Tag: artist

A new oil painting- Sea Foam

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Sea Foam

I finished this oil painting dyptic (Sea Foam, 11 x 14 each, on wood panel) a couple of days ago, and though I haven’t photographed it properly yet, I wanted to share.

Part of a series on natural flow systems, this piece illustrates in light turquoise the sea foam that roils on top of churning water. In general I’ve used my own emotional/ psychological and spiritual questions and needs to guide which natural design imagery I choose for each work in this series.

I started this piece when I was thinking about flow and connections between people that allow them to create something together (I had a project in mind that was beyond my scope and abilities alone).

I imagine we’re like the foam tumbling through the deep and unknowable current driven forces of our lives and circumstances. We can eventually find each other through a combination of will and chance for a moment to make contact. I guess through painting this I was expressing a hope for this to happen for me.

That was last summer (I seem to work on these paintings in slow time) and the connections appear to be made. Fingers crossed.

Dog portrait of Betty

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This portrait was created for a Christmas present, which is always a special commission. In this case, Betty had passed away recently so it was extra meaningful.

It feels so intimate to provide someone with a reminder of their relationship with their animal companion when that pet is no longer with them.  It’s so deep and sad when this relationship ends. It’s a special, pure type of connection whose weight I think is often overlooked.

I used India ink to paint Betty with some white gouache for accents, and for the background used watercolour and white pen.

 

 

amy dog 3
Betty

Poster artwork

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This was such a fun poster to make for local musician, Ché Aimee Dorval. I started with watercolour and ink then did the pink outlining and lettering on my tablet. It’s been rainy in Vancouver and I wanted to make something bright out of the everyday (I was inspired by the hedges that populate pretty much every neighbourhood).

Inktober

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Inktober is a challenge to artists to create an ink drawing every day for the entire month of October. So, I didn’t exactly do that, but it was a great excuse to challenge myself to make some off the cuff artwork that didn’t require too much thought or time (more than a day). Here’s what I came up with.

Danny and the stubborn baby
hullo!
brews

 

 

fiction project- full version

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It took an embarrassingly long time to figure out, but I finally got the images from my ‘fiction project’ off of the Brooklyn Art House Co-Op site to put into a gallery here.

p.s.- if you want to see the pictures full size, right click and pick ‘view image’

Summer painting

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So with the summer off, I resolved to finish painting in the illustrations from this story.  This project feels like it’s been going on forever, and I am ready to finish it and send it away from me where it will magically be published by a group of wonderful people who feel like paying me for an unsolicited semi autobiographical comic-y children’s story about anxiety.  Or I at least am ready to start officially writing it.

As it turns out finishing the painting might have been overly ambitious, as there are always distractions in life (like sunny days or trying to not be the lamest friend always), and it turns out I don’t have the longest attention span and seek distractions after about 4 hours of painting.  I also don’t know what is a normal amount of time to spend painting something like this, but it seems to be quite the slow process.  I want to say I’m a perfectionist, but there are just a lot of little details that take a really really long time to do.  And it takes me a long time to pick any colours that aren’t blue.Anyways, when I put everything together in a pile of finished paintings, I feel much better about things.  So that is what I am going to do.  I will try to keep them in order.  Also, I just got an iphone and am very excited about it, so the image quality may decrease and feature retro filters and scratchy framing effects.

Thanks Firehall! and Hunter Bisset Gallery!

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Thanks to the Firehall Arts Centre for hosting my artwork through January and February. And to the Hunter Bisset Gallery at Tinseltown for showing some of my drawings. They were part of the ‘Doodle!’ fundraiser for Atira Women’s Centre’s “Empowering Women Making Art” initiative, and will remain up for a little while longer.