tidy up

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My, have I been busy, either gardening in this gorgeous weather (almost too hot) or indoors tidying up digital files. We are giving away our old Apple G3 computer because we no longer need it, and that’s a bit of a long story.

We’d been using it just to operate our old scanners with their scsi ports. Recently I upgraded to Tiger (on this G5) and discovered that I also had to upgrade Remote Desktop, which allowed me to view the G3 window from this machine. Well, dang it, but this would not work with the particular video card on the G3 – do you think they’d tell you this beforehand? And the G3 crashed! Husband spent hours and days getting it running again. Grrr, this is my pet peeve about the constant and expensive upgrades we are subjected to! And then what to do with the old equipment. We are trying to find homes for them and NOT take things to the dump, but BC is very slow in getting their technical equipment recycling program going! In the meantime, we have a room full of dinosaurs. (The old scanner will work with daughter’s boyfriend’s PC at least!)

Anyway, we ended up buying a new scanner, a lovely beastie indeed. So now, I’m taking off old image and text files from about a dozen Zip disks that I used in those days. Handy, I loved them but they were getting small at 100 MB as my image files became bigger. Then Zip drives became obsolete, replaced by CD and DVD burners. Sigh. Now I have a huge desktop folder here that I must sort through and burn to CDs. What will be next?

But I had to have a bit of fun, too. I’ve been going through some of my photographs (from pre-digital days) especially of some very interestingly weathered rocks and petroglyphs on Hornby Island, one of the northern Gulf Islands here on the west coast of BC. I scanned a few while getting acquainted with this new equipment. One of them is above… your reward, dear readers, for patiently reading through my boring complaints!

By the way, this image was used in several of my prints: Paths XIII (Nexus), Paths X, and Paths XII.

Three Figures I

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Veils Suite: Three Figures I
etching, drawing, watercolour (unique)
76 x 57 cm.

Drawing and watercolour was applied to the etching. It is a unique piece (one of a kind) but not a monoprint or monotype.

online galleries

I think it was about three weeks ago when I was browsing through the Saatchi Gallery site, checking to see what’s new and (naturally!) if the link to my site is still there under cultural institutions.

I noticed a new feature called “Your Gallery” which allows artists to show their work on their website without charge. What a generous idea! Anyway, I left that to sit in my list of things to do. Other things happened until suddenly I saw an article on CBC a few days ago:

British art mogul Charles Saatchi has launched a special section on his art website allowing undiscovered artists to show their work.
More than 500 artists have posted their work in the “Your Gallery” section of his Saatchi Gallery site.  The site gives collectors and galleries around the world an opportunity to view new talent and buy works directly from the artists.
The advertising magnate said he wanted to offer a way for collectors and artists to save money by cutting out the dealer.

Time to act – I have now put a few images up amongst the many hundreds of other artists! Have a look, and if you are an artist reading this, do join this opportunity for more international exposure!

Speaking of online galleries, I’ve forgotten to mention IconData – WorldPrints by the Krakow International Print Society. If you search under Canada you will find many Canadian printmakers’ works including mine. Isn’t the web great?!

Canadian books

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Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart is celebrating 100 years and has put out their Essential 100 list of books: “Selected from the 700 plus M&S backlist titles currently available, our Essential 100 consists of those titles that  should be on every Canadian’s bookshelves.”

I found it very interesting to check out how many I’ve read and how very many more I still want to read. How many of these have YOU read and which one is your favourite? Let me see, my favourite…there are so many.. Jane Urquhart’s Away, Rohintron Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient… it’s impossible to choose and Canada has so many fine authors. And, if you are a Canadian resident, you may enter a contest to win these Essential 100 titles. I would need more bookshelves!

I don’t buy many novels, preferring to use the library, but I do have a LOT of art books, including a few M&S publications on Canadian artists:
1. Tom Thomson:The Silence and the Storm, Harold Town and David Silcox, 1977.
2. Pellan, Germain Lefebvre 1973
3. Contemporary Canadian Painting, William Withrow 1972
4. The Group of Seven, Peter Mellan, 1970
5. Sculpture of the Eskimo, George Swinton, 1972 (George Swinton was one of my instructors at the University of Manitoba School of Art, and he was well-known for his large collection and his scholarship at a time when interest in Inuit art was barely beginning.)

Happy Walpurgisnacht

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“Ah, it’s May Eve”, I wrote last year, “Almost anywhere else on the planet this would not be so very significant, but in Finland it means “Vappu”, a kind of Finnish “Mardi Gras meets the Rite of Spring”, with some historical political overtones and a strong youth and student flavouring. With the time difference, the party has been underway for awhile and will carry on into May Day tomorrow”.

I’m not sure if other European countries make this an official holiday, but In Finland it’s a long weekend, with the spring carnival-like celebrations starting the eve of Vappu, May Day, or Walpurgisnacht and continuing into May Day tomorrow.

Because I came to Canada as a young child, I don’t remember the Vappu celebrations in Finland but did hear the stories. Here in Canada, May Day is not a significant holiday, but our very small Finnish community had our own family-centred celebrations based around the traditional food and drink, especially sima and tippaleipää. The recipes at this link look similar to the ones my mother used.

My mother made sima (pronounced see-mah) for Vappu and even much of the summer, for it’s like a sparkling lemonade suitable for the whole family. It’s low in alcohol, with only a smidge of yeast for fermenting. Raisins are added to the fermenting sugar and lemon mixture, when they rise to the surface the sima is ready. As a child I was always fascinated watching the raisins begin to float to the surface, and enjoyed these swollen fruits along with the delicious drink.

