Thirty Days of Self Portraits

The previous couple of weeks I’d been getting myself into a very unhappy state of mind. I haven’t been feeling good about myself with many doubts and insecurities eating away at my self-confidence. I’ve also been in a rut creatively since I finished working on the fairy tale altered books. For me, self-confidence and creativity go hand-in-hand.

I think I’m a lot burnt out after a very intense year with too much stress and not enough vacation, and then I started a new part-time job. And while the new part time job is terrific and challenging, it means art and creativity get much less time than I’d like to dedicate to them.

To give myself something good to focus my energy into I decided I needed to get the creative juices flowing and begin a small project. I’ve chosen to do one self portrait a day for the next month. I started shooting a week ago today and I’m already at day 8 of the series.

Day 1: Losing My Head
Day 1: Losing My Head

Day 2: A moment in the sun
Day 2: A Moment In The Sun

Day 4: It's raining
Day 4: It’s Raining

Click through to flickr to view the rest of the series so far.

Some of the photos have been more creative than others, but it all depends on how much time I have available each day. I’m really enjoying working on this series so far.

Preview of Fairy Tales ReMixed

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Seymour Gallery - Dropping off work-7

I was at Seymour Art Gallery this morning to drop off my work and meet with the other artists. It’s really wonderful to see everyone’s work together after months of working away on our own.

Seymour Gallery - Dropping off work

I took a few photos after everyone unwrapped their work. This is one of those rare occasions where I don’t have to hang the show myself and can leave it in the hands of the gallery.

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I’m excited to see everything hanging together on the gallery walls tomorrow.

Altered Book: Thumbelina

Memory is a funny thing. As I began to write this blog post I suddenly remembered a song from my childhood about Thumbelina sung by Danny Kay. I haven’t thought about it in ages, and it certainly didn’t occur to me while I was working on this book.

Altered Book Thumbelina-5

The Thumbelina book is the fifth and final fairy tale altered book I have made for the show at Seymour Gallery. I was inspired by the imagery of a tiny figure in a flower and wanted to make something three-dimensional from paper. The figure inside the flower pictured here, is a photograph of my friend Siobhan curled up and pretending to rest.

Altered Book Thumbelina-3

Altered Book Thumbelina-2

In the story of Thumbelina there are many animals she encounters on her adventures, and I chose to reference only two of these. A mouse gives her shelter in her time of need, and she rescues the swallow who eventually rescues her in return. I cut the swallow from an old bird field guide, and made the mouse as an original paper cut painted with brown acrylic paint.

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Altered Book Thumbelina-7

The leaves were also hand-cut from paper and added to fill out the composition. I’m not one hundred percent happy with this book but I am out of time to make it better. The part I really want to do over is the flower because it’s rather clunky, but once it was glued in there was no going back. I think it’s a case of liking pieces of this composition more than the whole thing.

Altered Book Thumbelina-4

Altered Book Thumbelina

There is one week to go before the show opens at Seymour Art Gallery. Details here in case you missed it.

Materials used: book, green card stock, pink card stock, paper bird, tissue paper, acrylic paint, white glue, and gel medium.

Exhibition: Fairy Tales ReMixed

In June the Seymour Art Gallery is hosting a month long arts festival, which kicks off with a group art show on the theme of Fairy Tales ReMixed.

I am one of the four participating artists in the exhibition, and I will be premiering the fairy tale altered books I’ve been working on for the last few months. The show is only one week long, but there are two opportunities to visit the gallery and meet the artists during that time.

fairy-tales-remixed

Artists:
Cynthia Nugent, paintings & automata, Robi Smith, drawings & paintings, Kirsti Wakelin, illustration, and Rachael Ashe, altered books & collage.

Opening Reception:
Date: Tuesday June 7, 7 – 9 pm
Meet the artists, enjoy a ‘remixed’ fairytale reading, and eat your way through a magical fairytale-inspired food display.

Afternoon Celebration:
Date: Sunday June 12, 1–4 pm
We invite you to come dressed as a fairytale character to meet the artists and hear them speak about their work. Nika Vaughan, an artist specializing in face painting, will be on hand to help transform you into your favourite fairytale character or animal. Puppeteers Sandy Buck and Chad Hershler will also be at the gallery to perform their version of Oscar Wilde’s “The Birthday of the Infanta”.

