The Bird Revolution

 Cutting up old postcards and making some ATCs.

Tile-Inspired ATCs

I love mosaics and ceramic tile.   San Francisco has plenty of wonderful examples of tiled public art (including right around the block from my home).  That said, I needed to come down to Mexico to be inspired for a new series of ATCs painted on playing cards.  I suppose it took escape-vacation mode to make these happen.  More soon….

Ghosty ATCs

Tis the season for some spooky ATCs....

Fall Colors

As I was sorting through and organizing some of the recent mail art I received, I noticed I had quite a colorful pile on my desk.  Here are some of the recent arrivals:

1. A very tactile ghostly greeting arrived from Maureen Forys.
2. Barbara Stasiowski sent a Halloween-themed collage.
3. A colorful lizard (or maybe a gecko) arrived from Susan Stewart in Florida.
4. Marina Salmaso’s latest piece is my favorite from her to date.  Simply collaging with the insides of envelopes – the results are like a patchwork landscape.
5. Gregg Biggs sent a Pink Person.
6. Deb Faulnker’s collage postcard is dreaming of chocolate milk.
7. Dori Singh’s Halloween-themed mail is like a ghostly Victorian letter.
8. A new set of ATCs from Fleur Helsingor that even incorporates some of the Mexican play money I sent to her.
9. The latest update from Connie Jean’s Squirrel Museum came in from Florida.
10. Reminding us that Halloween becomes more and more of an international holiday, Katerina Nikoltsou sent Halloween greetings from Greece.
11. A more serious piece about wartime atrocities from Valdor in Catalonia.
12. An envelope from Ed Giecek is always a work of art.
13. Brooke Cook’s’ colorful piece celebrates both Halloween and Friday the 13th.

  

time + color + memory

Memory is a funny thing — when hearing a piece of music or getting the whiff of a smell can instantly transport you to back to another time and place in your life.  We have all experienced it – and as we get older, the opportunities for these moments of sensory recall increase.  What about color?  Can a certain color, or more precisely a shade of a certain color, take you back?  It happens to me – these moments of color recall.  When I see a 1970s blue – you know, that true blue that is not so common today. I never drove black or silver cars.  My vehicles were shades of orange and even purple.  The modern architecture we now call brutalist is the cold gray of formed concrete associated with my formal education.  Whenever I see that sad salmon color, I think of subway stations in Stockholm or wallpaper in Poland.  I landed in San Francisco in 1990 – a city full of cafés with sponge painted walls (I confess even my kitchen succumbed to the trend for a few years).  My local café never repainted for over 20 years.  Bean There’s walls felt historic, though sadly the café was recently brought to end by a greedy landlord.  The nightclub black, was it what we wore or the matte black paint that covered every surface back then?  And when you end up working for an interior designer you learn they only have one color in the box.  At least it wasn’t beige or taupe — I worked in a world of tasteful brown — just lots and lots of brown.

This week I have expressed those colors in a new series of ATCs that also, unintentionally, are a little color autobiography.  They are now off in the mail. 

ATCs of Palette and Place

Yesterday’s outgoing mail included my latest series ATCs.  In this series, the Collagescape idea that I began with in 2014 takes another direction.  There are eight different designs in the series.  Each design shows different place that has been reduced to four individual colors.  The colors are used to represent a certain place and, in some cases, a time of the year.

ATCs in the Mail

The best part of sending out Artist Trading Cards is the trading.  And after sending our a round of National Park-themed ATCs recently, I am started to receive more in return.

This first batch includes ones from:

1. William Mellott
2. Cuan Miles
3. Fleur Helsingor

And now it is time to get back to the new series I am working on, stay tuned…..

Take a Hike! — National Park ATCs

There is a great deal of expectation for artists to respond to the lunatic and his cronies that have occupied our White House.  As an artist I feel compelled to respond and yet I am torn.  I rather not let such negative energy into my art space. I want to make pleasant art and let my head escape to the national parks I love.  It is remarkable that something as innocuous as National Park-themed ATC’s could be perceived as something political. But these are remarkable times when our federal lands, lands protected for future generations, are under siege.   Even the voices of park rangers are being censored. Today’s outgoing mail art includes artist trading cards with the “radical” notion that the land administered by the National Park Service is to be loved and protected.

5th Annual Artist Trading Card Exhibition – Part II

Earlier this year I participated in an Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) up at the Richmond Gallery up in British Columbia (see previous blog entry).

One of the rewards is that my cards were traded and sent on to other artists. I received some cards in return from the gallery and am quite pleased with that arrived in my mailbox. A few of the new pieces are seen above. The include a piece from Ian Addison Hall’s series progress as seen through a hole, a simple and beautiful little water color from Preetika Rajgariah, and a collage from Monique Motut-Firth.