mixed media painting

New series: “Blackboards” and “Kerubim” open in SOFA Friday

Image | | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio
blackboards1
“Black Elk Antlers,” acrylic and oil stick on wood, Suzanne Edminster

It’s always exciting to have a new series choose you.  It makes you famous with yourself.  A great notion has flown down to take you away its talons, like a mythical bird, the Roc.   This bird only sees you.

Cretaceous Roc by Hodari Nundu
Cretaceous Roc by Hodari Nundu

This year two new series occurred in me, “Blackboards” and “Kerubim.”

I think much art lies outside conscious control.  These do.  Each “Blackboard” develops itself.  I have no idea of what the end result will be when I start. It’s childlike.  I see this, then I see that, then I turn the board and see something else.  I tell stories.  They develop out of the darkness of dream, the blackness of the childhood chalkboard, with markings and erasures like chalk.  And they can disappear like dreams too.

I believe art visits us.  The Kerubim series  (see below) is about visitation of ideas and phenomenon, texting from beyond, and decoding.  Cherubim are very old, going back to Assyria and Babylonia.  They orbit, rotate, have wheels, flames, eyes, thrones, and messages.

Chair Ubim, acrylic on Arches paper, Suzanne Edminster
Chair Ubim, acrylic on Arches paper, Suzanne Edminster

If you can make it, drop by during August.  The opening is in my studio, Friday August 5, 5-8 PM (invite below).   I’m happy to be showing with Chris Beards, an astonishing mixed media sculptor.  I’ll be releasing images on this site through the month of August for those of you who are far away.

It’s so much more interesting to be visited by Rocs or Muses than it is to watch summer blockbusters. With ideas, when the blockbuster opens,  you become its personal theatre.  I wish you happy visitations.

Suzanne

Implied large version

Access the Facebook invitation here.  We are also open for Artwalk on Saturday and Sunday.

 

Small Work, Big Impact: 40 venues go small at SOFA Sat. Feb 2, 5-8 PM

| Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

Suzanne Edminster, Sea Garden, acrylic on paper, SOLD

Small does not mean diminshed  intrigue or impact. A good small painting reads big.  I remember that in the Denver Art Museum that you could see the Georgia O’Keefe small painting from across a vast room, before we could even identify it as hers.  It just shone.  I’ve been working on larger pieces for a while now. It’s an interesting lesson: large is NOT small scaled up somehow. The dimension changes meaning. This one will be on display this Saturday.

Confession: the very small works are often traces of projects that lead to larger works for me. My own sense of detail is not robust; I prefer the BIG. Even my handwriting is large and scrawling. I like to work small on paper– it feels more open and free. But sometimes I do “smaller” canvases: 10″ x 10″ is one of the smallest. I like mixed media on smaller canvases to make more of an impact. Everything is small-ized now. Just think of your Iphone and Ipad.

Suzanne Edminster, Days of the Dead, combined media on canvas, 12 x 12 inches
Suzanne Edminster, Days of the Dead, combined media on canvas, 12 x 12 inches

Small can be very expressive. I did the piece above when my dad was diagnosed with cancer. I wanted to make a response that expressed sacrifice and rebirth as his living spirit started to transition.  The Little Sun Cow below was just pure play and joy.  We all have our art totems.  Cosmic and regular cows are  mine.

Suzanne Edminster, Little Sun Cow, acrylic on paper, SOLD

One artist who has a great sense of the small is Susan Cornelis.  You can see her latest cool “fossil” smalls here. Come visit me this Saturday, or, better yet, start your own  small series. Small can lead  to big things. Surprise yourself!

SOFA Small Works

Rainy Spring and Citra Solv Worlds

| Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio
My boots and rain hitting the pavement, spring 2012.

Our spring has been so wet. I love the feeling of the rain. Sorry, but it brings a wave of poetry on, especially e.e. cummings and Dylan Thomas– puddles, mud, and the green fuse that drives the flower. The image below is absolutely spontaneous, a world created by splashes, generative worlds of watery spring.

CitraSolv image on National Geographic page

What can you do when an art piece is wonderful and you had no part in it? There is nothing to do with this page of the National Geographic, altered by Citra Solv splashed on it and left to dry on a line, other than to toss it into a pile of other paintings as relentlessly beautiful as a pile of autumn leaves.

CitraSolv images drying on grass.

Many do show these, of course, or mount them and sell them on Etsy.  I use them as collage pieces in paintings sometimes.  Every single one of them is a delightful gift from a great spring or source somewhere. Of course, they are a combination of someone’s masterful photography and the Geo’s fantastic printing process, so each one contains  seed germs of both talent and technology,  an aesthetic DNA ready to abstractly bust out.