Tippaleipä (literally translated as drip bread) is similar to doughnuts but crispier because the batter is dripped into hot oil in circles to create a nest. Yum! I think it’s been decades since I’ve had sima and tippaleipää but I still remember the tastes – the taste of childhood memories.

Hauskaa Vappua, Happy May Day, Happy Walpurgisnacht! Bonne Fête du Muguet! (the reason for the photo of our just-opening lily- of-the-valley)

PS. I’ve been hoping someone would blog about May Day as International Worker’s Day – Dave at Via Negativa has written an excellent one, while baking bread!

The Couple VII

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Veils Suite: The Couple VII
monotype (oil-based inks) and watercolour pencil drawing
57 x 76 cm.

about these monotypes

Night Gardening

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Deep within each of us lies a garden. An intensely personal place. Throughout most of our lives, this garden remains hidden from view save for brief glimpses during moments spent daydreaming or in quiet contemplation…but many of us long to make this imaginative garden real.Julie Moir Messervy, The Inward Garden

For the second time in about three years I’ve read with deep pleasure Night Gardening, by E.L.Swann, pseudonym of award-winning children’s author Kathryn Lasky. It’s a most heart-warming yet bittersweet novel about gardening and finding love in later life. Widowed Maggie struggles to recover from a stroke and with the help of a landscape architect begins to restore her beloved garden during the night, away from the prying eyes of caregivers and her demanding alcoholic children. Swann beautifully develops the parallels of friendship growing into love, a body healing itself and a garden coming back to life, as signs of the restorative powers of love. Her plant knowledge and descriptions of the garden as a spiritual place provide a rich and sensuous background. Each chapter opens with a botanical drawing and a beautiful quote like the one above by several well-known landscape designers.

I am going to order a copy for a dear friend who’s an avid gardener and a book lover (and one for me too as I have to return this one to the library!).

As an aside and with apologies to non-Finnish readers, this seems the right place to refer to a recent conversation on the Finnish blog Dionysoksen kevät. His light-hearted post is about romance novels and about a Romantic Novel of the Year Award given to Erica James for her Gardens of Delight. As most of us know, romantic novels receive a certain amount of scorn, especially by critics of ¨literary” novels. In the comments, several of us including yours truly admit enjoying well-written and researched romantic novels, and that this is no different from enjoying romantic movies. Another interesting point made is that when men write romance, these are considered literary, while romances written by women are usually considered only frivolous entertainment. We believe there is room for all well-written genres and room for pleasure. What do you think?

Kathan Brown

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This is very interesting for printmakers and other artists! Artist-blogger Gregg Chadwick at Speed of Life has written:

Kathan Brown, the founder of San Francisco’s Crown Point Press, has a new book out – “Magical Secrets about Thinking Creatively: The Art of Etching and the Truth of Life”. The book is put together as a series of thirteen creative secrets gathered from working with contemporary artists as they created etchings at Crown Point.[…] Kathan writes clearly about the process of creation, the decisions involved, and the benefits of collaboration. The mix of artistic styles among the artists discussed is refreshing and inspiring.

There’s even a Magical Secrets website where you can download the first chapter AND a blog.

As a printmaker, I’ve long been aware of Kathan Brown and her famed Crown Point Press for its printmaking studio and as a publisher of books. Nearly two years ago I wrote this about a Virtual Exhibition of 35 Years at Crown Point Press (still active!) by the National Gallery of Art, Washington: Crown Point Press, a community studio in San Francisco founded by Kathan Brown, was a gathering place for artists to share ideas and equipment. Many of the best-known American painters, sculptors, and other artists, collaborated with the master printers here to create printworks. You can see a number of these prints in this virtual exhibition along with some discussion of printmaking techniques and a history of contemporary printmaking.

I love my copy of Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood: Painters and Sculptors at Crown Point Press by Kathan Brown, 1996 Chronicle Books, and recommend it highly for other printmakers. (It’s not to be confused with Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood: How to Recognize Contemporary Artists’ Prints, also by Kathan Brown, which is a handbook containing descriptions of all the printmaking processes with an emphasis on intaglio – good for students.) I’m really very tempted to get Magical Secrets!

prunings, rockpiles & pennies

Some recommended reading today:

1. PRUNED is a blog about “landscape architecture and related fields”, which includes earth art. I’ve been browsing through the archives finding treasures like panographies. PRUNINGS I to XX on the sidebar offers many eclectic and fascinating links.

2. Indian rock piles in New England as well as some other archaeological rock art like petroforms are featured at Rockpiles. There are some great links including other related blogs such as in the UK.

3. Anne Marchand is an artist-blogger in Washington, DC. In today’s post in her Painterly Visions “Pennies Per Peek”, Canadian Concept of Artist Remuneration , she writes about CARFAC (Canadian Artists Representation) via the words of Canadian artist Robert Genn.

It is interesting to read another artist’s view. I’ve mentioned here before how I believe in this organization (I’m a member). Artists receive the exhibition fee from many public galleries thanks to CARFAC, and they don’t have to be members. Unfortunately some public galleries ask to waive that fee, so it’s still an issue for CARFAC. Now I’m curious, are exhibition fees not paid in the USA?

The Couple VI

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Veils Suite: The Couple VI
monotype (oil-based inks) and watercolour pencil drawing
76 x 57 cm.

About these monotypes