Outdoor Draw & Paint Session at Como Park!

POP-UP ART CLASS

I will be at Como Park/Como Conservatory tomorrow, Saturday the 16th, at 9 a.m. until noon, to create some sketches and an oil painting on site. This will be mostly outdoors on the beautiful grounds; we may take sketch books and non-bulky materials indoors, but easels are not permitted inside the Conservatory itself.

Green Pond, 5 x 7" oil on canvas, ©Tracie L. Thompson 2016 (available)

Petunias at Como Park, ©Tracie L. Thompson 2011 (available)

The petunias in progress

Dancer Statue at Como Conservatory, ©Tracie L. Thompson 2010

This will be my first ever "Come as You Are" class opportunity. If you'd like to join me and learn how to choose a scene to draw or paint, how to create a thumbnail sketch before you begin, and have feedback throughout the process (as much or as little as you like), meet me near the Carousel at 9.

$20 for the class; bring your own favorite materials. Oils, acrylics, watercolors, dry media -- whatever you please. Hats and sunscreen highly recommended!

I'm Sorry, Wordpress, It's Not Working Out

Robert Street Bridge, 8 x 5" watercolor and pen ©Tracie L. Thompson 2016

I'm about to transfer over to a brand new website.

The one I've had for the past three or so years ... I just have to accept that I am never going to put in the hours of effort required to get it to work for me; that I am not up for the learning curve and don't retain what I do learn about using it. It's Wordpress based, which seems to be a great thing for a great many people.

I am not one of those people. Wordpress leaves the cap off my toothpaste, then drops it in the drain. It uses the last of the toilet paper and doesn't put a new roll on. For other people it's the sharpest dressed site in the room; for me, it shows up with shoes that don't match.

It'll get better, I keep telling myself. I'll learn how to communicate, I'll spend a romantic weekend resizing all my images. I'll figure out what I said to make it "lose" my Equine Art portfolio. We can work it out!

But the truth is, we won't. I have too many other things to get done.

Breaking up, as they say, is hard to do. I like the people I've been working with and dread having to tell them I'm out.

I'm heading for Fine Art Studio Online, which I've tested and found much more aligned with how I actually will use a website -- updating images is post-and-go just like this blog, which will also probably be moving in the next week or so, as I roll over to the blog function on FASO. The notion of being more centralized and less scattered is very, very enticing.

FASO let me link my Paypal account and put "purchase" buttons and a shopping cart on my site in, literally, about two minutes, without any third-party anything. If I'm not in love, I've at least got a massive crush. So I have come to the bridge, and I'm crossing it.

Birdhouses Continued: The Barn Owl House

The first birdhouse, the Screech Owl House, was so much fun to create (it was work, and a lot of work, but work I truly enjoyed) that I chose to make a second one. This has a tiny bird's nest inside just like the first one does.

My goal was to have it completed by April 22, when Saint Paul Art Crawl opened, and I made it!

Deadlines are perhaps the least fun but most useful tool in the Artist Productivity Kit. This is one of several brand new pieces I've completed ahead of Art Crawl, with most already posted to my Facebook page.

Make a Little Birdhouse in Your Soul

The birdhouse project, which has had me quietly singing Birdhouse in Your Soul for the past few days, began with a decorative basswood birdhouse from Ye Olde Crafte Shoppe. Saint Paul Art Collective gave a lot of birdhouses to a lot of artists and asked us to make art out of them. The finished works will be auctioned during Saint Paul Art Crawl from April 22 to 24.

The first thing I did with my birdhouse was give it some legs. Then I needed to figure out what kind of bird it belonged to. I liked the shape of an owl's head with the feather tufts on top, but a Great Horned seemed too big and too serious.

So I chose a little Screech Owl instead. They are an interesting combination of adorable and eerie; the eerie part is when you hear them in the middle of the night and HOLY CRAP WHAT WAS THAT.

A tight deadline meant I had to use acrylics instead of my default oil paints. This needed to dry, and it needed to dry FAST.

All the twigs are attached like pegs. I drilled holes in the base and the roof, just large enough to wedge the branches in and then glue them.

And on the inside, a tiny nest I found fallen to the ground some time ago. It was a perfect fit.

Spring Art Crawl is Coming Soon!

As usual, I'll be at J.A. Geiger Studio, and will be creating On the Spot Animal Portrait Sketches during the event. Start snapping shots of your favorite critter now!

Cardinals

These are details of a fairly large commission consisting of three wooden panels, each 24" square. I am having the worst time trying to photograph the entire thing; its subtle colors and the shifting sheen of the wood seem to confound my camera. I'll give it another shot this afternoon (if you'll pardon the pun), and meanwhile, here are the two birds I painted into the piece. 

