Blonds and Penguins, Heavy Metal, New Media and Kickstarter Video

 

 

 

Well, it’s been a busy and productive week for Martha Flores and me.

Artistically, Martha has continued to refine her new works like the ‘Blonds and Penguins’ acrylic on canvas and I, having been inspired by my recent success in selling new art on new media like metal, have been working on image transfer processes to media such as metal, tile and canvas.

So far I’d have to say that Bonny Lhotka’s digital seminars make it look much easier than it is. But, I may get it right yet… like anything it takes practice. And, along this line I have been getting to know the heavy metal cutting equipment of my good friend the wonderfully creative artist Terry Johnson. With the right equipment any job becomes easier.

Which brings me to my heavy metal project… the completion of the Steel Eagle project, or should I say the conversion of the Steel Eagle project.  Some readers may recall that in the early part of the year Martha and me put together a float for the 2012 Washington State Apple Blossom Grand Parade. And, as part of that project we created several giant birds for the float.  Martha created several tropical birds while I build a giant Steel Eagle. And, although the eagle’s internal structure was build of ¼ inch steel rods welded and tied together with bailing wire, the skin was mostly duct tape, cardboard and paper Mache’ all covered with hundreds upon hundreds of individually cut feathers made from paper.  

All, of that worked well for the parade float both in terms of time and weight (the eagle had to be lifted and place on the top of the highest point on the float (think 2x4 frame covered with plywood). But, the dream which is now a goal with a foreseeable outcome has always been to have an entirely metal eagle. And so, the plan now is to remove the cardboard, paper Mache’ and duct tape and create a metal skin and individually cut metal feathers. The additional equipment and materials cost enough that I have decided to develop a Kickstarter proposal with accompanying video to generate interest and find backers for the project.

To this end I put together the initial materials list and priced out the tools and materials at our local Lowes and took video along the way. I also, took video at the studio (Terry Johnson’s) where I will work on the project. I’ve never put together a Kickstarter proposal or this type of video before; so I was quite pleased to meet a young fellow named Robert at the local after hour’s business meet and great who does just that. That is he puts together grant proposals. Currently he is working on a proposal to get funding for painting murals in South Wenatchee as part of an anti gang program. Now, that’s a great idea. He was, also, very interested in my Steel Eagle project and offered to introduce me to a local business person who could be a help in this project.

And, as though, all of that were not enough, while I was taking video of metal and tools and meeting and greeting folks that could help with the Steel Eagle, Martha was at an all day Washington State Arts Commission conference in Seattle with her good friend Selina Danko who works for the Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center and who writes grants for the Wenatchee Arts Consortium.  This is the group that has put on some really great art programs for kids in our local schools which Martha has been involved with over the past few years.  thinking of Martha in Seattle, I took the time to play a bit with one of my Seattle shots taken from Beacon Hill last year.

Meanwhile, I put together a new zip file art portfolio for Martha including pieces such as her "Imerging woman" oil on Canvas, to send off to a gallery near you. Let’s hope for the best on that.

Well, that is probably enough for now… I’m exhausted just thinking about all of this myself. Think creative and have a very artful day.

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Over the Hill and Far Away / New Art and Gallery Hopping

 

 

 

Well, it’s been an interesting week for art, art projects and adventures for Martha Flores and me.

Martha has needed some glaze and other materials including some fabric for projects here at home and the studio and I have wanted to check out some galleries in and around Seattle. So; we planned to make the rounds out there, but first we checked with our good friend and artist Terry Johnson to see if he needed anything from the Pottery Store. It’s always good to see what new and creative things he is doing in his studio.

And, so Friday we headed out to the west side of the mountains purchase list for she and Terry in Martha’s hand and the addresses of all the galleries we wanted to check out loaded into my new Smart phone. Included in the list was a glass studio in the Fremont District that we didn’t end up getting to, so that will have to wait for another trip.

First on the list the necessary materials from the fabric store and pottery store. That done we headed over to Alkie, where I have scuba dived in the past and was able to show Martha around as she hadn’t been there before. As we worked our way around the point to visit Alkie Arts, we were pleasantly surprised to learn the area there west of Downtown Seattle was almost named New York…are you kidding me I thought. It would have to have been called New New York. Well, I’m glad that cooler heads prevailed on that. But, perhaps because of that early historical quirk, there is along the walkway near the shore a smaller version of the Statue of Liberty.

