she paints; she is a painter

The end of the Fall session at Project: Art ends in the “little” exhibition. “Little” meaning all canvases are either 12 x 12 inches or 24 x 24 inches. There is always an energy associated with this show because most people during the summer had been away traveling to new places and then returned armed with new ideas to translate to canvases. All well and good, but the realization quite often does not match the idea. There is sometimes an agonizing struggle to ensure pieces that are exhibition worthy. But, the deadline of an exhibition is an exhilarating incentive!

Last year at this time, I started this blog and the journey to explore my own work with some objectivity. The blog process has been really fun. The first post was about this show one year ago. Although I’ve only posted 16 entries, a little more than one a month, I haven’t nearly finished my chronological look at all the work I’ve done since I started exhibiting in 2000. In the behind the scenes process of writing a blog, one gets access to the stats, so on a daily basis I know how many people have wandered onto to this site and how many have been interested enough to move around within. For example, Barry Coombs recently announced that his site had passed the 30, 000 mark in two years and my daughter who has a very successful blog about the history of space exploration has almost reached 250,000 hits in one year! Now, this blog just passed the 4,000 mark and I was quite happy, even though I can’t exactly explain why. To some extent the blog is also a forum to expose and explain my work to the thirty or forty people who know I paint, but the bottom line is that I write this for myself; yet I do admit a feeling of dejection when a day goes by without a “hit”.  I digress and shall carry on …

In last year’s show I exhibited “Laura’s Barns” from Advocate, Nova Scotia. Again, this year I did an exploration of one subject in different media. On a trip to Boston, I took a photo of an unknown girl who was reading and listening to her iPod in the outdoor courtyard of the Museum of Fine Arts. I just liked her mood and posture and thought that one day I would use that photo for a painting. Here is the original:

Here are the 4 12 x 12 in pieces in the  show: (Click to enlarge)

The four paintings all have photo transfers as their base, with acrylic over painting and either graphite or Caran d’Ache,   water soluble artists’ crayons from Switzerland, as top sketching.

Several coats of Golden GAC 100 was used as a stabilizing medium, with either gloss, satin or matte UV resistant finish as the top coat.

Ewa Stryjnik managed this whole fabulous exhibition for her students within a very short time frame. The walls were repaired and painted. The space was made completely pristine to showcase these works. Most of us had followed Ewa from the AGO classes, where we had never been given the opportunity to show our work. We are very grateful.

The entrance to the Studio/Gallery is on the 2nd floor of the  El Mundo Gift Shop on 230 Queen Street W, Toronto. Hours are Monday through Sunday from 12:00 to 7 pm until December 18th.

Below are photos of the working studio before the show,  and as a beautiful gallery.      (Click to enlarge)