Happy National Dog Day! UPDATE!

I love my dog, more than wine.  Bless her heart, she is almost 14 years old and still keeping it real.  So to celebrate her, and the final days of summer and just because I'm feeling generous, I'm having a sale over at my etsy shop.  I close it down for a bit to get ready for other shows and some other projects I'm involved with through October.

So if you head over to etsy.com/shop/blage and find something you like just type in the code dogday20 and you get 20 percent off the cost of the piece.  For orders over $50 I throw in a bookmark.  Dog enthusiasts might like something like this.

THIS DOG IS GONE! 

But this summery bamboo, butterfly scene if still available!

https://www.etsy.com/listing/212276237/bamboo-and-sunflower

Eyes Wide Shut

This assemblage piece, "swing on a star," is in the group show juried by Moe Brooker at Da Vinci Art Alliance.   Moe Brooker is a nationally known Philadelphia Artist, with work in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Montgomery Museum of Art, and Musee des beaux arts D'Ontario.  He won a James Van Der Zee lifetime achievement award and has served as faculty at the Cleveland institute of Art,  Parsons school of Design, PAFA, and Moore college of art.  Brooker will attend the closing reception on August 30 from 3-5pm.   I am excited to meet him and hear how he made the selections for this show.

As with a number of my femme works this one is comprised of domestic objects, a small jewelry organizer, part of a napkin holder, the top a music box, buttons, fabric and drawer pulls. All are from different homes, different eras and belonged to women who never knew one another.  They are the things women are suppose to use and know about to make their homes more orderly, stylish, efficient.  So I combine these pieces, broken and discarded, painted them, rearranged and put them all together to become this woman, who swings on a star with a fancy letter opener at her feet.  Out of these house hold scraps emerges a feminine identity independent of the tastes, mores, and times of the indivduals who once choose and possessed them.

"Fruits of our labor"

The collograph below was created this past spring during the open print studio at the Community Art Center in Wallingford PA.  I created the plate on mat board using mostly fabric pieces coated with acrylic gel medium. The glove and grapes outline I stitched by hand with embroidery thread.  

Here is a photo of original plate I created, was a bit hard to ink at first as I liked this plate for its own sake.  After making several prints I cut out the hand/bowl so I could experiment with different sizes of paper.

I experimented with different paper sizes and ink colors, also adding other elements and washes to the finished print.  Many look decidedly mid-century modern which was the look I was going for.  At some point I cut the fruit bowl out of the plate for more printing options.

And lastly, this is the assemblage sculpture that I used for inspiration in front of the collograph print. The wooden objects that comprise the bowl are mostly fruits from wooden fruit bowl sets popular in the 1970s, as is the bowl.  There are varies dried pods in the mix, a wooden spoon and snake all are painted various shades of what we perceive as white.  The hand in the middle is an actual white glove stuffed and stiffened as if it were a gloved hand reaching out of the bowl.   Is the hand giving or receiving?

UPDATE

This version won 2nd Prize at the Wallingford a Community Art Center Member Show.