Needless to say, I had to take some tourist shots of that, which I had some fun with back at home on the computer and posted to Facebook.

The gallery there in Alkie was very nice and we enjoyed visiting with the owner Diane Venti who allowed me to take some photos and to enter the inner sanctum where she was preparing to ship out the art sold at the previous nights Second Thursday Art Walk. We didn’t get to meet her husband and metal artist Tom Wyrick, but we did get to meet her son and all around helper.

We really like the venue and the art therein. We both really liked the original oils by Cheryl Zahniser and I especially liked the piece titled “Kim”.

 

I was very interested in what Micahael Birawer was doing with his paintings of iconic Seattle scenes in his own unique way. His work is ‘really hot’ right now according to Diane and his work is the only work she sells canvas prints of vs. original art.

We gave our cards with links to our new web sites to Diane and she told us about some of the other galleries in the area that are part of the West Seattle Art Walk and gave us a map to check them out.

So, at that point we decided to go up the hill to the area where most of the other galleries were located and we weren’t disappointed.  Our first stop there was the ARTSWEST Playhouse and Gallery. There we were pleasantly surprised to find a few paintings by local Wenatchee Artist Diana Sanford. This venue is mostly a local theater with a nice Foyer available for display of art.

Next and just around the corner was the Twilight Artist Collective. This was the kind of art gallery that really appeals to a younger hipper crowd or to an old guy like me that has found memories of little independent ‘record stores/head shops’ from back in the day. When I said this out loud to Cheryl Robinson, one of the three co-owners of the gallery, she liked that comment and I was glad of that.  Cheryl has a BFA from Arizona State and works in a variety of media herself from pencil and paper to metal and beeswax. I wish I could have seen what she does with beeswax. But, what she had on hand of her own work at the moment was limited to some cards with birds and such on a wallpaper like background.

She let us know the gallery is for sale, as her two partners are moving on to kids and family focus and it is priced at a mere $30,000. That would be fun but this gallery would do better with younger owners I suspect. All in all, though, our visit to west Seattle and a few of its galleries reminded us that this area is more of what we were envisioning when we took on the adventure of moving from L.A. to Washington. At the time, though, we were actively involved in our counseling careers and we went where we both found counseling work at the same time in the same town… which turned out to be Wenatchee. Wenatchee has been good to us, but it is very different from Seattle and West Seattle.

After, visiting just a few of the art venues in West Seattle we decided to forgo the Fremont District for this trip as it was getting late in the afternoon on a Friday and we really needed to get to Kirkland where we planned to visit the Parklane Gallery.

Those readers who know of my recent videos of the Table Top Mountain fire http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ksqfemj6rCw and of ones mans effort to prepare for fire from the town of Liberty http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmxPPE-fshI  may be interested to know that the owner of the property in Liberty from where I took my video from, is the son of one of the principal members of the Parklane Gallery. Her husband Larey and I have been communicating back and forth for a bit now and I was especially interested to check out their co-op gallery.

When we got to Parklane we stopped first to check out some of the art in the lane. There we found a beautiful bronze by Ross Mattson who readers in Wenatchee may know from his impressive “Petra” bronze in front of the Performing arts Center.

The first gallery we stopped at was the Howard/Mandville Gallery which is just a couple of doors down the lane from the Parklane Gallery. At Howard Mandville we were pleased to see a smaller version of “Wings Bronze” by Gary Lee Price. I have always appreciated the large scale version of this that is part of the Arts on the Avenue in Wenatchee. They also had a smaller version of his “Journey of the Imagination”. For the most part this is a very traditional upscale type of gallery. One that I imagine home decorators will take their clients to pick out art for their newly remodeled homes. The large collection of catalogues with artist’s names on them may have something to do with that assessment.

Finally, we made it to the Parklane Gallery. And, although we did not expect to meet Larey McDaniels, as he was to perform with the Seattle Symphony that night, we were lucky in that we got there early enough that we caught him there. It was great to visit with him as well as to check out the variety of art they have there.

In the front of the gallery was the 12x12 show which is one of the few shows they do each year that is open to non-members and member alike. Each piece in that show must measure 12” by 12” including frames to be in the show. We were invited to bring something in before it opened but we really had nothing available in those measurements... another time perhaps. The other show they do there that is open to non-members is a 3d show... the next of those coming up in 2013 sometime.