I think that these little altered National Geographic pictures are just evidence of a great Grace, grace without effort.  I find it unfair that these are so beautiful and that I have to work so hard to make paintings.  It’s unfair, but unfair in the right direction.

My mother was given a lifetime subscription to National Geographic in 1929, so these magazines have always been a part of my life.  Each one is embedded with worlds of adventure in soy-based ink, released on the application of Citra Solv.    Do you remember flipping through them as a child, seeking breasts or beasts?  Were you forbidden to cut them up or destroy them?

It’s humbling to see what nature, chance, and the hand of others– the photographs we so relentlessly destroy to turn them into something else— can bring.  It’s a form of faith rising after destruction.  Exhilarating. Spring, after winter.

Judy Ludovise, Citra Solv mentor.

Studio Notes: In the March Spontaneous Construction class, Judy Ludovise conducted a Citra Solv segment.  Thank you so much, Judy!  I am fortunate to know two artists who have been featured as CitraSolv’s Artist of the Month,  Judy Ludovise and Susan Cornelis.  For complete instructions on how to use CitraSolv  to alter magazines, please visit the Citra Solv website.

Rainmaker, with spirals. Rain on pavement.

Mythic notes:  Here’s a Dylan Thomas poem for spring. There are so many images here of dripping,  whirlpools,  fountains, and natural accidents of love; this reminds me of painting with water media. I have always loved the phrase “green age.”  It’s what we can hope for.

THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

5 Tips for Painting with Collage

| Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

What’s collage painting, mixed media painting, or combined media painting? How does it differ from collage? 

How can you use collage elements in painting without being highjacked or overwhelmed by the collage image?

Here’s a simple rule of thumb: A collage painting is more paint than collage elements.  The paint is 60% or more of the painting.  The collaged parts merge and meld seamlessly into the whole. 

 How to do it? Here are 5 tips. All paintings shown here are acrylic paint on paper or canvas.  I affix collage pieces to the surface with glossy acrylic gel medium.

1. Use only your own images whenever possible, including photographs, text, and your own sketches and handwriting.  You can also use copyright-free black and white images.  Copy and recopy the same  images in larger and smaller sizes at a copy store or using a laser printer.  Black and white is easier to incorporate, and leaves the color elements to the painter and paints.  I prefer to avoid colored magazine images, as tempting as they are.  The more you play with a single image by altering size, color, dimension, the more freedom you will gain  in painting.  You’ll own the image, rather than the image “owning” you.

2. Choose a theme. I used non-copyrighted Dover deer. Avoid themes that are intensely personal, like pictures of your dog, your mom, or your child.  You need to have a bit of distance to use images effectively, or to rip one up.  Eventually you’ll develop image banks of differing themes that become your private visual language.  

3. Paint first.  Put color on the surface, or paint a very sketchy painting, then affix images, then paint some more.  Painting first, before applying images, establishes that it is more a painting than a collage.  For all of these I chose a crucifix composition and applied paint first.  Then I put down ripped black and white collage images.  A warm background is good, as it can glow up through layers of paint.

4.Be willing to sacrifice the image.  Let go of the image you love and let it disappear, if the painting demands it. Show only a part of it.  If you want to keep it perfect, do regular collage, not collage painting.  This is one of the hardest parts of using collage elements in paintings.

5. Cover your images with glossy gel medium or UVLS varnish as you apply them.  Then you can pile on coats of paint and still wipe back to find them.

Toss the collage boxes and go back to only a few images.  Use them  thoughtfully in series of paintings. And have fun! 

Please use the comment section for questions on the collages or techniques.  I’m happy to share what I know.  If you’re one of my student who gets the blog, please share something about your experience with collage painting.

Mythic news:   Deer are symbols of sacrifice and purity, often used in Christian iconography.  It was said that deer gathered at the foot of the cross where Jesus hung.  I used them here  in these three works floating up and down through a penetrable horizon of birth and death, ancestor souls.  Collage itself belongs to the realm of Kali: dismembering  of paper , appropriation of image, rebirth of pieces into a new whole.  The goddess of Necessity wields the scissors and snips the thread of life– or the image.

Ira Glass, Semiotics, Studios, and Salamanders

| Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio
Salamander Winter, acrylic combined media on Fabriano paper, 23″ x 23″, Suzanne Edminster

Last night I closed my open studio after an impromptu party with three muses , one rather hairy, in which the absinthe bottle of La Muse Verte was emptied. Scott, Ed, and I ended up at the Ira Glass show at the Santa Rosa Wells Fargo Center.   Ira Glass, a semiotics major made good as creator and host of NPR’s This American Life, spent a long time giving out his trade secrets of storytelling, or story cultivating, or story minding, or whatever it is he does so well. 

