Making the grade

I am not only my own worst critic, as many artists are, but my own hardest slave driver, too. I started working on this piece about ten days ago, striving to get it done in about a week... Pretty nearly there, I'll give myself a B for being a little late, though I'll likely get an A for the final grade since I'm liking it so much.

 

Note to my students: you can grade yourself like this when you've been at it for this long, but don't expect me to be quite as lenient with you - I won't be turning this in late to the gallery!

Photographic memory

Sometimes in my creative process, I will lay several elements on a piece in a certain composition that I like but then I will need to take that composition apart to work on intermediate steps. Getting the piece to the stage where I am then ready to affix all the layers can take a significant amount of time and my issue is then how to remember my initial composition.

While I have found that I can often recompose what I have forgotten to my satisfaction, I have also realized that I have a great tool at my fingertips to help me remember my original choices. So sometimes when I can foresee that I might have trouble remembering, I will take a quick photo that I can refer back to later in the process.

I have found myself in that place today, with the brass leaves that will have to be affixed in the very final stages of this piece, so I'm sharing a couple photos of details in the large 2x4' piece I recently started. It's also got five photo transfers of a row of older houses in East Sac that drew my attention. Maybe I'll give you little peeks of other sections as it progresses, too.

From one neighborhood to the next

Within the past couple of days I finished up a set of artworks. I usually fill the worktable and work in batches which helps me keep consistency in a particular body of work and gives me something to do when layers are drying...

I just finished several house shaped shadow boxes that look a lot like a neighborhood when seen together and today I photographed five houses all in a row on a street in east Sacramento. This is one of those relatively rare times when I'm shooting and then pretty rapidly putting the photos into a piece.

Sometimes it's because I'm working on a commission but it will happen even faster if I'm particularly inspired and want to strike while the iron's hot, so to speak. This was a hot iron, spurred by an upcoming exhibit deadline. The plan is to pull this next piece together in a week or so; we'll see if I can live up to my own expectations...