Back to the Grind

Due to the ongoing family moving process and all the preparations for the fall semester, I have done very little art of late.  It's been almost two weeks since I last posted here, and almost a month since I even worked on anything new.  But summer is over now.  The whole building was hopping tonight, with dance classes and theater people at work.  Today I've completed my first week of college classes, and I'm hoping that settling into the semester routine will allow me to schedule some regular time in the Studio.

The first step is having our holiday-postponed September critique.  We had nine artists with work, plus a couple of regulars who just came to watch and talk.  In the above photo (left to right, top to bottom) we have Mary's woodcut (from my BAC class), two paintings from Jill, Jane's tall landscape painting, Katie's graphite drawing, Margery's ceramic sculpture, my woodblock, and Lisa's plastic sculpture.

Jane also brought another landscape painting (above), in which we could see the effect of adding a layer of light blue paint on the left side and how much it changes the scene underneath.  Tim presented a new collaborative work (below) done in colored pencil, with he and his friend gradually rotating the composition and adding elements until it was complete.

Like me, Molly has been occupied with a bunch of stuff that wasn't her own artwork, but tonight she showed a few new things in progress. Above, Tim considers Molly's two pieces of wood, the vertical one partly cut, the horizontal one in an early drawing phase.  Many of the group have seen earlier versions of my latest boardwalk concept, but this is the first time on a block, and reversed.  I told them up front that my biggest early concern was the mismatched perspective between the two buildings.  I also explained how some elements I had considered in early versions would be spun off into a separate print.  One thing that people agreed on was that the composition was pointing viewers toward the empty center space in the sky, so I will need to put something of interest in that spot.