I felt like I was watching– or rather, hearing, as the show celebrated the audial life of the radio–  an alchemist giving out his “secret”  recipes for turning lead into gold.  Open secrets: everyone can hear them, but only a few can use them. Storytelling, he said, is a semiotic pattern. One thing happens, then another thing happens, then another thing– an Ariadne’s thread out of the labyrinth– and it doesn’t matter a bit what the story is or who’s telling it. At the end there’s a bump, a pause, and a moral.   The elements of the story are the abstract bones.  If the substructure is strong, any story propels us into the other world.  Anyone and anything might work in these stories.  And you can tell thousands of them, like Scheherazade.  Or Ira Glass.

This reminded me of abstract painting.  We move away from the subject, and into bones of pure visual  action.  The structure of the painting carries us along even without subject matter or explanation.  First one painting element happens, then another, then another….  it’s fashionable to avoid the word “narrative” with abstract or non-objective painting.  But there’s a story embedded in every piece, if we know how to read it.  The composition rocks and rockets us toward meaning.  

Glass paced the stage, IPAD in hand glowing like magic tablet of a new Moses, as he expounded on the world’s oldest art form, storytelling. In the story of the painting Salamander Winter, you may find Scott building salamander “houses” in our back yard.  We lay down boards on the damp winter ground on purpose to be salamander homes.  You can find two kinds of California salamanders in our yard, little wormlike Slender Salamanders and classically newty Arboreals.  We encourage them to raise their tiny, slimy, cute babies there, and we lift the  check their progress.  We identified them through this wonderful site, Identifying California Salamanders.

I'm Branka's painting now

My Ariadne’s thread is tangling here, so I have to quit. The Open Studios went well. Paintings bumped their way to new homes:  I’ve posted one here.  My thanks to all who visited and to my collectors.  The semiotic form of the blog requires that I ask you a question or two, to encourage socializing.  So I have some:  did you like my studio? huh? huh?  and, hey, did I invent the worst blog title ever, or not?  And the moral: Know Thy Salamanders.  Do you?

Mythic News:  Theseus dumped Ariadne after she saved his sorry self from the Minotaur, but a god (Dionysius)  ended up marrying her, so it all worked out.  She traded up.   The Alchemical Salamanders in my painting go through fire unscathed, faith enduring after earthly passions smolder.

Studio news:  the Open Studios were successful.  The Barracks Artists, in the old Finley Barracks in Santa Rosa, are emerging from the mist.  Guerilla artists in the mist.  Come visit me by appointment.

Hade’s Choir: Mixed Media Collage Paintings in B/W

| Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

Collage is a natural for Halloween, the dark hinge in the year that creaks as something opens the door.  The bits and pieces of  paper are ghosts or forlorn spirits, no longer “alive” in their original context.   You cut them, dismember them, rip them up, seek underworld messages from scraps of text, and bury theme in paint.  You can “skin” them as well. Then, like good little ghosts, they march out and live again, speaking in paper whispers.

 Yesterday,  in the class I teach at Sebastopol Center for the Arts,  I was trying to model how to develop a series theme.  I shared to the class that in my notebook I had written that I wanted to do a series that was like “Edgar Allen Poe on acid.”  I like to read horror stories and murder mysteries;  husband Scott actually prescribes them for me as an antidote if I get too bound up in art books or my secret indulgence bonbons, preachy self-help books, which I love but invariably depress me with how much help I still need to add to Self.  I had been hanging on to scratchy black and white compositional studies for years; liked ’em but didn’t know how to take them further.    The Choirboys had been altered into a very damaged acrylic skin. I tore them up into two pieces and mounted them on two paintings, paired with a quote from a cave painting book,  and  my landscape transformed itself into the River Styx.  Mixed media included Utrecht Pro Gesso as my white paint… love the opaque chalkiness… and Derwent Inktense pencils for the purple automatic writing marks.   Payne’s Grey makes a gorgeous blue/black.  If this little group comes to your door tonight, I wouldn’t open it.

Mythic News:  Avernus, a crater lake of Italy near Naples, is supposed to be the entry to the Greco-Roman underworld.  Our own Crater Lake in Oregon is creepy enough… dead, because not fed by springs.  Dead, because the volcano crater goes down, down to the center of the earth, or near enough.  Birds and fish often avoid these lakes as well.  I’ll see Avernus around Christmas on our Italian trip.

Saltworkstudio events:  We have our annual Open Studios this weekend, November 5 and 6, 2012, at the old naval airbase , 3840 Finley Ave, Santa Rosa.  I have a new series of B/W paintings and you can see the top of a WWII bunker from my studio window.   Drop by Saltworkstudio.  I will be doing demos and would love to visit with you.