outside the box statement

“Where Your Heart Is” marks the beginning of a new series of work I plan to display in the fall of 2011. Through this artwork, I am beginning to explore the concept of home as the complex layering of memories, relationships and place:

the scent of a specific flower

a particular palette of colors

the song of a certain bird

how the light filters through the trees and falls on the ground

the heat of a summer morning

a bond of shared experiences

a tugging in the human heart

Simultaneously, I am delving into the hope of an eternal home, perfect and complete, without any of the pain that overlays all that we now know.

In this piece, we peer through the gritty reality of earth hoping to see the light of heaven, to get a small foretaste of what will be, like the scent of dessert cooking during the evening meal.

new look

I finished my piece for the Outside the Box show with plenty of time to spare; I have to deliver it on Tuesday. It's actually harder to shoot this piece, now that I've ventured into the third dimension, but this will work.

This piece will be donated to the PlacerArts as part of their annual fundraiser. They'll be on display & I'll try to attend for Auburn's Art Walk on Thursday, April 14th, but I'll be missing the live auction on Second Saturday, May 14th... too bad, because this is a landmark piece for me, marking my first piece in this series.

If you don't win this piece, you can look forward to more in this series, which I'm planning for this November when I'll be featured at the Kennedy Gallery Art Center.

studio work

Slowly but surely, I'm making progress on my Outside of the Box piece; this is what it was looking like yesterday morning. I'm building up the layers of color and working on the final compositional elements...

Sunday I attended a little workshop at church on typography & have been wanting to incorporate more sophisticated text into my pieces. So I worked on this text & have now used it in the piece. This is the theme & title of this pieces, and speaks to the concept of home, both our home here and now and beyond.

Playing more with the concept of home, I'm toying with the idea of adding a birdhouse to this piece. I found a small one at a craft store, which I thought would be cool if I hung it outside & let it weather before I used in some piece at a later date. It apparently wasn't meant to be outside as the first rainstorm completely loosened all the glue & it fell to pieces on the ground... it's a little too big for this piece, so I traced all the pieces & now it's my pattern for a smaller house I'm going to build & see if it works. (A total experiment, you may never hear of this again.)

studio shot

This is what the progress looks like on my piece for the Outside of the Box show; I'll start painting next! (And I just put the branch in to see what the composition is looking like - I don't collage & color & paint around it, so it's in & out alot.) You can see the sycamore seed pod that's been coated with acrylic medium on the table above the piece and my dog Mopar laying on the floor, wishing I would play with him...

basic box composition

This is where the Outside of the Box project is now - I've got the basic composition laid out & I'll work on putting it all together today, as well as prepping & teaching, and seeing if I can make headway on the other projects in the studio as well...

where my heart is

Working on my Outside of the Box piece (this is the photo that will be in this box) & my mind is racing ahead to a new series... likely showing in November 2011 when I'm featured at the Kennedy Gallery. I'm seeing pieces similar in construction to this current piece (I've already begun what my daughter dubbed my stick collection.)

The imagery will be a little different than what I've been doing lately - I'm looking at homes and exploring the concept of "home is where your heart is" and all that might entail. I don't want to say too much yet but I do want to put out a call for anyone within driving distance that has a "home" that I might want to photograph...

You can comment to this post, contact me via Facebook or Twitter or email me from my website at www.judithmonroe.com.

outside of the box

I've been wanting to work more three-dimensionally lately and when I saw the call for Placer Arts 4th Annual Outside of the Box show, I was completely ready to jump in. So I got a box, which is 15"x15"x3" and almost immediately knew what I wanted to do! The deadline is only about three weeks away, so I finally got started with the physical aspect of working yesterday, which is what you can see here.

With my paltry woodworking skills, I managed to drill a properly sized hole to put my little tree branch into - I am so proud of myself! Next step is to gesso & work more on the final composition. I'll post photos of progress, have no fear...