Cay Denise

This past year has been much different in tone and scope than the last.  Artistically, I've been productive in different ways...with fewer paintings but many more crafts completed.   That said, there is so much to be thankful for including the fact that I've maintained a reasonable work-life balance especially compared with 2017.  For me now, its all about that work-life balance plus exploring new artistic horizons and continuing to do the work!  My arts-related accomplishments for 2018 include having: *Completed 5 Let's Face It! projects in this 2018 course *Made 36 Blog Posts *Done a video log (VLOG) for every day in February! *Started keeping VLOGs more regularly starting in July *Created 5 iMovies *Started a spontaneous art journal and completed 38 pages *Watched and totally enjoyed these movies:  Loving Vincent, Christopher Robin, and A Star is Born; other great movies though harder to watch included Green Book and Dark Money *Created 50 s...

It has been a long time since I've written a poem, but I was recently inspired to do so.  I'll reveal what that inspiration was in a week or two...so as not to influence the reader.  If you have constructive feedback, please consider leaving a comment. The inspiration for this poem came from the hooting calls of a Great Horned Owl that flew into our neighborhood one night in November.  This raptor very seldom visits...maybe once or twice a year.  It is during these visits that the night becomes eerily silent.  Listen to the Great Horned Owl hoot at this youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsIygCtoqYg

I came across a November 27th article in Vulture Guides by Jerry Saltz about the 33 ways to be an artist.  Because it is such a long article, it has been bookmarked for later reading.  BUT, I did come across this great exercise in it:  Build a Life Totem .  Wow, that could be great fun!!! To do it -- you can use any material on any surface to make a four-foot-tall totem pole of your life, and you have a week to complete it....period!  The intention is for you to create something in which others should be able to know something about you other than what you look like or how many siblings you have.  You get to include anything you want e.g. words, letters, maps, photos, objects, signs, etc.  Be ingenious!  When finished, there is a sharing component to the exercise as well. Imagine if you had created the totem below, what do you think others would 'get' about you from it?  Would they think you're female, a free spirit, a bookworm, a followe...

I have been in the mood to make some ornaments this year.  Little did I know I would make so many! These are such a great way to recycle buttons and textured paper remnants. The directions used to make the ornaments come from a "Shimmering Ornaments" article by Beryl Taylor in Cloth Paper Scissors magazine (2010).  I, of course, have added my own take while making these charming and delightful pieces of holiday art. This has been a labor a love -- because my hands and fingers are tired from the tedious work of cutting thick poster board into smaller shapes with an X-Acto knife, scoring each ornament's metallic tape frame, and wire wrapping beads for the top and bottom sections of each ornament. But they have been worth the time and effort, and are soooo fun!

https://austinkleon.com/2018/10/18/stains-on-the-wall/

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/12/the-first-abstract-painter-was-a-woman/

I went with the pixie haircut and scarf -- both in black.  I've named the piece 'Look into My Eyes' since the eyes should come across as the focal point.  I may add a few more butterfly stencils on the right side and one in the upper left (as I see some gaps looking at it now).  For now, I'm so glad to be able to consider this effort done!

I've been working on a piece for a while now.  Yesterday, I got to the point where I was ready to collage the magazine cut-outs of flowers for a hairpiece.  That flopped big-time!  If it wasn't air bubbles under the collaged pieces, it was rubbed off paint from the image because of using a credit card to try to flatten the bubbles out.  I didn't like what happened. So while wet, I started rolling the paper off with my fingers and fortunately found my baby wipes quickly enough to use them and prevent any damage to the piece.  Now, I'm trying to finish it off without the floral element.  The photo has a couple of ideas.  If you'd like share your preference or to contribute another idea, please leave a comment below!

         The works are wonderful and exactly what you'd expect to see including those by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones, Millais, Stanhope, Botticelli, Raphael and Fra Angelica among others. Such a wonderful art excursion.  Now at the San Francisco Legion of Honor!

A wonderful salvaged metal sculpture of a robotic female buddha stands atop a platform overlooking the expanse of our downtown park as if she is practicing a walking meditation.  Once a beacon for the Burning Man community, locals now have the opportunity to see this sensual creation by Dana Albany through August 13th.  Dana has made other sculptures including a youth educational mosaic spacecraft that was also displayed at Burning Man.  Some of the most amazing art work in ingenuity and quality is created by artists for each Burning Man gathering (an annual event in the Neveda desert).  We are fortunate that pieces from various gatherings are and will be making brief stops as they tour a number of locations over the next few years!

There can be no comparison between these movies, even though they are about artists. 'Big Eyes' with Amy Adams was disappointing.  Amy plays an artist is the 1950s who doesn't make her own mark because her husband sells her art as if he was its creator and she goes along with it (for years).  It isn't until she leaves the husband/marriage that she finds some backbone and strength to tell the truth about what happened.     'Loving Vincent' is a truly exquisite movie!  The animation of the numerous paintings made for this movie is amazing, and the paintings themselves are incredible!!  What an accomplishment to have made such an impressive and beautifully crafted movie.  If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it!!

