Super Green Garden

I'm rather proud of this artsy kind of shot. It's from above and it shows a collection of glass bottles, chopped off and finished with a crusty rim of gold paint. Together with some glass marbles and stones, potting soil and a plant, it's a little garden. The glass echoes terrarium but it's also like a planter. I spend time and anxiety worrying about the variety of glass colors, heights, thicknesses just to make sure that the bottles are all slightly different; that each brings its own piece to the overall puzzle. I'm liking how this collection is going. (I have my own little garden of bottles on my window sill.)

And here's me holding the smallest of jars. It's tiny. I'm hard-pressed finding a plant that will fit inside this little guy, but I'm working on it! And in the background you can see the plastic container of marbles, stones, and sea glass pieces that I've collected to be the water-draining portion of the planter. Oh and you can see the mixing bowl that has been repurposed to house plants as they await their final planting in a jar. And, for kicks, you can see that this whole operation is currently going down atop my stove. Like I said a week ago, there are little projects everywhere! As long as I stay sane, I'm happy to let the crafts take over. It's not like I could put the plants under a cabinet or anything anyway.

Finally, the plants in all their glory, with some glitteratti frogs chillin' in the open space. I don't know exactly why I decided that I needed to glitterize a set of plastic frogs, but I enjoy them living among the plants.

Lion Swirl

I'm a little pretentious in comparing my glass art paintings to those by the, as some critics would argue, father of the 19th century Romanticism movement, Eugene Delacroix. Yet that's just what I'm about to do! As I started to sketch this design and choose the colors I would use to color the glass, I was immediately reminded of the Delacroix painting, Arab Attacked By Lion. I've copied a picture of the work (below this paragraph) for those who don't remember Art History 201: 19th century European Art, though honestly I don't know how you could forget it, the effects of those genius artists still resound throughout modern design and shape much of what we envision when we think of museum art. Anyhow, I never start writing these things with the intention of sounding like a huge art history snob, but I think my affection for the subject can come across as a bit snooty. Sorry folks. I'll give that subject a break, but not before I tell you why I think that my glass painting, which I've named Lion Swirl, recalls the aforementioned Delacroix piece. One of the tenants of Romanticism is the movement captured by the artist. The piece is a shot of action, and a dramatic moment in the action, at that. In its own time, it was revolutionary to convey so much energy, dynamic movement--even the weather in the background calls to mind a turbulent storm at its breaking point. The eye is guided through the painting in a circular motion. One glances from the fierce lion to the Arab with his sword ready to strike and continues back around the canvas in a swirl. And in my painting, the colors and the shapes cause the eye to follow a similar swirl. The red and gold pallet is broken up with a smattering of purple and white dots.
I hope you like it. It's the last of this type of painting that I will be presenting for a while. I've run out of glass!

At the top is a shot of the whole piece. Again, as with all the glass paintings, it's really hard to take a good picture without the flash on the camera messing the whole thing up. One of these days I'll figure out a good way of taking pictures of these paintings. And below, I show you a close up of the picture so that you can see it from a different angle. Perhaps with this picture below you get a better idea of the swirly nature of the lines. I don't really know because, of course, I know what the real thing looks like. And finally, I unveil a silly picture of the painting propped up against a zebra print cloth (that's my shower curtain to be exact!). I just wanted to show how transparent the glass is. Sometimes you see the various backgrounds and start to think that the painting isn't see through, but it is.

Turkish Delight 2

Alas, a masterpiece! Enjoy a pair of pictures of my latest work of art, Turkish Delight 2. I'm still waiting on someone (who lives in Nashville, Tennessee and whose name rhymes with Pason Juccio...) to send me pictures of Turkish Delight 1. And now I'm going to wax art history on you, so watch out... This work is an exploration of shape, negative space and the delightful interplay of color. The shapes are inspired by patterns, lines, and figurative shapes that appear frequently in Islamic or Mediterranean art. The bright and fresh blue recalls the sea and the acorn and sunflower yellow-orange colors echo the warmth of the summer sun, the richness of earthy dirt, brick, grains.

Below you can see the piece as it leans on my kitchen counter next to some painted Diet Dr Pepper bottles. It is acrylic on glass. I'm in the process of painting two more slabs of glass. One is a swirly (this one is a spikier one than the next piece will be) blue/green piece that is, at the moment, reminding me of summers spent on the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country. The second picture is a circular work rendered in pink, red and gold. It is distinctively more girly than the first two glass paintings I have worked on.

English Mount(ed)

In a time before I existed, my mother was a flight attendant for Braniff. That airline went out of business--quite dramatically, a few days before I was born. Call my mother if you want to hear the whole story. I digress though, because the point is my mother got to travel all over the world (and I'm a well-travelled fetus, too--making it to Europe, Nebraska, Brazil and Korea all pre-birth). Once when in London, she got a set of framed prints that were created to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in 1977. I think that means that all of Great Britain was celebrating 25 years of QE2, but I'm not 100% on that fact. (On an unrelated note, my mother was always popping back and forth across the pond and got some really cool items celebrating the Charles/Diana wedding, though they are too valuable for any crafting updates...)

Unfortunately for my mother, the frames on the above prints were ugly and they languished in a closed drawer for the past three decades. The drab green frames really dated them as relics from the 1970s and didn't do anything to accentuate the colors in the prints, either. And olive green is hardly a royal color, nor is it suited my decorating tastes. So I splashed some super-metallic gold paint from Elliott's True Value Hardware all over those puppies and they are good to go! On Saturday, they broke their 31 year hiatus of living in various drawers and boxes and can now be spotted on the wall next to my desk.

Pictured above are two of the three prints. Getting a good photo of the "nook" area surrounding my desk was next to impossible, so I had to settle for just showing two of the frames. The print you are missing is of a boat sailing under London Bridge. The top print is the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben shown from across the Thames & the lower print is a royal procession approaching Buckingham Palace.


I love vintage finds, especially when you know the object's story and can relate to it personally. And seeing as these came straight from mom, how much more personal can I get?