My painting style has always been realistic, whether I was using watercolors or acrylics, whether I was painting flowers, mushrooms, or people. Toothy Grin is a recent example of my realistic work. At the same time, I’ve always appreciated looser, more abstract styles in other people’s work. Several years ago, at a meeting of the Orange County Artists’ Guild, members were…
This article provides you with a glimpse inside Volume IV of my 25-year Handmade Book Series. Every year I take a lot of the art I’ve done, write about it, and turn the adventure into a book. Within the following paragraphs is a snippet of how the fourth volume of the 25-year Handmade Book series is coming along. This is…
This spring I attended a class in marbling silk at Penland School of Crafts. It's something I had tried many years ago and wanted to swim back into again. I say swim because you start by mixing up a very specific gooey bath. You carefully dissolve methyl cellulose into the bath so that a viscous substance floats on the surface. After…
A couple of years ago I had one of those “aha” moments. I was looking at a bunch of small 4” x 4” canvases from a project that I somehow had lost interest in, wondering what to do with them, when I started putting them into a grid pattern. I was reminded of those sliding number puzzles that were so…
Despite the February snowflakes falling calmly outside the window, I can feel myself starting to feel hot in my clothes. My heart is beating too fast, my head begins to ache slightly, and my feet turn to ice. I am amazed by how I felt so calm just a few minutes before. This is it, I think, the day I…
My day started out by catching a field mouse in the house. Thankfully, the animal was unhurt, and I did not need to take it to a place like Triangle Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic. This wildlife hospital that had served the entire Triangle had to shut down. Many have listened to me lament over this heartbreaking loss. Now, prior to spring,…
When one is confronted with a prize to take a trip “anywhere”, it's a little daunting. As the recipient of a WUNC radio prize -- I had the unusual option to decide where I might want to travel. My decision was to take a river trip named Waterway of the Czars and travel down a major waterway from Moscow to St…
Making cane starts with picking up a piece of color bar that has been preheated to almost 1,000 degrees on the end of a steel rod, then heated and shaped. This is the center color of the cane. While one person is doing this, another is preparing a different chunk of color in the same way to cover the first color…
I thought I would take a moment to jot down some tips about some of the great things you can see in NYC right now. We were just there. The Metropolitan Museum. There is a really nice exhibit about the way in which Matisse documented the revisions he made of many of his paintings. He had a friend who was a photographer…
Special thanks to Sara Gress, the owner of the NC Crafts Gallery, for the opportunity to interview her for this timely blog article. Timely because this is the gift giving season and NC Crafts Gallery is just around the corner in Carrboro, NC. Sara has been supportive of OCAG and has included the work of many OCAG artists, who are…