MAINE DISCOVERY AUCTION NOV. 17th

Saturday, November 17th, 2012 is the  the Maine Discovery Children's Museum annual dinner & art auction in Bangor, it's their tenth!   Really cool, I love it that art is able to help such a valuable resource for our children...the Discovery Museum is just wonderful. The museum asks different area artists to  participate by donating a work of art keeping with a particular theme chosen for that years. This year it is "Maine Discovery". This is all taking place at the Hilton Garden Inn, 250 Haskell Road, Bangor. Although, I've donated work for the auction before, this will be the first time that i will be attending in person...and very jazzed about it! You can check it out at www.mainediscoverymuseum.org 

It should be lots of fun and certainly a great cause and so you might want to see if you could go yourself.

Been searching for the photo of my entry, "Mermaid with Red Fish", which I know I took but where is it? Oh well... :-(  sorry, wish I could share it with you but here is my artist statement:

Mermaid with Red Fish

Mixed Media

Mermaids hold a special place in our imaginations. Free, beautiful, and creative, mermaids inhabiting both the land and the sea become symbols for integrated intelligence (land) and feelings (water). Comfortable and knowledgeable in many words yet unified within herself, the Mermaid has a blissful heart and remains constantly enchanted by life. What better representative of the Discovery Museum than a Mermaid along with her side-kick, the Red Fish….

Artist Statement/Bio

Art, for me, seems to be a meditation on my world. I live on an island in Passamaquoddy Bay where nature is very large. Mythic creatures, animals, people, mostly female, and the human hybrids that I create with found-objects, all become personas and voices for the spirit of nature. A believer in the restorative powers of Art, Beauty, Nature, and our Human Imagination.

Moving in the late 1960’s from N.Y.C. to rural Maine as a back-to-the-land hippie, the idealism and the search for renewing meaning & identity of those times, remains with me.

My formal training began by studying sculpture with Jose DeCreeft at The Art Students League of New York in the 60’s; after that I attended The Cooper Union School of Art & Architecture. Later I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Maine Galleries
Maine Art, Kennebunkport, ME
Maine Art Shows, Kennebunkport, ME
Harbor Square Gallery, Rockport, ME
Maine Farmland Trust Gallery, Belfast, ME
The Barn Gallery, Ogunquit, ME
The Eastport Gallery, ME
Breakwater Gallery, Eastport, ME
Ostrander Studio Gallery and Sculpture Garden
Leighton Gallery, Blue Hill, ME (1987 to closing in 2012)

Florida Gallery
Cocco & Salem Imagine Art, Key West, FL

BIRD

"BIRD"

August 4th- September 3rd
Opening reception, Saturday August 4th, 5p-7p
Maine Art
10 Chase Hill Road
Kennebunk, Maine 04043
Show catalog available- call (207) 967-0049

View the show online-  http://maine-art.com/

 Sculpture by: Andy Moerlein, Donna Dodson, Elizabeth Ostrander, Andreas Van Huene and Tacha Vosburgh
Paintings by: Ellen Welch Granter

Looking forward to another terrific show at this gallery and showing with these other fabulous artists

Here are my sculptures for the "Bird Show"

 

Lady of the Gentle Birds
ceramic, acrylic, found wood
H 56” x W 29” x D 16”
$5, 250.00

Guided by the Beauty of Gentle Wings
ceramic, acrylic
H 27 ” x W 10” x D 14”
$1,800.00

Bird Spirit
ceramic, acrylic, wood
H 47 1/2” x W 12” x D 16”
$3,000.00

  
Joyful Anticipation of Flight
ceramic, acrylic
H 7” x W 6 1/2” x D 12 1/2”
$700.00

Ancient Bird Mother Protectoress of Life
ceramic, acrylic
H 15” x W 11” x D 7”
$1,200.00

SARDINE CAN ART

Working on another sardine art piece…this one for this Sunday’s  “Titanic Commemoration “ @ the Eastport  Arts Center.  For the art part of the day, a silent art auction with ocean themes.

I really enjoy creating these miniature art pieces contained in sardine cans…they’re really satisfying in this I-can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-it sort of way...but did the best I could in my Artist Statement.  

Earlier this year I put a sardine can piece in a “Collage, Assemblage Centennial.” show @ the Ontological Museum in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The Ontological Museum “is an artist oriented museum developed around living connections to artists.” it felt very cool to be part of it and to donate my sardine art can to the museum.

 Eastport Beach Composition #2
found material, acrylic, paper within a sardine can
Height 4 inches  x Width 3 ½ inches x Depth 1 inch

ARTIST STATEMENT

                                                                
Accumulation, serendipity, and the surprise of juxtaposition, to me, replicates life, elements that become messages artists use to create order in unified realities expressed thru the forms of collage, assemblage, and constructs…unfettered uniqueness and personal.

My on going series of little assemblages created inside sardine cans feels satisfying to me as well as integrated. I live on a island in Maine, way north in Passamaquoddy Bay looking across to Canada.  At one time its island shores were filled with sardine factories, in its heyday, its port even rivaled New York City. But fished-out long ago, today there is not one single fish factory left, now it is the art galleries turn to flourish…this another example of community being saved by Art…and so time marches on to different tunes. I walk the beaches and collect bits of nature, and parts of aged machinery, along with more contemporary trash. Back in the studio, I compose my island beach moments into the now imported sardine cans.  To me, they are like portraits of my island’s cycling history all enmeshed with mine and my assemblaged sardine-can art becomes a mash-up of moments and objects held in timeless composition.