Big Lemons and Such

Sometimes, big lemons are awesome. I grew this one on my balcony, from a tiny Meyer Lemon tree I named Lemony Snicket. 

Other times, the big lemons come in the form of, say, the MN DOT shutting down both directions of the interstate AND the light rail system, for the entire weekend of your carefully planned open studio event, so that instead of healthy traffic and steady sales, you do little better than covering your expenses. 

That's what happened to a great many artists of Saint Paul Art Crawl last weekend, myself included. It isn't the first time interstate closures have crippled the event, and surely it won't be the last. Things happen. Outdoor fairs get rain or tornadoes, websites crash, the cat horks on the rug and you find it with your foot in the morning. And sometimes, the DOT makes your event practically DOA. 

It was still a good weekend, and there's still no telling what good things might come of it. I met a few delightful new people and one amazingly cool Border Terrier whose portrait I drew, and we got a visit from a gallery director who drove almost an hour to the event because she wants to schedule me for an exhibit. And while things were slow because so few people could get to us, I finished a chicken for my upcoming Chickens of Distinction calendar for 2016.

Bogey, the Amazingly Cool Border Terrier

So that's the news from here, and it's good, and also if anyone has a recipe that requires maybe 1/4 cup of lemon juice ... I might need that.

Finding the Spark, Not Just the Bark

I spent much of Sunday creating very quick sketches of animals, using cell phone photos -- yes, still on the phone, on that tiny screen -- for reference. These are 8 x 10" and took an average of 25 minutes each. They all went home with their owners immediately, so I snapped shots of the art on my own cell phone when I had a moment.

If you're guessing that working from photos on a phone is challenging, you're right. It's especially so if you only have 20-ish minutes to capture what's important. 

For me, that means that more than anything else, I've got to get the expression in the eyes. I won't get the absolute accuracy I'd get if I had more time, but I've found that absolute accuracy is not what makes or breaks a piece of art. 

It's the life that has to be there, the sense of energy and character, and weirdly this is as true in a landscape as in a portrait of a Boston Terrier. 

I'll be doing these kinds of drawings again during Saint Paul Art Crawl. If you'd like one, come see me! But do bring prints of your favorite snapshots; prints on plain typing paper from your desktop printer are ideal. Working from a cell phone really is a lot harder. 

Princess Crow in Her Parlor

The Princess at Home in Her Parlor, two 6"x6" panels with collage, oil paint, colored pencil, wax medium.
CLICK TO ENLARGE if you please. She loses a lot of detail at blog-friendly size.

On Monday when I took the trash out, I found a small bit of spangled ribbon on the ground, and thought that it looked like a collar or necklace for one of my creatures. And here's the creature, finished last night, still drying on the still life table in my studio.

I had already taken these two wooden panels -- small ones, 6" square and 1.5" deep -- and used wax to collage some interestingly patterned tissue paper onto them. The pattern is very wallpaper-like, and very red. And then I had the drawings I'd already done of the young crow I once rescued from entrapment in a deep basement window well.

I flipped the drawing and copied it onto one of the panels, then picked up a black wax-lead pencil and began drawing twigs, a nest, a moon. Layers of translucent wax/paint gave everything color, and I allowed the "wallpaper" to peek through, because after all the sky is a living room for our young Princess. Some of the pattern served as remnants of foliage on the tree.

The necklace had to go on carefully, because if I covered it in paint by accident I'd never get that off. A thick layer of translucent wax, a few slippery adjustments, a few strokes of black to soften the edge, and STOP NOW YOU FOOL, IT'S DONE.

Still, I needed a moon: Something silver, with a subtle texture, easily collaged into place, shiny enough to complement the crow's necklace but not so attention-grabbing that it stole the show.

Nothing I had in the studio would do.

So I put my shoes on and went down to the street, in the dark, looking for a discarded gum wrapper in the litter. That's what the moon in this piece is made of.

Little Lulu

Lulu belongs to Jeanne Klein, organizer of the Horse Crazy Market where I exhibit in December. Jeanne takes a class with me, and brought in photos our friend D'Arcy Allison Teasley (of Horse Tribe studios) took of her animals; I chose a shot of Lulu to use for a demonstration.

The idea was to show how to draw/paint black shapes while keeping their form -- to make them dark enough to read as black, but not let them turn into flat black blobs. So all I meant to draw was that black ear and the area around her eye, and then ... it got away from me and the next thing I knew, I had this.

If you make art for very long, you start to get these odd moments of magic, where you do something and then aren't quite sure how you did it (or how you did it that fast). There ought to be a word for that, but I don't know it if there is.

Upcoming Events!