We really were intrigued by the “Lost Memories” digital art piece by Del Hoffman. In fact this piece really inspired me to venture into some further digital art experimentation myself.  

And so, the art continues at home in the studio for Martha where she is painting away and at my computer

 

"Cascadian Collage"  by Rod Daut

                                                  "YoungWoman" by Martha Flores

where I am ever exploring further into digital creations based on my ownphotos. Look for more along that line in the near
future at a gallery near you.                              

                                                                                        

Have a very artful day.

 

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Fire Moon, Tulip Rose, Princesses and Dreaming of Bloshoi

 

 

 

 

Well, a lot has gone on since our last post. September has been the month of fires in central Washington, and that has had a great influence on what I have been doing in particular.

I have taken many photos of the fire, the smoke, and the moon and the sun through smoke infused skies. These efforts have produced some pretty interesting shots some of which were posted on Facebook and some of which went into one of two videos I produced from stills and videos taken from the town of Liberty as the fire was approaching.

One of these videos is a short piece showing the sheer power of the fire as it billowed grey and black clouds up above Table Top Mountain looking very much like a volcano http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ksqfemj6rCw . A portion of this was sped up only to keep the video under 5 minutes. The impact is pretty dramatic though; so much so that I was contacted by storyful.com about granting them permission to use it in some news programs.

The second video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmxPPE-fshI  is on based on stills and video taken the same day as the Table Top Mountain fire video but is showcasing the efforts by the homeowner of the property there in Liberty to protect his home from fire. I got some pretty good shots of his work and the firefighters who were going to use part of his property as a staging area and to place a temporary above ground cistern to hold water for their fire trucks and pumps. Both of these videos can also be seen on the new GoWedia video site for all things related to Central  Washington http://www.gowedia.com/videos/2012/sep/27/liberty-fire-prepararion/

I got some pretty dramatic shots of the fire when it was visible from our own back yard and these were well appreciated as seen on Facebook. The same for shots of the moon shot from our deck and the sun as seen and shot from the middle of the road as I returned just at sunset from the town of Quincy.  The smoke was a little less thick that day in Quincy but as I returned to Wenatchee, it was so thick at one point by the river that I could not see the sun and it was not sun set yet at that time. As I approached Wenatchee and was up on a hill, there was such color in the sun that I had to pull over and get some shots. So far response has been good to these as I posted some on Facebook.

Meanwhile, as I was trapped indoors due to the smoke my mind’s eye gravitated to further experimentation with digital art. At least one of my fire sky photos lent itself well to layering with a photo of geese flying by and adding some other digital filtering and digital painting and I came up with a piece that a quite a few people have really liked.  I have been getting good response to my postings from people associated with a Salvador Dali’ Facebook page. I like that. They like Martha’s painting a whole lot... probably more so than my digital art even.

And, while I have doing all of the above Martha has been painting away creating some new works that should do well as some of her other recent pieces have. This past month she sold one painting at the Two Rivers Gallery and donated two pieces, a watercolor of a ’Guatemalan Woman and Child’, and a print of her ‘Dancing Flower’ painting, for a fundraiser for Columbia Valley Community Health which did very well for the clinic.

And speaking of works sold I also sold a piece at Two Rivers Gallery this month – a 10”x20” framed photo of a ‘Great Blue Heron’ on an Island in the river printed on linen.

This month we also submitted images of works to some galleries for some juried shows. We sent three images of one of Martha’s paintings and her 'Dreaming of Bolshoi' sculpture to the Larson Gallery in Yakima and I sent off some digital photo art pieces to LACDA for the 2012 International Juried Competition in L.A.

We shall see how we do on these.

And, while I have been back in CA taking photos of princesses and nights in armor, Martha attended a gala opening reception and ribbon cutting for the new music and art center at the Wenatchee Valley College and has started another new painting… this one of President Obama in profile. I can’t wait to see that ne as done with Martha’s unique use of colors.  I heard about greens and oranges while I spoke with Martha over the phone this morning. I really can’t wait to see this piece when I get back to town. I only hope the smoke has cleared as it was really causing me some serious headaches before I left town.

Well, I think that’s enough for now. Until the next time from your Artful Blogger… Rod Daut

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