Friday Finds: More Zentangles and Art:21

Carla Hedges and "Feathered Flowers"

Zentangles explosion
I'm experiencing pattern hypersensitivity. Everywhere I look I see Zentangles: the neighbor's trellis, the cut-glass decanter, a palm tree's trunk, even the wallpaper in my powder room (never got around to stripping that; just hoping now for wallpaper to come back in style).

Here are a few Zentangle artworks I will share. The first is Carla Hedges' "Feathered Flowers" that I mentioned in last week's post. She will be featured in the June issue of Bloomington Watercolor Society's Brushstrokes.

I stumbled across the second one this morning while checking my blog feed. The headline, not the art, is what drew me in: "Balancing roles of artist and mother" by guest columnist Sandhya Manne. When I clicked on it, the artwork appeared. Go to http://www.artbizblog.com/2011/05/artist-mother.html .

Art:21 Must-see TV from PBS online
Since seeing the John Marin exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in April, I have been thinking about realism and abstraction. And that has led me into an exploration of more contemporary themes and works.

Art:21, a PBS series about contemporary visual arts, is now available online at http://www.pbs.org/art21/index.html . The site offers not only 20 full episodes but also slideshows of more than 2,800 images, educator's guides and online lesson library. This Web site was a hold on me for the next few months!

And remember that PBS is public funded television, so donate through your local station. In Bloomington that's WTIU and the link is http://www.indiana.edu/~radiotv/wtiu/support.html . (Full disclosure: WTIU is sort of the "family business": my husband is executive director, but I would tell you to support WTIU even if I weren't married to him.)

Friday Finds: Out with the old; In with the new

Spring cleaning: Out with the old

I confess to not doing as much spring cleaning as is needed. However, I have cleaned up my palette and, thanks to my friend Carol Rhodes, Aureolin got the old heave-ho! That’s right. I scraped the old paint out of the palette and even tossed the brand new tube of Aureolin in the trash.

Those of you who have taken my classes recognize the paint as one of the paints I’ve listed as a must have. How did it lose favor so quickly?

I had noticed that the pigment took on a brownish cast when left on my palette for very long. When Carol told me she had read that Aureolin also turns brown in paintings, I took action. To read more, go to http://www.hilarypage.com/#page7.

According to Hilary, the best substitutes are paints listed as PY175: Winsor & Newton’s Winsor Lemon, MaimeriBlu’s Permanent Yellow Lemon, Schmincke’s Chrome Yellow Lemon and Daniel Smith’s Lemon Yellow.



My first (and second) Zentangles


In with the new: Zentangles

Last week I was fascinated by a painting of Carla Hedges that is currently hanging in the Waldron’s Flashlight Gallery. The intricate design intrigued me, and because I couldn’t find Carla I asked Linda Meyer-Wright about it. (Carla and I have both taken classes taught by Linda, a mixed media artist.)

Linda described the painting as a Zentangle, explaining this has taken on almost a cult status with a following, its own language and even disputes about whether the method is an art form or a doodle. She referred me to http://www.zentangle.com, where I have spent some time reading through its archive of newsletters.

I’ve been playing with some of the Zentangle patterns on Artist Trading Cards and have found the experience to be almost meditative.

The blue card is my first Zentangle attempt; the pattern is called OOF (Out Of Focus) and was created by Zentangle co-creator Rick Roberts after visiting New York City’s Cloisters, which houses the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval collection. On the yellow card I experimented with “a string,” Zentangle-speak for a free-form line that subdivides working space, and multiple Zentangle patterns.

Go to the Web site, but be prepared to “lose yourself” in the Zentangle world for a while.

Made it into the Sunday paper

Sunday HT featured Creative Aging shows in B-town this week, and the article mentioned me -- without listing my age. Glad to dodge that bullet!

http://www.heraldtimesonline.com/stories/2011/05/07/scene.qp-0389994.sto

Even better news: The painting sold!