Eastporters...the Art Auction is starts @ 2 PM...the Play @ 4 PM and the Movie @ 5:30 PM 

PLUS Refreshments! 

Voting for “Choice” has Begun!

Reverie Of A Woodland Nymph
Ceramic,  Acrylic and A Wreath of Tree Roots
Height 17 inches,  Width 11 inches, Depth  7 ½ inches

So the voting is on…and so far, “Reverie of the Woodland Nymph“,  is in the lead…I’m using her face as my Blog logo…so she is definitely one of  “mama’s” favorite…yes, I do think of my sculptures as my art children…entities that came from me…out of me that were once so close, so intimate they,  like my birth children, in time, claim their own unto themselves identities

 “Reverie of the Woodland Nymph“, appeared to me in a visual meditation and I was inspired to pursue the vision in clay but I was also using a new clay and I was a bit anxious how it would all turn out.

For some time, I had been wanting to try a higher firing clay body and so after much toing-and-foring, I choose a mid-range firing sculpture clay from Portland Pottery…that’s Portland, ME.  This new clay took me a while to get use to…It didn’t handle like the familiar terracotta clay but after a bit, I did feel we were beginning to dance together…but then my concern was how would the kiln firing  go with this higher cone clay in my kiln…gratefully, it fried beautifully…a bit more shrinking than I was used to but I was still quite pleased.  Plus it responded well to my acrylic coloring technique…so, a vision realized along with technical aplomb makes her a winner to me!

Flying With Soul’s Grace
Ceramic, and Acrylic
Height  16 ½ inches,  Width 11 ½ inches, Depth 13 inches

 “Flying With Soul’s Grace” is the second most high rated favorite…she is another nature being like “Reverie of the Woodland Nymph“, but of a decidedly different countenance.  For her, I feel that she is springing up from the grass to soar with the birds towards the sun and the Nymph’s quietude unfolds in the sweet shadows of forest trees and ferns.

Hope you’ll go take a peek at all of this…and vote too…it’s @  www.maine-art.com/choice

“The Poetic Heart of a Faun”

“The Poetic Heart of a Faun”....in my garden

Often people ask me why such a rarity of male sculptures showing up in my work…and its true,  my sculptures are mostly women…but when there are males, they most likely will be Fauns or versions of the Green Man.  Relating to my work as personas or archetypes, influenced by mythology, I am drawn to these male consorts of Mother Nature…generator, fecund lover…the creators, nurturers, healers & teachers…and other aspects of male gentleness. First inspired, I am sure, by one of my favorite ballets “Afternoon of a Faun”, music by Claude Dubussy which I first saw as a teenager…it swept me up into its beauty, lyricism & romanticism…the choreographer was Jerome Robbins who turned the Faun into a ballet student and was no longer the very randy Faun (half man, half) created by the original choreographer, Nijinsky and who also danced as the Faun in the ballet’s infamous opening of 1912 in Paris (think “Rite of Spring“)…so it was Jerome Robbins’  gentle , ethereal “Faun” that made such a huge impression on me. Actually, the Faun of the ancient Romans is said to be a gentler form of the ancient Greeks Satyr.  So for me, the Faun  represents a poetic heart…and so far, all my Fauns have emblazed on their chests; a heart.

“The Poetic Heart of a Faun”
Photo of “The Poetic Heart of a Faun” in my studio showing the red terracotta clay while he waits to dry enough to be fired in my electric kiln

 This photo is thru the mystical dimensions of Photoshop shop…oh, I do enjoy playing there! If you would like to see “The Poetic Heart of a Faun" in person, he is @ Cocco & Salem Imagine Art Gallery, 1111 Duval Street, Key West, FL

The Golden Heart Of The Blue Faun

Hello…what a GREAT time for me to be starting this Blog.  Choice, an art show happening at the gallery, Maine Art in Kennebunk has a dynamite ad in the April issue of Maine Home…and I’m in it…or my ceramic sculpture, The Golden Heart Of The Blue Faun is in it! I am one of 12 artists selected to be part of this, first-for-me type of art show…after April 2, the public is invited to go on line

(Maine-Art.com/choice) and vote for their favorite work from each of the participating artists…ultimately, 3 pieces from the 6 pieces that each artist presents will be selected for the Choice show…one will represent artist choice, one the gallery choice, and one the public’s choice…not quite American Idol but I’m surprisingly excited…living in Eastport, Maine and only a hop, skip, and a jump from the actual and official 45th parallel line and where folks, where I live, have been know to say, “It’s not nowhere but you can see it from here” makes it’s feel so phenomenal to be apart of this on-line, wide ranging Art Project…feeling connected but still having my great, uncrowded “view“! So please remember during April 2 to May 31, to take a peek and voice your choice…(Maine-Art.com/choice)…I’m really curious to find out what it will be…and thanks!

The Golden Heart Of The Blue Faun
Ceramic,  Acrylic and Sand
Height 22 inches,  Width 12 inches, Depth 8 inches