"Demo at Lake Martin 2019 3"

This is demo 3 I did at Lake Martin. It is also my favorite one. I have started to pay attention on color scheme design with this painting. The harmony of the color design on this painting was my intention.

Last week on Art With a Needle

You may have noticed that I'm posting found poetry only once a month instead of once a week as I did in 2018.  I've noticed that after I have been doing a particular form of daily or weekly art it's hard to let go.  For instance, I used to post a "photo suite" -- five or six photos on a single theme -- once a week, for four years.  Finally I decided it was time to stop, but couldn't bring myself to go cold turkey, so I dropped back to once a month for another year before I was able to let go.

After a year of weekly found poetry, following a year of daily text, I didn't want to put in that much time every week -- but I still owned (own) a huge pile of poetry bits, painstakingly searched out and cut out and filed, and the thought of abandoning those dozens of hours of work was more than I could bear.  So I'm doing found poetry once a month.

Sonja left a comment:  "Love the words inspired by your art, or was it the other way?"  Almost always, words first, then a big search for an appropriate image to go along with it.  Fortunately in addition to a huge pile of poetry bits, I have a huge box full of pictures left over from three years of daily collage, so after I have composed the poem I look through my box of pictures to find one that goes with the words.

Here's my favorite miniature of the week:

Whenever I go to the beach I look for shells with holes in them, and this shell had been lying on my counter for a long time.  The iridescent blue beads seemed like sea treasures, nestled in the shell.

"Demo at Lake Martin 2019 2" --- Available

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This is my 2nd demo at Lake Martin. Silver, brass, and porcelain.

Remembering Enid

A small but lovely show opened at 21C Museum Hotel this week, featuring work by members of Enid, a group of Louisville-area female artists who work in sculpture and 3-D.  Enid is named for Enid Yandell, born 150 years ago in Louisville, who studied with Rodin and whose sculptures were highly renowned.  One of her huge statues, of Athena, 25 feet tall, made for the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exhibition in Nashville, was the largest statue ever made by a woman (what a back-handed accolade).

Enid Yandell and Pallas Athena (in pieces)

As a fan of Enid, my favorite statue is one that was never made.  In 1894 the Kentucky Woman's Confederate Monument Association held a big design competition to choose the sculptor of a monument in Louisville.  Enid won the contest, but it was just too forward for a woman to be given such a prestigious commission, and the members of the association overruled their selection committee and let a local gravestone company build the statue instead.  In a huge slap in the face to Enid, the monument was topped by a statue of a generic soldier, sculpted by a German artist -- anybody with money could order a cast for their cemetery or street corner.

But in the long run, it was probably better for Enid's reputation to not have gotten the commission.  Louisville's Confederate monument was one of hundreds built around the beginning of the last century in a concerted effort to romanticize the "Lost Cause" of the Civil War and reinforce Jim Crow laws and customs in the U.S. South.  It coincided with the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in many states, even outside the South.  As time passed, many cities decided that their Confederate monuments were nothing to be proud of; in 2016 the Louisville monument was taken down (not without much outrage from those who still refuse to admit that the Confederacy lost the war).

Well, here I've gone on and on about Enid and not even touched on the show.  I'll do that in another post!

"Demo at Lake Martin 2019 1" --- Sold

This is my first demo on the workshop at the Tallapoosa School of Art at Lake Martin, AL. I want to thank Dorothy and George Littleton for organizing this workshop, and thank all the artists for attending. Lake Martin is a beautiful place. If you are interested to visit and paint there, please check: http://www.tallapoosaworkshops.com.