Art Business

In the morning I continued work on the holiday cards, picking up where I had left off last night.  The glue was all dry and everything seemed stable, so I got out the watercolors and colored the two cards I had started making last night.  Did them in stages, one color at a time and letting them dry, as this Japanese paper can be a bit tricky.  When both were done, I folded and trimmed the cards,  In that final state, it was not obvious that this was two bonded pieces of different kinds of paper- it seemed like it could have been a heavy paper with one relatively rough side.  Not the most careful and precise coloring job I ever did with this kind of paper, but good enough for this project.  Below is a photo of the first two, taken on my windowsill where the daylight could light it.

Aspects of tomorrow's forecast are still up in the air, but at this point everyone agrees that significant snow is arriving tomorrow and it seems unlikely I'll be going out tomorrow, so I expect I will try to work on the rest of the cards.  I'm sure I can get the assembly done on the remaining six copies, and maybe some or all of the coloring.  I'd like to get them in the mail by the beginning of next week.

With possible bad weather coming around tomorrow, today was a day to get things done.  It was sunny with highs in the 30's, so the nicest day we've had in a week, or probably for the next several days.  Roads were packed with panic buyers, and it was almost impossible to get into some supermarket parking lots.  (I bought my milk yesterday, so I didn't have to fight anyone for it today)  One of many stops I made today was in Belmar, making my payment for the next show, the annual Salon style show.

This has been the custom there for the past several years, opening the new season of exhibitions with a Salon show, which is an open show (non-juried), where participants are invited to present one of their pieces in the show, take questions about it or their process, etc, all during the opening reception. These shows generally have some kind of theme, and this year it will be "blue".  How to interpret that is up to the artist.  I like the color blue, but don't do many monochromatic pieces.  However for me, this could only be relating to music.  Been a huge fan of blues music for a long time, including being a radio disc jockey playing only blues music weekly for several years, at colleges across the country.  That included making posters for those shows, which might be etchings, monotypes, drawings, or whatever made sense.  And then sometimes I just made art, usually based on photos I took of musicians at work.

For example, I put a photo I took of blues duo John Cephas and Phil Wiggins in Philadelphia to use in a few art projects, starting around 1990 when I took the original photo at a blues festival.  I put part of that photo to use again several years ago (just Cephas in this smaller work), a demonstration of a two block/chiraoscuro print done for a linocut workshop I would be teaching.  In the above image I have an orange block and an indigo block, plus the white of the paper.  That's the one I'm going with. The show will start on January 17th,  with that salon on January 20th, from 5 to 7 pm.