I’m in the Faculty Show at Minnetonka Center for the Arts, Aug. 20th — Sept. 24th; Reception is on Thursday, Sept. 17th, 6 - 8 p.m.

Because my Photo-Inspired Mixed Media class (click link, scroll down a bit) at MTCA is on creating mixed media art based on your own amateur snapshots, I’m showing three pieces of animal themed art in mixed media. 

I’ve got three works in the Animal Attraction show at Gallery 427, Sept. 18th - Oct. 10th; Reception is Friday, Sept. 18th, 7 - 10 p.m.

I’m the September artist at Espresso Royale at the corner of Fairview and Randolph in Saint Paul. Highly recommend coming in for their astoundingly good vanilla lattes, made with genuine vanilla syrup they brew on site. 

October: of course I am in Saint Paul Art Crawl! October 9, 10, and 11; hours and full map are on their site. I show at J.A. Geiger Studio where it’s easy and free to park because we are in an East St. Paul neighborhood rather than in crowded Lowertown. Art Crawl is the ONLY time I create pet portrait sketches “on the spot” from your photos; cost is between $20 and $60 depending how many animals are in the shot and how long you’d like me to spend on the mixed media sketch. 

November: I’m at Peggy’s Holiday Boutique at the Oval in Roseville from November 7 - 15th, displaying original art, reproductions, and a lot of greeting cards, and I’m also one of the artists who does live art demonstrations during the weekends (schedule TBA). 

Then it’s Art of the Holidays at Minnetonka Center for the Arts (click the link and scroll down for info), Nov. 12th — December 23rd; Grand Opening is Nov. 11th, 6 - 9 p.m. This show/sale is a great tradition in Minnetonka and one of the best places to find truly unique gift items. 

December: HORSE CRAZY MARKET, here I come!  Friday, Dec. 4th, 2 - 8 p.m. and Saturday, Dec. 5th, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.. This two-day event is in its third year and growing fast. It’s at the Ramada Bloomington (formerly the Thunderbird) and admission is free. There are a LOT of high-quality professional artists there, and this year’s roster includes a strong secondary focus on dogs and dog-related art and gift items. 

A Tiny Queen on the Balcony

Queen Amelia of the Garden, 7 x 10" mixed media on tan cotton paper.

So this is a BIG reason why I live where I do.

Because this apartment has sliding doors that open onto a balcony, and I had to have some kind of outdoor space where things can grow. 

The Happy Sparrows series started here, at my balcony feeder. The forget-me-nots and chamomile and nasturtiums, all in pots along the railing where they get as much sun as they can. While I don't have any chickens up here, I do grow the things I use for their settings. 

This spring, I went to look at an artist's loft in one of the big live/work buildings in Lowertown. Beautiful brick, aged wood, the community in the heart of everything -- and not so much as a window box to call my own. I pictured myself there and my heart sank, and I came back home grateful for the sunlight and space of my balcony, full of lively little sparrows even in the middle of winter. 

Always, I'm taking that step sideways from reality, but it turns out I need to have one foot on the ground, even if that ground is three floors up. 

Designing a Clucking Calendar

I began last night, gathering up images of the chickens I have already painted so that I can make the much-asked-for chicken calendar for 2016.

I have eight or nine (depending whether I end up combining the two Noble Hens, #4 and 5 in the squares above, into a diptych, which I may), so I need three or four more. Actually I have many more chickens than that, but for the calendar I'm only using the ones I've done in mixed media on paper.

For those of you who might be asking, "But what about the horses?", fear not. The 2016 horse calendar is also in its early design stages, but because I already did one of those last year, I actually have fewer horses than I have chickens.

If you feel this is unacceptable, send me horse photos. :-D

Springy Stuff! And I'm Sick.

A day or two after Saint Paul Art Crawl, I got sick. The cough still hasn't gone away, and I've been working steadily at my frame shop job all the while, because some other folks have been out of town.

The result of all this has been that I still need to ship two items that I finished a while ago, and I haven't created any new art to show you this week. What I did do was take the long way home a couple times last week, and let rush hour rush by while I wandered with camera, Kleenex and cough drops in hand, snapping shots and inhaling the scents that I could, amazingly, still smell.

I hope you'll all have the chance to do something similar, now that all the lilacs are blooming.

Poetry is for the Birds

What you see here is my design process as I prepare to frame this raven of mine. While I don't consider myself a poet, some of my art sprouts verses as I work on it, rather by accident. I have chosen to add the verse to this one when I frame it. 

In this draft, you can't read the writing well (and I've got some layout issues which I will correct in the final version). Here's what it says.

The Patron Saint of Storytellers

often flies away

just before he tells you how it ends.

If you keep on calling, he comes back another day

He brings you half the ending 

and you bring the rest to him.