As part of the module on Egon Schiele that I posted about yesterday, I took the second painting of my facial bones to work on.  As you can tell from this photo compared to yesterday's post, I've changed the background, reduced the width of the face at the jaw line, neck and shoulders, done some additional painting of the face, and added a hand (in an attempt at a Schiele-like hand though mine is not as boney as he would have done) plus a stem.  I don't have any plan for what to put on top of the stem--that's still a mystery--so I'm going to leave it without anything for now.  What you can see in the face is additional depth and more clarification of facial elements that weren't there before.  The striped background provides contrast with the face as well as the hand.  Its not a pretty image, but I learned a lot by doing the exercise in the first place and then working with it further to form something else.

Week 30's instructor led us through a great exercise of getting to know our facial bone structure (a way in which Schiele painted).  That is what the first two images above are about. Using a paintbrush with our dominant hand, the other hand was used to feel the facial bones as we painted what we felt with our eyes closed. This was done three different times with a different color each time. These were considered warm-up exercises to get into an expressive mode of painting. The images to the left are separate paintings done from the same photo after the warm-up exercises.  The figure on the right is in acrylic; the one on the left is in watercolor crayon and markers. What I learned is not to be afraid of work that looks unpleasant or strange, or fearful of applying paint with free-form brush stokes. and that painting and drawing loosely has its own character and charm.

2018 Painting Process of Woman in a Klimt Garden from Cay Denise on Vimeo .

Two lessons have been combined into this single image--one lesson was on Klimt, the other on quick sketching a face and filling it in with paint.  Since I love Klimt, I used the face sketch as inspiration in this piece that has many Klimt-like elements, and it was a fun piece to create!  A sketch element remains in the piece - the hair. Overall, the face took the most time especially getting the eyes right (3 times is a charm), plus the layering and blending of the assorted flesh-tone colors used. 

Ascending from an underground garage, the elevator doors open to reveal this grove of stunning electric blue tree trunks in an urban landscape.  Awesome surprise as well as a public art project installation!

This was a fairly quick piece completed in one evening (about 4 hours) from instruction through the online retreat I've been participating in. When you draw with a Sharpie pen, as in this effort, the result is unforgiving and permanent. That's why some of the image elements are a bit off.

I love the Flower of Life exercise that was led by Lou Reed with the Energy Medicine Institute.  It is so practical and informative -- this floral version includes Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs elements.  I was really impressed with how Lou described what the fulfillment (petal fully colored in) of each of the elements is made of.  It includes some things we don't necessarily think about regularly.  Anyway, great beginning to the online retreat for Summer 2018. 

If you searched for my name and found a couple of links to You Tube that have come up with 'Cay Denise', they are not mine.  I don't use You Tube to upload videos to the internet.

I've started doing a small daily practice of creating an art journal spread in a 9"x6" Nature Sketch sketchbook. How I've started: The first layer is gesso on the 2-page spread, selection of 2 colors and applying droplets of those colors to the pages spontaneously, spreading the colors with fingers, adding some white paint with my finders, then embellishing with pens, grease pencils, markers, etc..  In some cases, words or phrases that spontaneously came up during the process have been added in different ways.  For preservation purposes, I'm using tracing paper to separate the pages and including a list of the words and phrases used because they are hard to see/recognize when looking at the pages, and I want to be able to recall what they are. Theses photos are of the 5 projects completed this past week (earliest to latest).  The first two followed guidelines by Rae Missigman in her Cloth Paper Scissors magazine article (May/June 2018 issue).  The latter ones...

The finished project in the Pic-Collage above was started weeks ago when I chose the source inspiration photo and then collaged paper in the rough shapes of the photo image to watercolor paper.   Most of the underlying paper used in the collage were scrapbook paper remnants except for the face which was maroon tissue paper.  The tissue paper was very delicate and a bit challenging to work with, and I played with layering it to create shadow areas.   The instructor's lesson plan was for students to use pastels to create a face with impressions of its features as well as light and shadow.  I don't have pastels, so I used acrylic paint to complete the face staying with the maroon color scheme. This proved challenging to do, and I found myself color-mixing and blending most of the time as I painted over all the tissue paper. The background (green/blue area) is made of collaged scrapbook paper remnants that have been covered with gelatos, the patterns...

Facial close-up of original painting by John Waterhouse "The Lady of Shallot" by John Waterhouse, 1888

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A fun collage with a lovely handmade paper pouch for secrets sharing.  The hand-drawn face is one I did a long time ago but didn't have a way to use until today. Her hair is made from a magazine image.

This is a first piece in a long time (several months) due to some intense resistance to actually doing any work.  I'm taking a new online course this year and have had difficult starting.  Part of it has been due to seeing the brilliant work of many others and feeling like my work doesn't measure up.  Then starting became harder the longer my absence from painting grew. So, here is my modern take on a portion of "The Lady of Shallot" that also includes a few lines from the Tennyson poem about the subject.

'Blue Moon Madonna' - January 31, 2018 I've finished the work in progress from the weekend.  The digital drawing printed on a book page was completed with collage, gesso, paint, Gelatos and pen work.