Platteville WRAP Show

The 2018 Platteville WRAP exhibit was held from October 1 through November 10 at the wonderful new Platteville Public Library, which opened it's doors just a year and a half ago in late June of 2017.

The show judge and workshop presenter were both Art Lecturers from UW-Platteville - ceramic artist Scott Steder served as the show judge and Daniel O'Brien led the workshop on the last day of the exhibit.

My piece, "Drawing Class Redux", received a State Award so will be eligible for entry into the September 2019 State Exhibit in Madison. It is a 9 X 12 mixed media collage on a cradled panel utilizing what I call "faux encaustic," a  technique employing many layers of collage materials, acrylic paint and matte medium to mimic the translucent look of encaustic. The foreground still-life image is a drawing from one of my (very old!) college sketch books. I photocopied the image, collaged it onto the background and used water soluble inks to enhance the lights and darks for added contrast.

During the morning workshop, we got to experiment with mark making using pens and inks. Daniel O'Brien brought in inks, a wide variety of brushes and many different papers. Encouraged by Dan, we all enjoyed just playing with the materials. I may not have created any great art but I sure did go home with lots of great collage fodder!

I also entered "Cuppa Joe," a small faux encaustic piece.

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WRAP/WRAA State Exhibit and Conference -2018

Each September, State Award winning artworks from WRAP Exhibitions around the state are exhibited at the WRAP State Art Exhibition. At the conclusion of the exhibition is the annual WRAA State Conference, "State Day." 

State Day is held at the Pyle Center on the UW campus in Madison, or every third year, at the Center for the Visual Arts (CVA) in Wausau in northern Wisconsin. The State Day weekend kicks off on Friday evening with and an Evening With the Arts reception. Saturday morning features a presentation, usually by the show judge, followed by a luncheon and presentation of awards. Each year upwards of $5000 in awards are sponsored by local arts organizations and individual arts supporters throughout the state. For more information on WRAA State Exhibit and Conference, visit the UW-Madison website or the WRAA website.

The 2018 State Day was in Madison at the Pyle Center. The show judge and speaker was Leslee Nelson, fiber artist and Emeritus Professor in the Continuing Ed department at UW-Madison where she was director of the WRAP program for over 25 years.

I entered a collage, "Hold on There" which won a State Award at the Platteville WRAP show in November of 2017 and at State Day received the LHS Art Club Innovative Art Technique Award sponsored by the Lancaster High School Art Club in Lancaster, WI. 

Thank you to the Lancaster High School Art Club for sponsoring this award.

Junk Drawer Art Charms Class

Although jewelry is not my main passion, I do enjoy using mixed media techniques to create jewelry with a rather funky appeal. And for the last several years I have been teaching classes in mixed media jewelry during Shake Rag Alley's annual jewelry weekend, now called Jewelry Boor Camp (formerly Beads and Bangles).

This spring I taught a session called Junk Drawer Arts Charms - making jewelry components out of some decidedly unconventional jewelry materials, especially household "trinkets" - all that flotsam and jetsam that has accumulated in your desk drawer, tool chest, sewing kit, or wherever.

In addition to the Junk Drawer Art Charms class, from time to time, I have also taught Boho Dangle Necklace (making mixed media dangles that are incorporated into a necklace or can be used for earrings) and Handmade Bead Bracelet (making beads out of unconventional materials such and paper and vinyl tubing, then combining these with commercial beads on a memory wire bracelet).

My jewelry can be found at Longbranch Gallery in Mineral Point.

Announcing: Sugar Row Gallery Group Show

For the month of May I will be part of a group show at Sugar Row Gallery in Mineral:

Michael Donavan, Peter Flanary, Gerry Glaeve

Bill Grover, Rick Harris, Tom Kelly

Richard Moninski, Ben Russell, Carole Spelic

Sharon Stauffer, Chris Taw, Cindy ReynoldsTaylor

May 5th through May 27th, 2018

Opening Reception with Artists May 5th 4:30-7pm

Sugar Row Gallery

234 High Street

Mineral Point, Wi 53565

Open Weekdays by chance or appointment

Fridays and Saturdays 11-4:30 Sundays 11-4pm

www.sugarrowstudioandgallery.com

Encaustic Effects With Acrylics

In March I took a three day class at Shake Rag Alley with Bonnie Cutts learning to employ acrylic mediums to achieve encaustic effects.

Bonnie has been a Golden Acrylics Working Artist for years and as such, knows just about all there is to know about the bewildering array of Golden acrylic mediums and products. Bonnie explained how she often builds up many layers of acrylic medium on her paintings...and that consequently her paintings are often mistaken for encaustics.

Bonnie brought in a wide variety of paints and mediums for us to try and showed us which types of acrylic mediums are best for creating that desired encaustic translucent look. We each worked on several paintings at a time, building many, many layers.

Since the class I've experimented with using this encaustic effect on the background of my figurative collages. I collage a photocopy of a figurative drawing over the "encaustic" background and possibly add other collage elements as well.