This Painting is Galloping Away

This is Black Mare in Summer, one of my personal favorite canvases. Based on a snapshot I took of my horse, it's made of layers of oil paint and wax, and measures 40" h x 30" w.

And I'm putting it in the Live Art Auction at Schmidt Artists Lofts on April 25th.

This may surprise those of you who read my recent post critical of charity benefit art auctions. I'm so burned out on those that I almost deleted the email about this auction without even reading it. 

Glad I didn't. This auction is put on by a group of people who want to support and promote the artists while providing a fun time for everyone.

How rare is such an event?

I have never seen one like it before. I have been asked to give countless times. This is the first time I have ever been given an opportunity to sell my work in an auction.

So here I am, sending one of my own very favorite paintings to this auction. Retail, this is a twelve-hundred-dollar canvas. My reserve on it at auction is just four hundred fifty. It could go for that; that's the gamble I'm taking. If you love it, and you want it, here's your chance.

Flying on Half-Finished Wings

Night Hawk, salvaged objects and materials with polymer clay, oil paint and wax.
Tracie Thompson, 12.5" h x 8" w x 5.25" d

I hope you'll click this photo to enlarge it; the pared-down-for-fast-loading blog version loses so much. 

This was finished last night, and in a sense it was 5 years in the making: that's how long I've had the main piece, which was once part of a wooden planter but which, when I found it, was debris along the tracks in Robbinsdale. I took home several of these slats, and have now used all but one.

The "2437" piece, I picked up in a parking lot on Ford Parkway about 3 years ago. It was night, and I had a fever, but I was out walking anyway. I recall that I had a reason for that, but not what it was.

Originally the plan was to truly finish the bird's wings. There were going to be more feathers and I thought I'd paint them black. Yet the longer I worked, the less I wanted to do that, and the more I liked the feeling of the wings half-constructed yet still somehow working: It felt like life as I know it, and so it stayed.

This piece is available, $350. 

A Charm for Hope and Comfort

About seven years ago, when my Grandma Thompson was still alive and I was still in Florida, I found several of these little bluebirds half buried in her back yard. I'd been making art with rescued materials for a long time by then, so I plucked the little birds from the dirt and took them home. They came with me to Minnesota, and since the move I had used all but this last one, whose tail was broken when I found her and had to be glued. Over the past couple days I worked out this design and assembled it; it's one of the smallest of this series of works at about 6" high. 

All my salvaged-object pieces are about hope and comfort, even when they're also about a lot of other things. There's a meaning for me in choosing to use materials and items which have been deemed 100% worthless, either by being abandoned, forgotten, or outright discarded. It feels like a way to honor all the parts of our own selves which have taken a beating or been neglected or deemed unimportant. 

Still in Art School

If you make art, and you want to do it really well, you're a student. You're always and forever a student, even when you're the instructor sometimes, even when you're getting into galleries and making sales and impressing your family and friends. This is because the moment you decide you know enough, is the moment you stop making really good art.

Red Coffeepot, 9 x 12" oil on canvas board, study from class. $60.

So here's me, being a student. This still life experiment is from my class with Derek Davis last week, where I'm continuing to learn about color and about how to loosen up my work and let go of some of my tendency to nitpick and to make edges too well defined. Is it a masterpiece? Nope. But it's a fun study that makes me happy and will probably end up brightening someone's kitchen. 

And I learn from each of these. For this one, I learned a little more about how much I could get away with blurring the edges, and how much form I could create with a big, shabby brush. 

Remember the Owl?

I finished it last night, quite late, like the owl I've always been.

Any time there are owls in my art, it's got something to do with my dad, who could call to them and get them not only to respond but to come close. This is a barred owl, the kind he could talk to. I haven't titled it yet because there are so many associations I have with these birds that I'm having a hard time narrowing it down. Its working title has been Owl House, and it may just stay that way.

This is 17" high and -- I say this because I've had a couple folks ask if that was an actual, stuffed owl -- no owls were harmed in the making of this art. The owl is oil paint and black pencil on a thin piece of tin I found discarded around an old barn.

I salvaged the wire, both the heavy copper and the fine stuff, from a friend who had scrap she was throwing out. The central spire is a surveyor's stake I found while walking around Saint Paul. The heavenly bodies are bits of found-on-the-street jewelry, gears, washers, and punched-out pieces of metal from the mill district along Minnehaha Ave near 38th. 

I want to thank Bob at Front Yard Video in Florida, for giving me permission to use still images from his owl videos as reference photos. 

This piece is available, $500. I will have it on display in April at Saint Paul Art Crawl, at J.A. Geiger Studio, provided it hasn't yet sold.