Cay Denise

Art provided a tethering to purpose during shelter-at-home and other activities restricted or curtailed during the year.  Blank canvases, journals, paper and pen, etc. provided the open doors to expressing our feelings of imposed solitude, fear, loneliness, futility, stress and the myriad other emotions felt in 2020. Did you depend on some art form this year to maintain some sense of rhythm to the passing days?  For me, it was a surprise to see how much I relied on it -- as a stress reliever, for learning new methods and gaining some regularity of practice, and as a meditative tool.   If you're an artist, what was your experience with art-making in 2020?

I've got a new group of Shimmering Ornaments made this year--from a process originally learned through Beryl Taylor's article in the Nov/Dec 2010 Cloth Paper Scissors magazine* and adapted to create my own version of them.  I use handmade papers, a lot of beads, buttons and crystals.  They are so special to do at this season of the year and speak Christmas to me! *Cloth Paper Scissors magazine was an Interweave publication at the time that article ran.   

Over the weekend, I finished reading "Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and it is just excellent! It inspired me to create a mandala dedicated to 'arting' the highlights from the book in order to remember the most important parts -- from my perspective. It took some time to condense my notes to the main points that could fit in the piece. Above are some photos of it. The red/white side has quotes from Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, and the other side has the painted drawings of the four men (that Lincoln won) who competed for the Republican Party nomination for President in 1860 and my handwritten highlights. Both the book and mandala have actually been a labor of love and learning. I started reading the book in October. It is so large (750 pages) that I felt overwhelmed with the effort it would take to read it. But the writing made it so easy, and the book is now one of my favorites. The mandala was a learning exercise too and called me to b

An image of Jean Dubuffet's work is the juicy background for this word map with descriptors of Christmas and winter from my point of view.  The center has a collaged Christmas tree that looks more like a lava lamp though.  How many of the words in this would you use in creating your own Christmas collage?  What other words resonate with you when you think of the holiday or season?

How do you work with shadow and light?  Do you like flat imagery or that which has depth?   I worked on this piece because of an interest in learning how to create depth in a painted surface through conveying shadow and light areas.  The coat became my primary focus and was challenging.  But there have been classical to modern painters who've done this kind of thing extraordinarily well.  I'm just beginning to learn what it takes.  That is -- a different kind of 'seeing' -- looking at the folds of fabric for their light and shadow qualities, and color properties.  Looking for the shapes of shadow and the shapes for the light.  That takes using the base color and mixing it with gradations of tints and tones to use to create the contours of the folds and depth shown by a sense of layers in different positions in space.   I consider this piece a success because there is actually some depth to be seen in the coat.  Even the tilt of the head works, and I've not done that