I have received a recent delightful request that I make a few selections of my art work for an upcoming exhibit. This had an unexpected consequence, as it actually plunged me into the dark night of the artist’s soul! The request: I was asked to choose from two short lists of artworks that I display in my online gallery.

This gallery is very large, and spans many years of work. I grouped the images into albums with somewhat loose & overlapping categories. And this organization does NOT match up with the groupings of higher resolution images that I store locally. Then there are the original artworks, which are not at all organized.

Do I have a data base of my artworks? Do I carefully track which pieces have sold, or been gifted away? Of course not! Instead I have incomplete “note” files here and there on my computer. And my faulty memory!

So what caused me to enter this place or mood that am calling the dark night of the *artist’s* soul? First the painful task of locating the works of interest, matching up the images & titles to identify and locate the original artworks! Second the sheer number of unwanted and forgotten artworks in my studio! So much work to be sold, gifted, retained or destroyed.

I found them all, but not without being too exhausted to finish the communication for the exhibit. One drawing was in one of four forgotten folios of drawings & prints from the previous decade. Another mixed media work was sold some years ago, a more recent piece has been gifted to a family member. The others are available and hang on the wall in my house. You may see a few of the pieces shown here in a fun exhibit soon, TBD.

Now I need to complete the job. I will document the sizes, any framing or changes to the works, add prices, and share the list of the available works. Tomorrow I must emerge from this dark night of the artist’s soul, and get to work if I want to show a few art works at an upcoming one day event.

Now is the time to add the Port Townsend Studio Tour 2024 to your calendar, if you haven’t already done so! This self-guided tour of 60 artists’ studios in Port Townsend or nearby is one day only, Saturday August 24th from 10am to 6pm. Participating artists open their studios, and let’s hope for lovely weather for some outdoor art viewing also!

I hope to see you here in my own studio; you will be welcomed! I will have newer artworks to show, and you will find a selection of older artwork that very few people have seen.

If you cannot make the Studio Tour August date, and would like to see my studio on another day, please do contact me to schedule a visit. I am often available and enjoy art visits. Your visit will make my day!

So plan ahead now! Check out the flyer and the map now available on the Raw Art Collective website! You will also find brief bios from participating artists along with a larger images of the works below. Enjoy the sample works from all 60 artists online up until the tour date, and follow links to their Instagram accounts to see more. Use this to choose which studios you will locate on the map provided, to prepare for the tour date.

Port Townsend Studio Tour 2024 will be the first Artist Tour here since 2019, and we are all excited to welcome visitors.

Here is the quick link to the tour map.

Artist are makers, and artists are human; they procrastinate when the art work gets difficult. And then there are family obligations to take care of. So this month the opportunity arose to take gift wrap to a new level!

On a recent visit, the youngest granddaughter and I made a very rudimentary cardboard castle for some last minute creative fun. It was a great project that went home with Summer Elise, and now takes up too much space in her playroom. This activity inspired my latest maker project: another cardboard castle to contain a few of her birthday gifts!

I spent a happy couple of days in my studio “building” a more elaborate castle! This one is fit for a princess about to be seven years old! So much fun!

This cardboard castle has color, decorative elements, and various non-cardboard embellishments. There are shells, feathers, and some shiny bits of this & that! There is plastic film “glass” in some windows, the doors open and close, and there is even a sort of landscaping about the base!

I enclosed three small presents and tied the front closed with a lovely ribbon. What is more, the castle made it safely to its destination. We parked in Bainbridge to walk on to the Seattle ferry, to be met for our ride to Kent. I am so glad that cardboard is lightweight!

So in order to take gift wrap to a new level, I made this fancy cardboard castle “box” for a few small birthday gifts for our seven year old granddaughter! So much more fun than yard work, or resolving difficulties with more ambitious art projects…

I have mounted eight small retired printing plates for a finished artwork, and my Metallic Flowers on Copper is ready to hang. I made the small plates from mat board and shellac years ago at Corvidae Press. They are slightly ink stained, and now embellished with acrylic paint. I loved the idea of mounting them to yet another printing plate. The base is a copper sheet was also a printing plate, but now has the photo sensitive etching material removed. I researched glues for copper, and chose one that should be adequate for this job, fingers crossed!

See the previous post for a photo of the original arrangement, which I liked also. I have mounted a glossy print of the first arrangement onto a painted birch panel, and that piece has already found a new home. I enjoy the amazing variations in the natural world daily on my walks. My metallic flowers on copper allude to the pleasure I find in spring and summer flowers. What a fabulous spring we are enjoying this year!

As usual, I did not plan ahead for how this piece could be hung. I don’t want to frame it, and anyway it is not a standard size so would require a custom frame. But in cleaning out my studio I found three sets of Moore Gallery Clips. These are designed to hold matted art behind glass without a frame. The thin stiff metal pieces fit around the corners of the work, and are held by waxed cord on the back. I added a backer piece of foam core behind the thin copper sheet, in order to use these discreet clips with my piece; now it is ready to hang. I am so glad that I kept these (for years!).

Of course I played with the photo, and tried out some variations of my favorite digital effect. I created several layers in order to adjust the colors and intensity independently. Really I much prefer the original over the foils for this, which is a good thing! But I hope you enjoy these three colorful versions using the digital foil effect. I manipulated all of them for far to long in order to get these results ;-).