Elizabeth Bauman Newsletter January 2012, Volume 21
Upcoming Events
Greetings everyone! Here is a little bit about an upcoming group show I'm participating in at the Mary Lou Zeek Gallery in February. I'm so excited to be in this show again, it is a favorite of mine and sadly this will be its last year. It is the annual 100 Artists Show and here is a little from their website about the show:
The Art of Communication – 100 Artist Show February 1-March 3rd Artist Reception: February 1, 5-7pm
This year’s 100 Artists theme was inspired by a First Day Cover stamp art collection found by gallery owner Mary Lou Zeek at an estate sale. All of the 1960’s first day of issue postage envelopes were addressed to Dennis Rowley of Snowflake, Arizona, with special artwork printed on the envelopes and an old school font style that only a ribbon-style manual typewriter could produce. This ephemeral collection conjured up ideas of pen pals and hand-written letters . . . a correspondence style that now seems a rare luxury in this modern day of email and short message texting.
With theme in mind and envelopes in hand, Mary Lou divided the 100 artists into pairs. She assembled a packet of instructions along with an envelope from Rowley’s collection for each artist. The artists were given the name of their correspondence partner and asked to use the blank sheet of paper included in a Rowley envelope to create a correspondence piece to mail to their assigned art pal. The message could be a letter, a poem, a drawing. Whatever the artist chose to do was fine as long as it was done by hand.
But the instructions didn’t end there. After creating their correspondence, artists were asked to mail it along with the Rowley envelope to their show partner. In return, their show partner would do the same for them. Then, in creating show artwork artists were asked to use correspondence that arrived in their mailbox as inspiration. To sum it up, artists were given a two-fold assignment this year:
1. Create a hand-written message and send it to the assigned art show pen pal.
2. Then use the correspondence received from their art show pen pal as a catalyst for creating their piece of artwork.
My piece, inspired by a letter from the amazing artist Anna Magruder, is above and it is titled "It was at that moment she started thinking bigger". It is on a 6 x 8 inch panel and is painted in acrylic gouache with pencil and paper collage. Check out some of the art in the show on their website (scroll below the text), it looks to be a wonderful show. They will be holding a silent auction, which I believe if you can't make it to the gallery they can take bids by phone as well, in case you see anything you like. Many tempting pieces there!
I finished up this painting in December. It is called "The Ice Collector" and it is currently available in my shop. It is painted in acrylic gouache with just a tiny bit of colored pencil and it is on an 8 x 8 inch panel. I had such a good time painting ice and water that I plan to include those elements in my next painting too.
In my last newsletter, I mentioned I had some news to share and that news is I am working on some illustrations. This is totally new for me and since I needed to practice and develop my illustration style, I decided I needed a project. Inspired by several sources, I chose to do an illustration for each page of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein. I've really enjoyed this book and it is so descriptive, it seemed a perfect fit. So over 2012 (hopefully completing by the beginning of December) I will be sharing these illustrations over on my blog and I will of course share a few of my favorites here as well, though not every single one. I don't want to overwhelm you. I started posting last week and you can see what I've done so far here including my introduction post with more information about my inspiration for this project (a little sampling is below).
(This will be in addition to my usual work, so I'll be back next time with more paintings to share.)