Bright Colors - Asian Design

A bold look from my studio.

I needed an image for a post about an adventure in China on my food blog www.CarolEgbert.com. Creating art that works with posts is fun and sometimes a challenge.

I' m realizing that the last time I posted was about this time last year to announce that my work was going to be featured in the Woodstock Sculpturefest. I don't think I ever posted the featured sculpture at that show. So here it is. I',m hoping to have another piece I am presently working on in this years show. Time will tell, I'll keep you posted.

Messing Around with Acrylic Backgrounds

Cynthia Emerlye:
Oh what a glorious mess I've made! My studio is in shambles with paint, rags, and wet canvasses everywhere. This really necessitates the re-designing of my setup. I need more space!


For the past week I've been experimenting with backgrounds for my large canvas (which sits untouched in the bunk room.) It's a good thing I started with smaller, experimental canvases because there is so much I've forgotten from the long ago days of painting with acrylic. For the past century I've been working small - illustrating with pen, pencil and watercolor - and the looseness and forgiving nature of acrylics had been forgotten.


In the beginning of this process, I was quite timid. Watercolor is not very forgiving. You have to get it right the first time. Thus, I've gotten into the habit of working slowly and carefully. I stop and deliberate multiple times before laying down a new color - thinking things through before I proceed. With acrylic, however, if something doesn't work, I can simply paint over it! I knew this in my head, but somehow, the experience of it has beckoned me to loosen up and play more. After days and days of this, I've begun to slosh the paint around much more boldly, trying weird new things to create interesting texture.






I'm not sure many of these will actually make for a good background - most are too busy - but its given me ideas for interior texture and its helped me loosen up and have fun.

While I'm playing Bob Marley or Beethoven and sloshing paint around, my studio companion spends her time napping.

Kirigami Wedding Present

I cut a custom kirigami mandala for a client the other day and wasn't completely satisfied with it, so I've tried again. This is a wedding present for a couple who are both mechanical engineers and bicycle riders.

Here is the first one I did, called "Engineering Couple."



And here is the one I did last night, called "The Mechanics of Love."


Which one do you like best?

A Quechee Field in July

It's been awhile since I've posted and I cannot say I have a good reason/excuse for that.  Putting the house on the market?  Maybe.  Vacation?  For sure!
But I have been out painting and here is the most recent large landscape.

"July Field, Quechee"

acrylic

Since I painted this, the field has been mowed and the wild flowers too.  Still, my love for these bountiful, beautiful fields is not diminished and August and September remain....

Paper and Metal

It's been a good work week, with the tea bag quilt slowly growing, now about 3 x 3 feet. And working with metal to create "flower" forms for the Sculpture Fest has been quite a contrast to creating with fragile paper.

I still have some logistics to figure out as I try to assemble the pieces without welding or some some complicated heavy-duty application, but hopefully it will all come together without too much difficulty. Fun to be doing something different!

Mermaids in Bubbles -and- Web of Friendship

Mermaid Friends in a Ring of Bubbles

These are two large Kirigami Mandalas, ready to frame, that I cut as a custom request from someone who wanted me to depict a long-standing friendship between two women. One has straight hair and the other wavy hair. They love gardens and the sea so I made one mandala for each motif and they can choose which one they want. These are both combination cuts: multi-fold on the outer edge and a bifold in the center, which makes the design a bit more elegant (and time-consuming.)

Web of Friendship