Here a few examples -

Arts Mineral Point Member Show 2018

The 3rd annual Arts Mineral Point (AMP)  Member Show was held the third weekend on January at the old Canary Building. Member artists could display two examples of their work.

I exhibited two of what I call my "paper" collages - collages that, unlike most of my collages, do NOT have layers and layers of acrylic paint and medium over the collage elements. While I might draw on them a bit (can't resist) or outline something, for the most part the papers speak for themselves. I exhibited "Or" and "South Dakota".

Here's Ben with one of the photographs he entered.

And here's a close-up of "Or" (the top collage above).

Altered Mint Tins

I've been teaching an Altered Mint Tin workshop at Shake Rag Alley for the last couple of years. I'd sold all of my altered tins, so when I had another class coming up in November I needed to make a class sample. But this time I took a slightly different approach than I had in the past. Instead of thinking of the tin as a decorated container, I viewed it as sort of a substrate for creating art. Sure, these are basically embellished tins that do open and could function as containers, but I wanted to create objects that could stand on their own as interesting artful pieces aside from any potential utilitarian purpose. Hope I succeeded, but regardless, I had so much fun making the first one that now I'm totally hooked.

Here are a few samples of what I've come up with. I really like putting feet on the boxes and search my stash of junk for anything I can find that will serve the purpose from chess pieces to plastic plumbing fixtures (I transform plastic pieces into faux metal with acrylic paint and metallic rub-ons  - one of my favorite craft materials). The tins are covered with a combination of commercial papers and fabric papers that I make myself. I sometimes decoupage the entire lid, but I prefer to take advantage of the color of the tin and only cover the lid's flat portion letting the original color on the edge of the lid be part of the design. My design mantra for the top is "layer, layer, layer" using anything and everything at hand.

Altered Book with Gesture Drawings

At our Monday night figure drawing sessions we always start with a half dozen 2 minute warm-up poses before moving on to the evening's long pose. Over the years I have accumulated quite a stack of these gesture drawings which I tossed in a pile and never looked at until recently. When I finally did go through them, somewhat to my surprise I found that I actually liked a number of them. There was a certain charm in their energy and rawness that gets lost in my carefully rendered finished drawings.

So I decided to do something with them.

They were all pretty soft since they were done in pencil on newsprint. So I scanned them and did some Photoshop magic to punch them up. In so doing I discovered that the newsprint background began to look like yellowed old paper, a rather nifty effect which I then enhanced even further. I then printed them out on drawing paper. Since I've been somewhat obsessed lately with the book format as a vehicle for presenting art, I used these prints to make this altered book. It's something of an homage to one of my greatest pleasures - figure drawing.

I entered this piece in the Wisconsin Regional Artists Association State Exhibit at the Pyle Center at UW-Madison (702 Langdon St, Madison WI). It will be on display through September 21st. If you are not familiar with the Wisconsin Regional Art Program (WRAP) or the Wisconsin Regional Artists Assocaiation (WRAA), you can visit their website or click on my WRAA/WRAP tab to learn more. And if you've never seen one of their State Conference Exhibits at the Pyle Center, do check it out. There are over 100 pieces on display and the artwork is always terrific.

Mixed Media Workshop in the Quonset Hut

The first Shake Rag Alley workshop in the new Quonset Hut was Mixed Media Paint Layering held in mid March. The Quonset Hut is pretty funky around the edges and scheduled for renovation, but nobody minded at all, especially not me. What a great space to spread out in! I had room to set up a separate demo station for the first time ever. It was glorious.

There were 10 terrific students and everyone did great. We first made some fabric paper which is an overnight dry meaning they would have to take it home wet for later use. (But we had ample room to spread it out - yeah!)











Then we moved on to layering thin coats of acrylic paint (glazing), collaging, and stamping on watercolor paper to build up patterned paper with lots of depth.

This was a very short class, only three hours, so there wasn't much time to take these papers and work them into a finished piece. But there were lots of stencils and card stock on hand for anyone who wanted to use some of their newly created paper to make a card like these pomegranate and hand cards.

Altered Book Workshop

I've had two great groups of students for workshops so far this month. Both through Shake Rag Alley, but both firsts in terms of location.

At the beginning of the month, two women from Rockford who were here for a Shake Rag Alley custom retreat weekend, joined me in my studio for an afternoon making Altered Books. First workshop that I've taught in my own studio. Really a plus to have all my supplies at hand for them to use.

My second class was the first Shake Rag workshop in the new Quonset hut! More on that class in a separate post.

Both Rhonda and Barb are veteran crafters so they really moved right along and got a remarkable amount done in only three hours. Here's Rhonda's amazing book. Can you make out the image of the man peeking out from under the torn pages in the detail? Very clever.

Book detail showing
face peeking through

I'll be teaching the Altered Book workshop again in the fall at Shake Rag Alley on September 28th. 
Registration will be open by late April. See the workshop tab above for a class description.