MECAmarathon!

Room 402, the classroom I where I teach Mixed Media Portraiture, transformed!

Photo by Lynelle Wilson

Photo by Lynelle Wilson

Photo by Lynelle Wilson

Photo by Lynelle Wilson

Photo by Lynelle Wilson

Candace Karu in a dress of her own design. LOVE it!!!

WHEW! What a night!

I hung my portraits, set up my supplies, had time to click just a few *before the crowds arrived* pics, then started my portrait drawing marathon! Drew straight through the party, from 6:30 - 9:30, non-stop. It was a blast! Didn't get home till almost midnight (I actually slept till 9:00 this morning - unheard of for me! :^)

I'll write more about this event later - I'm heading up the coast to teach a class at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland this afternoon!

MECAmorphosis TONIGHT!

MECAmorphosis tickets/advertisements designed by Meghan Lambert

I will be doing portraits up on the 4th floor ~ 15 minute portraits, $25 each! What a steal!! Starts at 6:30, goes till 9:30. I'm a teensy bit nervous about being on display while working...

Wish me luck!!!

Back in Print

A Pickwick Independent Press member (and friend) at work.

My work station - using Lisbeth's snowflakes as stencils, I'm etching a copper plate and a zinc plate with sugarlift...

This sugarlift recipe is sugar, Ivory Snow, and India Ink. Yesterday a couple of people in the print shop told me that you can use straight condensed milk! I have to try that...

Lisa Pixley at work.

Lisa's exquisite new bird prints.

Bulletin board paper doll lovers from a local gallery.

Those of us in The Artist Studio who have been pining to print are incredibly lucky! Lisa Pixley spearheaded the creation of a spanking new print shop in our building that is now in full operation, Pickwick Independent Press. I haven't done any intaglio since my senior year at MECA in 2006, and I am very excited to have access to a press again! I have started to experiment with transferring Lisbeth's cut paper designs to copper and zinc. There are several ways to do this, and I believe I will eventually attempt them all, but I'm starting with the very direct sugarlift process. This afternoon I will be putting the hard ground on these plates and putting them in the acid bath. I heard yesterday that you can put your plates in the ocean, and it will etch like an acid bath! I think you'd have to leave them in a long time, maybe several days...I really like this idea...

It's No Poop Dream! Fame Grabs Greta!

My studio neighbor, artist and mother of two: the hilarious, multi-talented, and spectacularly theatrical Greta Bank!

NOW PLAYING at the deCordova!!!

In costume for a friend's Halloween wedding...

Spring '09 Peep Hole performance at The Artist Studio in Portland...

This is me and Mick Jagger at my summer home.

collage model, 2009

This is me and Britney Spears peeing in the woods.

collage model, 2009

I love how Greta laughs in the face of and reveals the farce of artifice! She is the girl who farts loudly at the Mary Kay party. A true trickster.

Greta and fellow poop polisher, architect, Christopher Campbell...

Works in progress...

Studio as Shrine.

Groovy Greta at the deCordova opening.

My sister Susan and I coined the phrase it's a take it away! when we were little girls. Our mother had a jewelry drawer that was within our reach, and we loved to rake through it, looking at all her necklaces and earrings. But there was one pair of earrings that we found both fascinating and repelling: they were made of ivory and had deep intricate carvings, somewhat like the trails that bugs leave as they eat away at dead branches on the forest floor. Susan and I would stare at these and get an icky feeling in our stomachs, and say, oooh, take it away! Yet this didn't keep us from going back for another look. Every so often we'd say to each other, Let's go find those earrings! There was a delight in being creeped out...

Greta Bank's new sculpture falls into this take it away category - oooh, it makes me feel so icky, yet I want to keep looking! It speaks of the attraction/repulsion capacity of the human form. Greta describes the pieces in her Wallflower project as super gross-out and very pretty.

Indeed.

Read this great interview with Greta, Everybody Poops.

And be sure to visit her fabulous new website, My Secret Studio!

Home

(the beginnings of a mail art project...)

So happy to be settling back into my home in Woolwich (I will continue to maintain my studio in downtown Portland). I've been busy nesting - cleaning, painting walls, de-cluttering, rearranging - pottering about with gray squirrel energy. Already I feel less scattered and more rooted. Fun as it was to have an apartment in town, I was constantly packing bags and moving between three places. I felt at times like the scarecrow from the Wizard of OZ, slayed open on the ground after being attacked by the flying monkeys...

"Some of me is over here! Some of me is over there! I'm all over the place!"

Right now two places feels like plenty.
Happy Autumnal Equinox, all!