Fairy Tales ReMixed
Date: June 7th to 12th, 2011
Seymour Art Gallery
4360 Gallant Avenue
North Vancouver BC
In the heart of Deep Cove.

There is an event page on Facebook if you would like to RSVP »

Shopping on The Drive

Late last week Boris and I went food shopping in the Santa Barbara Market in preparation for the long weekend. It’s not a place we normally go but it’s one of the few markets opened a bit later in the evening.

Santa Barbara Market

There was beautiful light pouring in through a window as I waited for Boris near the deli counter at the back of the store.

Boa constrictor

And as we waited in line to pay I realized the guy in front of us had a small boa constrictor coiled around his arm. He said her name was Sketch and she liked being worn as a bracelet. I gave the snake a stroke and then went back to packing up our groceries.

Such is life in East Van – snakes in a grocery store….

Altered Book: Three Little Pigs

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Do you remember the paper cut Big Bad Wolf I shared a few weeks ago? Well these are the Three Little Pigs altered books that go with him. I decided to make each of them their own house from a book – one of straw, one of sticks and one of bricks.

Altered Book Three Little Pigs

When these are hung together the wolf will flow around them, from the left side to underneath them. He really completes the whole picture. I decided to treat this more as an installation piece to better tell the story, and I’m saving the final view of everything together for the show.

The piglets I’ve used are toys I bought from Michael’s art supplies, which is not a store I normally visit, but I figured they carried this sort of thing. I painted two of the pigs and left one of them clean and pink so they would look different from each other even though they are exactly the same. The book houses are covered in raffia, dried stems from a lemon balm plant, and paper I hand cut to look like bricks. A special thank you to Horst for cutting the corners off the books with his bandsaw and making them look like houses.

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Altered Book Three Little Pigs-4

Materials used: three books, raffia, dried lemon balm stems, Japanese paper, white card stock, three plastic pigs, acrylic paint, white glue, and gel medium.

Booklyn Book Arts From Brooklyn

On Friday I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Felice Tebbe, the Collection Development & Education Director of Booklyn Artists Alliance. They are a book arts organization based in Brooklyn, and Felice was in Vancouver as part of a West Coast tour to present and share books from their collection. And what an amazing collection!



The presentation was hilarious because of Felice’s deadpan commentary, but it was also inspiring to hear about how much Booklyn does to nurture and promote their artists. Book arts is alive and well in Brooklyn, and some day I must visit their collection.

Check out the Brooklyn web site to view more of their amazing artist books.

Altered Book: Four & Twenty Black Birds

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Normally I photograph and share new work as soon as I’ve completed it, but lately I’ve been too short on time to do so. I’ve still been working away on the Fairy Tale series of altered books and just put the finishing touches on the fifth (and final) one today. The book I’m sharing with you today is part of the series but it was inspired by what is considered a nursery rhyme rather than a fairy tale.

I’ve always loved the line from “Sing a Song of Sixpence” about the “four and twenty black birds baked in a pie” and wanted to attempt to recreate this as an altered book. I thought, “how hard can it be to make a book look like a pie?” Apparently, it’s kind of hard.

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Four and Twenty Black Birds-4

This is the second book I folded to use because the first one didn’t work out the way I’d hoped. I did some cutting after the folding that ended up looking more like a mushroom than a pie, and it was then I gave up on that detail of the rhyme. Four and twenty crows flying out of a book is pretty awesome all on its own, thank you very much.

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Four and Twenty Black Birds

I sourced the bird outlines from google images to make three templates to trace onto black card stock. I then cut out twenty four black birds from the paper using an xacto knife. It was fun to have a small pile of crows on my desk before they were attached to the pages using glue. Yet again I could not resist incorporating paper cut work into an altered book, because I am a little bit obsessed with the process.

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The only splash of colour to this is provided by the patterned paper I added as end pages, and I’m really glad to have it there.

Materials used: book, black card stock, scrapbook paper, glue, and gel medium.