Holiday Craziness and Work in Progress

The winter holidays are quickly closing in...are you ready?  It is only the first week of December, and already you can feel the rush and bustle in the air!

Things here at the house are getting pretty hectic, too...I have lists everywhere and calendars are filling up with schedules, activities for the kids and Christmas parties all over the place.  No wonder it's hard to keep up with it all :)  That's not to mention the cleaning and shopping.  I love cyber Monday :)

My youngest son, Ethan did his solo in his Christmas concert beautifully...we were all so proud!






They also enjoyed the Christmas parade :)







Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and Google Plus, Etsy, Fine Art America...Anybody else find it hard to keep up with it all?  As an artist, I think it's important to be on at least some of these social media sites.  It's a  way of getting your work out there and seen and also see and enjoy other artists's work.  I like to start my day by checking my email and putter around with all these different social media sites.

Here's my problem...I get on all these sites, and it's fun...meeting other artists and chatting and having a look at all the amazing artwork out there.  The next things you know, hours have gone by and I haven't painted a darn thing! Anybody else experience this?   I'd love to hear how other artists and bloggers balance it all. (Yes, I know I have been slow updating my blog here!)

So that being said, in spite of all the craziness going on around here, I have got a bit of painting in:) Here is a sneak peek of my latest work!  It's a work in progress, still a bit more work to be done.

I plan on adding some collage elements to it.  It's based on a photo of my grandfather when he first came to Canada from Poland.  I collaged in some letters from his mother in Poland, some pay stubs and some receipts of money he sent back to the mother country.  A lot of these got painted over, so I will print these off on rice paper and collage them back in, distress it a bit, too.  Any thoughts?

Thanks for stopping by!

What the heck are ATCs anyway?

Artist trading cards (ATCs) are miniature works of art!  They are about the same size as modern baseball cards, or 2 ½ X 3 ½ inches (63 mm X 89 mm).  They are small enough to fit inside standard card-collector pockets, sleeves or sheets and they can be created with any material imaginable. Some cards are produced in editions (a limited number of the same card), some in series (a set of cards with a unifying theme), and some are singular originals.


An offshoot of ATCs are the "Art Cards, Editions and Originals" also known as ACEO. ACEOs originated when some artists began to create cards to sell, and/or trading among themselves.


Here is an example of how popular these little cards have become...


This week on August 11, the Confederation Center of the Arts in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island is holding it's fifth annual Artist Trading Card event!  It's Fifth!  There are more than 60 artists from all over the maritimes participating!  There will be local artists to Prince Edward Island as well as artists from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador and Ontario.


The event starts at 7 p.m. in Memorial Hall as part of the Thursday in the Gallery series. This year's submissions include a wide variety of techniques including linocuts, watercolours, collage, and mixed media creations.


I am not able to attend, but I'll give you a sneak peek of the card I submitted:

It's called "I Believe, I Wish"  The original painting is watercolor and acrylic on 140 lb watercolor paper. I love how this image turned out.  I submitted signed, limited edition prints of this painting.  What do you think?


I have created several ATC and ACEOs and they do seem to be quite popular.  If you are an artist, leave a comment, and share your experiences with Art Trading Cards and ACEO's.  Do you find they are popular as well?  And do you sell them or use them primarily for trading with other artists?  Do you use prints or originals or both?  

Who Loves French?

Who doesn't love French?  The romance of the language...the gorgeous countryside of France or the incredible beauty of Paris, famous for its history, romance and art?

I love the language, and it's been on my bucket list for a few years now to learn it fluently.  I have been taking weekly classes for two years now, and I've come a long way, but still have tons to learn.  I love getting out once a week to get my French fix.

French class is finished for the summer and will start up again in the fall.  So to honour my love for French, I have decided to relist my Valentine ACEOs on Etsy ♥  If you'd like to have a look at the listing just click on the image :-)

Do you love French?  Leave me a comment!

Ancient Shells and Building on what we Already Know

One of my favorite places my family and I went to on our recent vacation was the Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.  It was the first of the Smithsonian museums that we were able to see, and I was in absolute awe the minute I walked in the door with my husband and my two kids.


