clearout wordpress art sale tea-for-two wet varnish

My 'studio' is really just a spare room of the house with very little natural lighting. I haven't had time or energy to go in and clear it out since the mad massive amount of work I threw into the Vysotsky project in the summer. Most people have to juggle the work /life balance these days. My recent problem has been the voluntary community work verses art / paid / own work balance, 'life' is the price i pay for choosing self employment over waged employment. But all this being chased by various committees day & night for 7 days straight just got a bit much so i dug my heels in this weekend, ignored the task list and cleared the studio for fun and recreation.

and thats not the worst of it! oh the shame!

I also had an art clear out as usual, i offered some up for cheap grabs there & then on my facebook page, worth 'liking' if you want to grab bargains when i have one of my sale impulses.

Some got sold, some got donated to a community shop. That's not to say I won't have one of my art bonfires again next bad mood! 

I've still got some of these Ram hand done wax relief prints ( its like lino prints but carving into wax, my invention as i ran out of lino )  if anyone wants one for £5. £2 p&p limited edition of 25.

So once i'd cleared some space, i was all inspired to crack on with painting again. 

First there was a days training in Wordpress run by PAN Promoters art network.   I was there with the Highland- Russian Connections charity, but the wordpress way of building websites will be brilliant for many of these community projects that i'm up to my eyes in, including our own Hi-Ex Comic Expo site, which is half way set up now as a wordpress.org site. 

here's myself the other Highland-Russian Connections ladies and our tutor for the day- Thanks to Elena for the photo.

back home & to painting in a hurry to get a painting finished for The Dornie Schoolhouse Tea room and gallery Christmas show, the theme is Tea for Two. I finished it in the small hours ready to get delivered by Rich heading that way today... except the over the top kitsch glossy varnish i'd applied hasn't dried yet. oh well, looks like i'll be driving that way myself this week then.

here it is .

Its very shiny with gold & copper paint so looks different in different lights.I'll photograph it better, when and IF it ever dries !

a couple of other bits of news but that's enough for one day !

Kawaii !

Juggling zombies, cowboys, organising things and doing traditional gallery art is usually achievable, they need different bits of my brain so I comparmentalise & flit from one to the other. To take the being 'spread too thin' metaphor a bit further, there is a level of superficiality, not enough meat on the bones ( or sandwich in the spread analogy, except a veggie meat substitute, in fact theres often nothing to go on the sandwiches around here at all...but thats a different story ). Sometimes winging it is no longer enough. In an ideal world an artist could go into the garret and play for an unspecified time, obsessing, immersing and going a bit bonkers in a particular direction until finally Ta Da! out of all those sketches, scribbles, angst and absinthe sessions appears a glorious canvas of divine eternal beauty. Meanwhile back to reality, when I ran a pottery, it was always a case of needing to feed the children so getting those 20 mugs done by Friday. That work ethos has continued now I'm playing at visual arts, deadline? friday, sure, bish bash bosh. Run out of inspiration? sure I'll just go hug a tree & have a rummage in my brain ...and there it is again.

Sometimes more is required though. Bish bash bosh is simply not appropriate for Mr Vysotsky & Mr Beavitt.

The first impromptu outing of Art and Songs together as Tommy sings 'Lyricale' and 'who'll come hunting the wolf' at The Greenhouse, Dingwall this Saturday. It was awesome!

 Interpreting these Russian songs needs me to dig rather deeper, down in the mental art mines, past the chip on the shoulder, the ancient defenses, that pile of rubbish left over from art college... there over there in the corner!

So what is Kitsch?  I would probably define it as badly made, mass produced, cheesy tat. Or corny sentimental over prettified amateur Art. Imagine my fury at the Art college principal when doing a walk past the lowly studios, saw my sculptural ceramic forms, which combined iconography, wombs, feminist themes, child birth, the highland landscape and figures, visceral pregnant birthing figures- he described this as 'delightfully kitsch'!  I dismissed this as art snobbery chauvinist buffoonery. But in my subsequent search for an accessible art form could I have slipped into kitsch? In my refusal to play with the darker nasty side of life, and to try and create things of beauty, light, happy thoughts, have I become too twee? Wiki describes Kitsch as being over sentimental. People love my cute characters and pretty scenes,I try & have a darker undertone, the monsters are always off camera. Life is a mixture of the good and bad, but lets just focus on the nice stuff is what I try to say. Does that make it appear over sentimental?  Someone close to me suffering a lot of illness and trauma used to draw twisted schrieking demonic doodles, but to me she was following the dark side rather than fighting it. So how to create positive images without slipping into sparkly kittens and childlike angels? I'm working on it.

The lady from 'Lyricale' goes too disney princess... version 2 in progress.