OMG!

OMG!

My piece 'Zen" won Best of Show at the Thorne Sagendorph Biennial Regional Juried Show!

It is a regional juried show open to artists living within 30 miles of Keene and is one of those shows that you are just happy to get your piece accepted in. My hope was to get in (my fingers were crossed as well as my stomach in knots waiting to find out if I got in) and have a piece that, this year, people might stop and look at instead of walk past. The last two times I got in, my pieces were small or insignificant next to the amazing art in the show and it hit a nerve when it seemed no one even stopped to take a look at my drawings. So this time, I just hoped my pieces would command a little looksee from the viewers of the show.

BUT to win Best of Show was beyond my expectations!

Seriously, just getting in the show had me excited. The gallery space is such a phenomenal space & they really know how to hang and light work. Just to see my pieces hanging, lit up better than when I was working on them was a thrill I was looking forward to.

If you remember I did the piece Zen with the intention of entering it in this show and one other - the CPSA national show... and if you remember more... I found out that it is too big to be entered in the CPSA show. :-( Oh well........ I would have liked to have had the chance to get it in an all colored pencil show.

Here are some pics from the opening last night.

Another piece of mine got in the show, and here it is with me and my model posing in front of it. People kept on coming up to her during the opening asking her "Haven't I seen you before."

Here's me with my beautiful older daughter who is the model in Zen. :-)

& look! People stopped and looked at it, lol!

If you didn't have a chance to go to the opening -

the show runs January 24 - February 26, 2009.

The gallery hours are:

Saturday – Wednesday noon to 4 p.m.
Thursday and Friday noon to 7 p.m.

The Thorne Sagendorph Gallery is on the Keene State College campus on Wyman Way (off of Main St.)

If anyone would like to look back at 'Zen' being made - it is in my October archive (link below) Just scroll down the page:

http://nicolecaulfieldfineart.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html

Grey Matters finished!

Untitled
27" x 40"

I still don't have a name for this one either... names are not my strong point!

I may fiddle with the grey area a bit more on this, but we'll call this tentatively finished.

I did this piece with two shows in mind: a regional show at the Thorne Sagendorph Gallery at KSC locally, and the 2009 International Exhibition of the Colored Pencil Society of America. Well, that was until Katherine Tyrrell (of the Making a Mark blog) reminded me that there are size constraints for the CPSA show. The regional show is fine - which I am sure of since they regularly get 9 ft high pieces in the semiannual event, but I won't be able to submit my all colored pencil piece to the national Colored Pencil Society of America show. :-( The rule is that the FRAMED work must not exceed 32 x 40", which means with matting and framing the maximum the piece can be is 24" x 32."

Size makes an impact. In an art world where bigger is better, an art society that is trying to promote a medium, that in some circles, is considered a hobby medium, constraining the size of the artwork entered to such a small size seems a silly thing to do. I understand that not all galleries can take very many large pieces, and this show is huge, but maybe that could be a prerequisite for the gallery chosen for the event?

Size had been on my brain when I started this piece after the discussion Katherine had on her blog: Juried Art Competitions - does size matter? In the Thorne Sagendorph show, my piece of 40" tall will actually be dwarfed by the other pieces trying to get in, if the show looks as it has in the past. I love the show. Yes there are more intimate pieces that get in, but its the larger than life pieces that strike you from across the gallery and pull you in....

Walking Into a Rothko

Mark Rothko

Untitled / Grey and Black

The more I work on this the more I feel like the model walked into a Mark Rothko painting and leaned on the mass of colorful greys.

Words from Mark Rothko (taken from his wiki)
"I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and color. The only thing I care about is the expression of man's basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny."

In the June 13, 1943 edition of the New York Times, Rothko, together with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, published the following brief manifesto:

1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.
2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.
4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted."
[Rothko said "this is the essence of academicism".]
There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.
We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art."

Wow.

As always the art world is ever changing. I believe the art world is struggling right now with how realism and figurative art fits into the world that modernists such as Rothko created. Struggling not only with being seen as going backwards in the progression of the art world, but also with the notion that using the tools of our time (photography, computers) makes realism redundant.

Personally I find our times exciting and hope I live long enough to see where it all takes us!

I can hardly believe I am almost finished with this. Unfortunately I can not work on it today... I have to drive to a gallery and then obligations at my kids' school, but it is probably fair to say it will be finished by the end of the week. Not too bad for how big it is and how small my paintbrush was (the tip of a pencil).

Standing on the table and leaning over the image with a camera, is just not the best recipe for clear, straight photographs. It is not worth the risk to smudge the work done by taking it off the table.

The plan was to have just a light grey tabletop in the bottom portion of the composition, but I decided to make it into a concrete wall. I walked down to the parking garage down the street from my studio today and took several photographs of the low concrete walls to use as reference. This change of plan will, however, make this small (hah!) endeavor take a bit longer.

If the strange delineated composition of this piece and the last one I did just doesn't make sense to you... let me show you some of my favorite paintings, which I think will clue you in partially to my pshyche.

The Death of Marat by Jacques-Loius David is one of my all time favoites, if not my favorite painting.

as is this painting by Gustave Caillebotte "Paris Street, Rainy Day." Actually look at the range of Caillebotte's paintings and the types of compositions he chose. It makes me salivate.

Add to these a fascination with all things Edward Hopper & I think you WILL understand me better!

Experimental Wisdom 2

I am taking a midday break, having to stand while working on this is taking a bit more out of me than usual. I moved my table out away from the wall and leaned against the wall while working which helped.

An Anonymous commenter asked what colors I used for the face so instead of typing them in, here is a photograph of them. If you are familiar with Polychromos, you should be able to make out the colors I think. If not, I didn't use anything unusual for me so you can search my blog for past skintone colors that look similar.

Yesterday when opening my web browser, which defaults to a news page, I was surprised to see a picture of my town Keene, NH with the heading "America's Most And Least Vulnerable Towns." Surprisingly Keene, NH ranked #3 in the LEAST vulnerable towns to the current economic crisis from a study of over 100 small cities and towns in the US by Forbes magazine.

People must have liked hearing that news because I've been stopping at Starbucks every morning for the past month (I received a $100 gift certificate for my birthday and I am stretching it out). I have been the only one in line or just one other every day for weeks, BUT today there were 9 people in the Starbucks drive-thru line! I guess people feel like they can afford a latte in Keene, NH this week.

Experimental Wisdom

On to the next one!!

I am going for it with this one. It is about 27" wide and 46" tall. Whew. See what I mean.

Since I am using Polychromos on Fisher 400 and they are very unstable on this surface, like pastels, I am more than a bit worried about this piece. How will I get it to the photographers, for instance, without smudging it? I'll worry about that when the time comes I guess.

The piece of paper fits 2/3 of my 6 foot drawing table. Don't freak out though folks, most of the drawing will be the figure at the top and then a bunch of light grey tabletop below it. I should be able to pull this off working standing up and walking around the table to get at specific parts. I would hang it on the wall and work, but it just doesn't suit my technique, and never feels right when I do that excpet for in later stages when I am just fixing things here and there.