I was so excited, I started taking pictures right away.   I was taking as much in as my little brain could handle, reading all the little information cards and doing my best to commit the information to memory.  

"Look, kids...this is a blah, blah, blah!  And look at this, isn't that interesting?"

My husband, who had been to the Museum of Natural History before was shaking his head.  "Ah, Jo-Ann...this is just the small stuff, are you sure you don't want to move along and see some of the bigger stuff?

But I didn't want to miss anything and I was determined to take it all in!  I loved these ancient fossilized shells!  They were so beautiful!  










The artist in my was creating mixed media collages in my head.  Here is a mixed media painting that I created this week.  It is 8 x 8 x 1.5 inches on gallery wrapped canvas.  

 These ancient shells are call ammonites.  They look very much like shelled nautiloids but are actually more closely related to octopus, squid and cuttlefish.   Very similar to a nautilus, however, they grow and move into a larger chamber which has grown ahead of it.  It adds newer and larger chambers to the open end of the coil and grows like this until it has reached maturity. 


I love how David Weber of Thou relates the nautilus shell to life

And therein is the story of everything else. A baby is born with an infant’s consciousness: everything, beginning with Mom, is an extension of itself. As a 1 to 2 year, the toddler begins to understand the distinct nature of itself. The second level of consciousness supercedes the first, even as it is wholly built upon it. Cognitive abilities continue to increase as the child grows older: from the manipulation of its environment to the complete separation of its personality from parents and others, to an always heightening understanding of cause and effect, then adopting a social self, a critical self, a self-critical self. Each point in the process is built upon the previous one, and is always a part of the previous state of consciousness and understanding

The whole is a result of previous and lesser sized parts, one built upon the other. No part loses its significance, even as its specific usefulness ha been transcended.

An acorn becomes a shoot, becomes a sapling, becomes a young tree, becomes a mature oak. Everything about the acorn is still a part of the great oak tree, but has been transformed and functions as a much larger and much more complex part of the tree’s wholeness.

These are fresh of the press!  Well, not off the press, really, but fresh off my brush, if that makes sense. 

This first painting here I have been fussing and playing with for some time.  Might have gotten a little busy and I struggled a bit with which way to take it.   I took a photo in January on our trip to Petersfield Park (see blog post How to Remember Summer in January  I was playing with my new camera, and taking some closeups of leaves.  They were brown and broken, no longer the flashy reds and golds of autumn, but elegant all the same.

I find that I can get a little carried away when I am painting, and I am not very patient.  It drives me crazy waiting for a wash to dry, and I sometimes risk going back to work on an area too soon.  If its too wet, it's mud.  I usually like to have several paintings on the go at once, that keeps me busy while I am waiting for a wash to dry!  I started this abstract here:  Fun to do, it is painted on watercolor paper with watercolor paint.  I used some stamping from random objects and collaged some found material (can you guess what it is?)










And last but not least, I just finished this piece yesterday.  I had two paintings on the go...one was a complete disaster! lol  but I learned loads about working with my booboos.  I tried to fix it with gesso, acrylic paint, collage, and even gold spray paint.  It just got worse and I think it's time I let it go.  I might be able to save part for collage later....hmmm...Anyhoo... back to the painting that actually worked out:

It is a mixed media painting.  I drew the pears from life and added this quote:
"One day we will realize that the battle we are fighting is not outside ourselves, but within."

I am not sure if I made that up or heard it somewhere, but if anyone out there knows where it came from, could you let me know so I can reference them :-)



Thanks for stopping by and don't be shy...say HI!

Latest Painting, Mixed Media Abstract

Yesterday, I said to my oldest son, "watch this..."  I brought my newly completed painting to my yountest son, who is 6 and a half.  "What do you think of this, Ethan?" I asked, expecting for certain that he would make a screwed up face and say something like, "weird" or just simply shake his head at me.

What I got was the complete opposite...His eyes popped, his arms flew up in the air with the exclamation, "I LOVE IT!!!!  That is soooooo beautiful, Mom!  I can't believe you made that, WOW!!!!"   Kids never cease to amaze me, and as I learned for myself, you just never know what reaction you are going to get!

You can click on the image to see more views of this painting on my Artfire site.