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It has been a long time since I worked 14 to 16 hour days at this pace -- perhaps going back to graduate school...or the early months of motherhood. I've been preparing for a show at the Bloomington Monroe County Convention Center which opened Friday will hang through July 26th.
I am now in the midst of the Bloomington Open Studios Tour. The traffic is light on Sunday mornings, so I thought I would post some images of what an Open Studios looks like. I've talked more in the past 48 hours than I have in the past four months, so I'll let the pictures do most of the talking.
The front walk is weeded and ready to welcome people to my home studio.
We took out our couch and chair to transform our living room into a gallery space.
After frantic printing for the last two months, the studio is spotless and spider-free,
My husband's latest camera took this fabulous panoramic image of my studio, complete with my inspiration wall on the right.
This is my third year on the Bloomington Open Studios Tour, and each year I have enjoyed demonstrating the printing process for visitors. In past years I had worked on large prints of my own. This year I wanted to have something that people could actually do themselves, and have the result give them that Aha! printing moment that is so fabulous. So I created a small block, carved away some white and printed a juicy tangerine to raspberry blend roll. I did this 100 times, on paper designed to become a notecard.
Printing 100 of these cards was exhausting!
During the Open Studios, people are invited to my basement studio, where we are printing the second layer of ink -- a medium blue. What results is sea fan, along with a lesson in color theory. Where did the blue ink go?
A delicate sea fan waves in a dark ocean.
Doing this demonstration has been lots of fun for me, and very educational for my visitors. Some people are completely mystified when they see my work, but a quick trip to the studio yields some immediate understanding. Priceless.
