranty on this puppy so we’re happy.  Parkers Heating and Cooling in Smyrna did the project after we ran 3 contractors through bid process.  (Being a former designer in Prudential’s Eastern Home Office Planning & Purchasing Department taught me those ropes & I applied the system like our little home was a multi-million dollar corporate complex!).  BTW, Parker’s did an exceptional job and were very, very professional about the process and in working with us.

Then, you gotta figure, when mortgage interest rates are so low and you are already looking to make a major home renovation purchase, you might as well refinance right?  Especially when you have a sister in the business (VP of BB&T’s Mortgage Banking Division in Maryland in case you need one).  So, of course we had to refinance.  Meaning, dig up all sortsa records, request more, and coordinate the hell out of things to get it all to the underwriter within 30 days of the Air Conditioning bid so we could get it all done & coolness restored.  Alot of money changed hands last month, at least on paper. I’m sure our transactions alone contributed to at least a .25 point increase in GDP!  Yay America!

So … home finance and repair work done, … check!
Adjustment to new schedule underway, … check!
Business invoices sent out at eom, … check!

Nothing left to do after that but take a Labor Day Vacation, right?

Read all about that in the blog entry to follow.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Golden Triangle

Coming from a background as a photographer, I recognize so many principles that relate to both photographic and painterly images.  Lightstalking Magazine, for professional photographers, has some great content that applies to those using a brush as well, such as this one, on The Golden Triangle in composition.

Busy day, heading out to paint with the C.A.N. girls today and then errands before heading up north for the holiday weekend.  I sure hope Earl doesn’t mess with our plans too much.  I’m looking forward to plein air painting from my sis’ cabin in the mountains.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Miss Hazel on National Public Radio!

I am not sure if this made it nationally or was just a local feature, but it sure does make me proud to know Hazel King has been recognized!

WPLN’s feature on Hazel King

Posted on by — 5 Comments

Tom Jones’ Workshop: Fantabulous!

>

Based on a Tom Jones painting and workshop

Never having been to a workshop before, I didn’t know what to expect.  I thought it would be a great learning experience but had no idea just how great it would be!

Tom Jones is a fabulous nature landscape artist who represents and is representative of some of the finest producers of art supplies in the art world – Arches paper, Rembrandt paints, and Jerrys Artarama.  So when I heard he was coming to our local Jerry’s to put on this workshop, of course, I signed up and put down the names of my fellow C.A.N.* girls.  The only one who was unable to join us was Barbara, but since we’ve got miles to go to catch up to her caliber of painting, we figured it was only right.

Tom was a great and inspiring teacher.  He had a gentle, matter of fact style that didn’t pull punches but showed me (on more than one occasion) how to fix some major goofs in my work.  The painting he chose to have us do was challenging and really pushed us out of our comfort zones, but I watched with relief and joy as Lynne, Lucilla and Margot moved from frustration to anxiety to pleasure at learning the new process.  Safe to say we all got a lot out of it.  My painting (I brought it home and doctored it up slightly after all the gaffs), is above.

We also got to meet Tom’s lovely wife Bonnie, a strong watercolor artist herself, and she showed us some batik paintings she has done recently that are beyond exquisite.  We are hoping to encourage either Jerry’s or our Centennial Arts Center to enlist her to teach a batik class in the future.  And of course, we want Tom back.  Again and again.

I learned so much in the class I came home, spent and exhausted but dying to try more.  But I’m willing to share a few of my strongest impressions here:  Arches 300# paper kicks a$$ when it comes to durability, workability, presentation quality, etc.  You know when you are working on it that it is just.well.golden!  And at $10 and change, it wasn’t nearly as expensive as I thought it would be for a full sheet since you can split it into smaller sheets.  Lush.

Several lessons I got from the workshop:

  1. Tom taught us to lighten the palette.  By that I mean don’t use a huge number of different colors, but few and mix between them to maintain unity in the painting.  
  2. When laying in a stand of trees, you want to do just that — lay in the color in a freeform block and don’t worry about trunks and branches until you’ve got the basic shape.  Then go in and lay in a few here and there.  
  3. Let the watercolors do the job, don’t you do it by brushing.  Just shape it, smooth it, etc. within 15 seconds if you can.  
  4. The detail work, which means the difference between a good and great painting, is accomplished in the last 15 minutes of any painting, no matter if you work on it for 30 minutes, five days, two years, whatever.  It is absolutely that last 15 minutes that makes the painting.  
  5. Use tissue instead of paper towels to blot and blend and smooth areas out, and if you need to go back to white paper, a stiff toothbrush and tissue and water are your best friends.  
  6. If you, like me, go way overboard with the paint and need to take off even more, a spray bottle with a strong stream is your even better friend.  Spray and let the water and paint run off the paper and start over. 

There were loads more things to learn and I filled a couple of pages of notes, but you’ll just have to take a class yourself! 

I loved the rockwork!  It is much like painting large flower petals.  Lay color at one edge, use a clean (water only) brush and sweep that color across the remainder of the area to be covered, ensuring one edge has strong definition.  Tom noted that I had too many rocks and it made the painting look too busy.  He suggested I merge a couple here and there into larger boulders and I may well do that later, but honestly, I’m kinda proud of the rockwork, I kept them as they were this time to show my hubby and show off on my blog.

On the waterfall, I am ashamed to say I cheated.  It was a mess to begin with but he used a new product offered at Jerry’s called “Aqua Cover” that did a great job on leveling off the water, creating a better spill area below and such.  But with 20 students and limited time, he could only do so much, and I wanted to wow my husband when he got home later last night so, after resting when I got home, I got out my (dare I say it) acrylic white paint to complete the fix. I rationalize that now I can effectively call it a mixed media work and honestly, it looks pretty good, I think. The Aqua Cover is a great, amazing product though and would have done the job but I didn’t purchase it and figured the acrylic application was next best thing.  So sue me for cheating! 

Final note on the painting: Tom’s painting did not include, but I did, a tree stump sticking through the edge of the waterfall and another area where water spills over a giant rock.  I am kinda proud of that improvisation and the overall work, even if the rocks are too busy.  I will be making a few minor changes to this work sometime when I get a chance, and thankfully, because of the great paper, I can.  But I wanted to get the near-finished painting up here with the workshop review while it was all fresh in my mind. 

Tom, if you ever grace my blog with a visit to read this, know that I got a tremendous out of you workshop and really appreciate your painting style, teaching style and the generous, genuine and decent person you appear to be.  Keep up the great work and hopefully, we Nashvillians’ll catch another of your workshops before too long.   Bonnie, we’ll be working on yours too, OK?